Garcia ranks Trump family businesses first among oversight priorities
If Democrats win the Senate and House in November, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has said the gavels would be used for accountability, and ranking committee members have spent the past several months telegraphing what that means in concrete terms. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, ranked his priorities in September: the Trump family’s businesses, the Epstein files, immigration enforcement, corporate profiteering, and Robert F Kennedy Jr’s handling of vaccines.
Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee and its likely chair, calls the potential scope “gargantuan.” On 25 August, Raskin renewed a demand that Jared Kushner hand over documents on the overlap between his informal role advising Trump on foreign policy and his private equity firm, Affinity Partners. Raskin has been chasing the firm since 2023, when he said it took $2bn from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund after Kushner left the White House. Additional items under review include a $400m plane Qatar gifted Trump, a Trump Jr wedding party partly funded by a Russian oligarch, and several multimillion-dollar defense contracts won by the extended Trump family.
Five of the 11 companies that Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer and Ron Wyden wrote to about Donald Trump’s IRS settlement — including the Trump Organization and World Liberty Financial — never answered at all. Under current congressional control, none of them had to. In May, the Department of Justice settled the president’s $10bn lawsuit against the IRS with an order barring the agency from auditing past returns of Trump, his family and related companies.
House Ways and Means ranking member Richard Neal and Raskin demanded documents on the negotiations, the roles of the justice department and treasury officials, and safeguards against fraud, with a 27 May deadline ahead of treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s appearance before Neal’s committee. In the Senate, Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden and 12 other finance Democrats on 22 May called for a bipartisan investigation into the settlement and the administration’s decision to bar the IRS from auditing Trump, his family and businesses. At a hearing, Wyden pressed Bessent on whether the audit immunity remained in effect, which he declined to answer. On 7 July, Wyden, Warren and Schumer wrote to 11 companies, including Kalshi and Polymarket, asking whether they intend to rely on the settlement as protection against audits, given Trump Jr’s financial ties with the companies. Raskin and Garcia, meanwhile, demanded correspondence between Trump’s lawyers and the justice department over his reported $230m claim for past investigations. A federal judge has said the order conflicts with federal law, according to Warren’s office, and the legal fight is unresolved.
On the crypto side, Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, opened a preliminary inquiry and wrote to executives behind the $Trump meme coin and World Liberty Financial, asking about ownership and investment structure. Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, asked the Office of Government Ethics to review a reported deal involving World Liberty, Binance and a UAE state-backed fund. Warren, Blumenthal, Gary Peters, Dick Durbin and Wyden demanded hearings after disclosures showed Trump earned more than $1.2bn from crypto ventures, including about $588m tied to World Liberty token sales. In the House, Representative Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the financial services committee, has called for legislation to “end the President’s crypto profiteering and recoup his ill-gotten gains.”
The IRS settlement is also the entry point into prediction-market scrutiny. The July letter to Kalshi’s chief executive noted that Trump Jr is a “strategic advisor” to the company, and seven House Democrats asked oversight chair James Comer to subpoena the markets over suspicious trades tied to the Iran war. The prediction-market angle has drawn the most bipartisan interest so far: Republican Senator John Curtis asked the Senate judiciary committee to subpoena Trump Jr over his Kalshi and Polymarket ties, and Comer has opened his own insider-trading probe.
On the Epstein files, Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie forced the Department of Justice to release millions of files last year through a bipartisan tag-team effort, but the department blew the legally mandated disclosure deadline and released only about 3.5 million pages of the 6 million in its possession, deeming the rest duplicates. Members of both parties have raised concerns about heavy redactions in some places and the apparently accidental disclosure of victims’ names in others. The Justice Department is now facing a lawsuit from journalist Katie Phang over many of these issues. Even under a Republican-controlled Congress, the oversight committee under GOP chair James Comer has been a rare spot of bipartisan comity, with members of both sides routinely (but not always) acting in concert to subpoena witnesses and hold them in contempt when they don’t cooperate; expect that to continue in any new Democratic Congress.
Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado congressman who sits on the armed services and intelligence committees and co-chairs the House end corruption caucus, has said he would start with the Pentagon, citing reports of defense money steered toward companies linked to the Trump family. The sharpest look so far is a January letter from Warren, Blumenthal and Senator Andy Kim listing companies backed by 1789 Capital, the venture firm Trump Jr joined as a partner: Cerberus ($45m), PsiQuantum ($10.8m), Firehawk Aerospace ($4.9m) and Vulcan Elements ($10m, plus a reported $620m loan). The senators also cited a $12.8m contract to Unusual Machines, a drone company in which Trump Jr holds a stake, asked whether the Vulcan loan was competitive, asked which officials Trump Jr screened for Pentagon jobs, and sought every contact between defense department officials and Trump Jr since 5 November 2024. A later Pentagon reply, they wrote, showed no safeguards against such conflicts. Vulcan and the Pentagon have denied Trump Jr had any involvement in the loan.
On the Iran war, House Foreign Affairs ranking member Gregory Meeks led his colleagues in demanding that Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Steve Witkoff and Kushner testify on the Iran war and forced a vote to subpoena them. He also demanded documents on Venezuelan oil revenue routed into a Qatar account. In 2025, Senate Armed Services ranking member Jack Reed pressed for an expanded inspector general probe of defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal, and Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, objected to a Hegseth memo routing Pentagon communications with Congress through his office.
On immigration enforcement, Raskin and Warren led 52 lawmakers in writing in March to six companies tied to ICE’s warehouse detention plan: CoreCivic, Geo Group, GardaWorld Federal, Gosin Group, KVG LLC and PNK Group. They asked for expected profit margins, lobbying efforts and donations to Trump’s campaign or cabinet officials, by 13 April. The plan carries a $38.3bn price tag and aims to hold nearly 100,000 people by November. The lawmakers flagged ICE paying $129m for a Georgia facility — nearly five times its assessed value — and a contracting official who came from Geo. Oversight Democrats wrote separately to Geo about Corey Lewandowski’s dealings after reports he sought personal payments from contractors.
Senator Peters, the retiring top Democrat on the Senate homeland security committee, led a separate letter seeking every DHS contract that border czar Tom Homan may have influenced after reports of a bribery investigation. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House homeland security committee, would take the matter up there. If Democrats flip the Senate, now-ranking member Elizabeth Warren would be positioned to chair the banking committee, and private credit is her likeliest target. On 13 May, she wrote to Bessent and Securities and Exchange Commission chair Paul Atkins on how deregulation has increased private credit risks, with responses due 26 May; in July 2025 she asked Bessent to run a stress test of the market, which he did not do. She has also written to ratings agencies including S&P, Moody’s and Fitch over reportedly inflated private credit ratings. When Blue Owl restricted withdrawals from a fund, she called for higher bank capital requirements for private credit exposures, transparent data from the firms and a stress test.
Impeachment remains an open question layered over all of it. Trump was impeached twice in his first term and acquitted both times. Jeffries has said Democrats have “ruled nothing in and nothing out,” while House Majority Leader Steve Scalise has predicted an attempt on “Day 1.” The 2018 midterm precedent cuts both ways: then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi held off left-wing impeachment calls for months before ultimately pursuing two articles against Trump after he sought Ukrainian investigations of Joe Biden and incited the January 6 attack on the Capitol.