‘People are terrified’: Panicked calls as Trump’s corporate allies fear pardons won’t come

Some of America’s biggest companies spent two years courting President Donald Trump. Now they are quietly bracing for a Democratic reckoning, and many doubt the president will protect them, MS NOW reported Thursday.

On election night, as Democrats swept control of Congress, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, had a sharp warning: “Lawyer up" – and MS NOW reported that plenty of companies already have.

Lawyers who handle congressional investigations at Washington’s white-shoe firms say they have been fielding panicked calls from some companies that expect to be near the top of Democrats’ target lists and have opened back channels to the party, according to lawyers and congressional investigators familiar with the matter.

“People are terrified of the reputational issues,” said a lawyer whose clients have already been targeted by Democratic oversight. “At the end of the day, a lot of corporations don’t believe there will be a blanket pardon — they believe there’s going to be a pardon for people that Trump loves.”

More than a dozen lawyers and congressional staffers told MS NOW they expect most targets to cooperate with Democratic investigators to some degree. Executives are less worried about one bad headline, they said, than about a future Justice Department that could act on referrals Trump’s DOJ is expected to ignore.

“The world is long, power shifts,” said one lawyer. “If it’s a company and it’s a name that you’ve heard of before, it probably wants to be a company that you’ve heard of after the Trump administration is over.”

Clients also fear Democrats could use spending bills against them, for example by barring firms that took investment from a member of Trump’s family from winning federal contracts.

In Trump’s first term, the White House stonewalled a string of House subpoenas. This time, much of the information Democrats want sits with publicly traded companies that answer to shareholders and are vulnerable to stock drops, and that makes them harder to keep quiet.

The White House is preparing a defense. In August, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion extending executive privilege to some communications with private parties. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis waved off the coming probes as “sham investigations.”

A small group of Trump loyalists may simply refuse to cooperate. Elon Musk has warned Democrats he would come after them if they came after him, which one lawyer called “the middle finger strategy.” Trump told the New York Post on Monday that he was prepared to issue preemptive pardons to Musk and others.

But a pardon can’t stop a civil suit to enforce a subpoena, and it can’t prop up a share price. Tesla and SpaceX shares fell sharply on Wednesday.

“Companies that take a hard line and end up being held in contempt by the House will basically be gambling on the outcome of the 2028 election,” a lawyer said.