And so it begins.
Democrats won back the majority in the House of Representatives, vowing that if they did so, they would launch multiple investigations into President Donald Trump and his administration.
And according to Rep. Adam Schiff, Democrats plan to look into alleged abuses of power by the president and will examine his use of “the instruments of state power to punish the press.”
“It is very squarely within our responsibility to find out,” the California Democrat told Axios in an interview that aired on HBO on Sunday.
Democrats will be looking at “an effort by the president to use the instruments of state power to punish Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post,” the soon-to-be House Intelligence Committee chairman said, referring to the founder, chairman and CEO of Amazon, who also owns the Washington Post.
Trump “was secretly meeting with the postmaster [general] in an effort to browbeat the postmaster [general] into raising postal rates on Amazon,” Schiff told Axios.
Another investigation by Democrats will reportedly be looking into whether or not Trump tried to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner as a way to get back at CNN.
“We don’t know, for example, whether the effort to hold up the merger of the parent of CNN was a concern over antitrust or whether this was an effort merely to punish CNN,” Schiff said.
The president told Axios in a separate interview last week that his administration is looking into launching antitrust investigations of Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Schiff’s comments came just days after a fiery confrontation between Trump and CNN’s Jim Acosta in which the reporter’s press pass was pulled after the contentious back and forth with Trump at the president’s post-election press conference.
Acosta refused to relinquish the microphone, even briefly wrangling with a White House intern who tried unsuccessfully to retrieve it and move it to another reporter.
With Acosta’s defiant behavior and accusations that he was physically aggressive with the intern – which he denied – White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced that his press credentials were being yanked.
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Frieda@bizpacreview.com
Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.
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