On Thursday, CNN reported that the Biden administration has spent "months" organizing a legal plan of action to defend against an onslaught of investigations in the event of Republicans taking control of the House and using their oversight powers to undermine the White House.
"While President Joe Biden and Democrats campaigned to preserve their congressional majorities, a small team of attorneys, communications strategists and legislative specialists have spent the past few months holed up in Washington preparing for the alternative, two administration officials said," reported Jeremy Diamond, Priscilla Alvarez, Jeremy Herb, Sean Lyngaas, Zachary Cohen, and Kylie Atwood. "The preparations, largely run out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House, are among the earliest and most comprehensive by any administration ahead of a midterm election and highlight how far-reaching and aggressive Republican investigations are expected to be."
According to the report, the Biden team has already hired Richard Sauber, a prominent white-collar attorney, to lead the legal response to oversight probes.
"Along with Sauber, this spring the White House hired veteran Democratic communications aide Ian Sams as spokesman for the White House counsel’s office. Top Biden adviser Anita Dunn returned to the White House in the spring, in part to oversee the administration’s preparations for a GOP-controlled Congress," said the report. "The Justice Department is also bracing for investigations, bringing in well-known government transparency attorney Austin Evers to help respond to legislative oversight. Evers is the founder of the group American Oversight and served as its executive director until this year, and previously handled the oversight response at the State Department."
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This comes after POLITICO reported that an independent team of Democratic strategists have launched an initiative called the Congressional Integrity Project, which will investigate potential abuses of power by the House watchdog committees.
Republicans have vowed for months that they would use a House majority to launch a volley of investigations into everything from Hunter Biden's laptop, to the border policies at the Department of Homeland Security, to inquiries intended to harass Dr. Anthony Fauci for his advice during the COVID-19 pandemic. The effort would presumably look like oversight during the Obama administration, when Republicans famously spent years and multiple investigations trying to link Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya — an effort GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy bragged had the purpose of sabotaging her presidential campaign.