Upcoming dueling probes in divided Washington

Upcoming dueling probes in divided Washington

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While the Joe Biden administration has appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigation into Donald Trump, Republicans, who are set to take over the US House of Representatives, have pledged their own spate of investigations into the president.

From now until the presidential and general elections of 2024, Americans could witness a long struggle between two camps that accuse each other of subverting the justice system for their own political ends.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, for example, echoed a common Trump refrain, saying on Twitter on Friday that “Joe Biden has fully armed the Justice Department to attack his political opponents.”

Cruz was responding to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a former war crimes prosecutor, Jack Smith, as special counsel to lead two months-long investigations into Trump.

One focuses on the former president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his supporters’ attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The other is an investigation into a cache of classified government documents seized in an FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida in August.

But as Trump and part of his party’s right wing denounce what they call a witch hunt, Democrats are preparing to level the same criticism at Republicans.

Republicans say they plan to use the power of being the controlling party in the House of Representatives to launch a series of investigations, the first of which will focus on the president’s son, Hunter.

They suspect him of doing shady deals in Ukraine in China, capitalizing on his last name and his father’s influence as Vice President under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.

“There are no plans to subpoena Joe Biden. There are plans to subpoena Hunter Biden,” Congressman James Comer said on CNN on Thursday, outlining his party’s strategy.

This Kentucky lawmaker has become something of a chief investigator for the Republicans after the Nov. 8 midterm elections, in which they won control of the House, albeit by a narrow margin, but failed to take over the Senate.

Comer is said to head the House Oversight Committee, the body of Congress that, among other things, monitors and, if necessary, investigates the behavior of the executive branch.

But Comer made it clear that not only Hunter Biden but also his father are under investigation.

“This needs to be called the Biden investigation and not the Hunter-Biden investigation,” he said.

– Origins of Covid 19 –

Comer also said the panel will examine the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and what role a lab in Wuhan, China, may have played. The issue is a bone that many Republicans have been gnawing at for years.

Republicans have also said they will investigate the Biden administration’s handling of immigration across the US-Mexico border.

While Democrats deny Hunter Biden did anything wrong, Comer assured the investigation would not be a political circus.

“This is not a dog and pony show. This is not a committee where everyone is going to scream and be outraged and try to make the Witnesses look like fools,” Comer said in a Nov. 8 interview with Politico.

One of the most outspoken lawmakers on the far-right, Georgia voter Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made comments dismissed as outlandish and racist by critics, has said she wants a seat on the oversight committee.

The Democrats are preparing a counteroffensive.

Politico reports that party supporters have launched the Congressional Integrity Project, designed solely to respond to investigations by the Republican Congress.

The idea is “to investigate investigators, to uncover their political motivations and the financial special interests that support their work,” the project’s founder, Kyle Herrig, an attorney and activist, told Politico.

The Republicans’ primary goal, Herrig said, is not to seek the truth, but to “slander Joe Biden and fulfill Trump’s political imperatives.”

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