Republicans who are currently controlling the United States House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to launch an investigation into what they tagged Democratic President Joe Biden’s ‘weaponisation’ of the federal government. Meanwhile, Democrats have branded it a partisan fishing expedition.
Republicans have pledged to use their new majority to investigate Republican former President Donald Trump and his supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. These investigations were conducted by the US Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other federal agencies.
This is what the party-line vote on Tuesday, which creates a “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” wants to do. The body is getting ready to start an extensive investigation of the Democratic Biden administration, which Republicans claim “weaponized” the FBI against Trump.
Republicans will also investigate claims that the Biden administration has pressured big tech companies to censor views that run contrary to White House policy. The bill establishing the panel said legislators would probe how the executive branch works with the private sector, nonprofit groups, and other agencies “to facilitate action against” American citizens.
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‘We need to get to work now,’ Republican James Comer, head of the Oversight Committee, said in a speech on the House floor. “We must expose the abuses committed by the unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy.”
Among the federal agencies pinpointed are those looking into Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat and alleged mishandling of classified documents. Trump has dismissed these probes as “witch hunts”.
Africa Today News, New York recalls that days after the August search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for classified material, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik promised to launch a probe of ‘Joe Biden and his administration’s weaponization of the Department of Justice and FBI’.
‘The FBI raid of President Trump is a complete abuse and overreach of its authority,’ she said.
Democrats have raised concerns about a provision that authorises the committee to probe “ongoing criminal investigations”, which are generally outside the purview of congressional oversight.
‘This is a violation of separation of powers, and it’s also very dangerous,’ said Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
On Monday, the White House said that lawyers for Biden found classified documents at a Washington, DC-based think tank affiliated with the president.
Some Republicans compared that discovery to the criminal investigation into Trump’s removal of classified documents from the White House, though smaller numbers of papers are involved. Biden’s team said it turned the documents over upon discovery, while Trump resisted calls to return the paperwork and now faces an investigation into whether he obstructed justice.