The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has quietly dropped an investigation into whether former president Donald Trump profited improperly during his presidency.
The House Oversight & Accountability declined to enforce a court-supervised settlement agreement that demanded that Mazars USA, the fomer president’s accounting firm, produce his financial records to Congress, The New York Times reported.
“I honestly didn’t even know who or what Mazars was,” Representative James Comer of Kentucky, who serves as chairman of the committee, told The Times. Rather, Mr Comer said he would focus more on investigating President Joe Biden’s family.
“What exactly are they looking for,” he said. “They’ve been ‘investigating’ Trump for six years. I know exactly what I’m investigating: money the Bidens received from China.”
Democrats previously wrote to Mr Comer, who was the former ranking member of the committee when Democrats controlled the House last Congress, and raised concerns about the fact that Mr Trump’s accounting firm, which cut ties with him, stopped turning over documents to the committee.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said Mr Comer worked with Mr Trump’s lawyers to effectively kill the investigation, which Mr Comer denied.
“It has come to my attention that you may have acted in league with attorneys for former President Donald Trump to block the committee from receiving documents subpoenaed in its investigation of unauthorized, unreported and unlawful payments by foreign governments and others to then-President Trump,” Mr Raskin wrote on Sunday to Mr Comer.
But Mr Comer denied any knowledge of any attempt to coordinate with the former president’s attorneys to block the investigation but he has issued no subpoenas about Mr Trump’s finances.
The winding down of the investigation comes after Democrats spent much of their time in the majority from 2019 to 2023 trying to obtain financial documents from Mr Trump’s companies. They received and published Mr Trump’s tax records right before they handed control over to Republicans.
