Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, blasted House Democrats’ investigations of President Trump during a live discussion with the Washington Post on Tuesday.
When questioned why House Democrats should not seek the president’s finances, Meadows responded, “Those are about events that happened prior to him being the president of the United States.”
“But isn’t it of public interest?” the Post‘s Bob Costa asked.
“The public made a decision on November of 2016 that apparently that didn’t matter,” Meadows shot back.
He noted Trump did not release his tax returns as a candidate, but the public “made a decision in November.”
“To suggest that now we have to go back and look at some of those personal tax returns and that it’s Congress’s job to go back — that’s more opposition research than legislative priorities,” he said.
Asked whether he believed there were “further questions” about Trump’s finances, Meadows replied, “You mean that we haven’t found in the last three years of a counterintelligence investigation that started under Obama? Or that we didn’t find in the last two years under Bob Mueller?”
“I mean, how long do we investigate these things?” he asked. “With all due respect to Adam [Schiff], with his committee and his staff, does he really think that he’s going to find something that $30 million with Bob Mueller didn’t find?”
“We know that the DOJ was looking at oligarchs and at organized crime — they have that ongoing. So we know that they are investigating that. So any suggestion that this president hasn’t been investigated doesn’t correlate with the facts,” he added.
Meadows said he wants a “full transparent” investigation into how the FBI’s investigation on the Trump campaign got started in the first place.
“How did it get started?” he asked. “If we’ve weaponized [investigations], then I certainly want to investigate it.”
Meadows also blasted subpoenas being issued by House Democrats for the president’s financial records and current and former White House officials.
“The way that many of the subpoenas are being used right now…for the vast majority of those, are unprecedented,” Meadows.
He said when U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross testified in front of Congress in March, House Democrats issued a subpoena for documents even as those documents were being delivered to Congress.
“Many of these subpoenas are 2020 subpoenas. They have nothing to do with legitimate legislative ability,” he said.
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