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Last week, The ReidOut blog covered the relaunch of the Democrat-led watchdog Congressional Integrity Project. In essence, the organization plans to function as a rapid response team that will help Democrats push back against any conspiratorial claims that emerge from GOP committees once Republicans are in the House majority next term.
And they’re wasting no time. On Thursday, the Congressional Integrity Project released a video throwing down the gauntlet and rightly denouncing the GOP’s likely Biden administration probes for being blatantly political. Republicans have spent the past two years vowing to pursue conspiracy theories related to a host of topics, including Hunter Biden, the Covid pandemic, the Jan. 6 attack and immigration.
Here’s how the Congressional Integrity Project laid out the stakes.
The group also released a short statement Friday highlighting GOP lawmakers’ hypocritical outrage over Attorney General Merrick Garland appointing of a special counsel to oversee two criminal investigations into former President Donald Trump.
Trump-loving Republicans (and Trump himself) had a conniption, predictably. But the Congressional Integrity Project responded almost immediately with a statement titled “The Trump Prosecutors Republicans Don’t Want to Talk About Today,” which focused on special prosecutors appointed by the Trump administration to investigate Hunter Biden, as well as the DOJ's probe of ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
That includes John Durham, a special counsel whose investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe resulted in no convictions whatsoever. It also includes David Weiss, the federal prosecutor tapped by the Trump DOJ to oversee the federal tax investigation into Hunter Biden. The Biden administration asked Weiss to remain on the job last year.
“Durham’s investigation cost over $3.8 million dollars so far and there is no estimate for the cost of Weiss investigation,” according to the watchdog statement. “All we know is that neither Trump prosecutor has delivered any results, despite their years of work and millions of dollars spent.”
House Democrats may be at a loss without subpoena power come January. But Democrat-led watchdog groups like the Congressional Integrity Project are planning to show that dogged investigations of the GOP probes will undermine their legitimacy.
And, frankly, I’d take anyone’s chances in a messaging war with screaming, sweating Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and the Christian nationalist cheerleader, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.