Kurt Bardella

Opinion columnist

President Donald Trump started his Saturday morning routine with a tweet: “Can you imagine if these Do Nothing Democrat Savages, people like Nadler, Schiff, AOC Plus 3, and many more, had a Republican Party who would have done to Obama what the Do Nothings are doing to me. Oh well, maybe next time!”

Setting aside the appalling use of the word “savages” to describe two Jewish members of Congress and a woman of color, the president’s “what if” scenario reveals how ignorant he is of some very recent history. This very decade opened with Republicans launching an investigatory barrage into the presidency of Barack Obama.

I know, because I was there choreographing it.

An acute case of Trump amnesia?

From 2009 to 2013, I was the spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee under the leadership of Rep. Darrell Issa. During their time in the majority, the Oversight Committee alone issued more than 100 subpoenas to the Obama administration. Upon becoming chair of the committee, Issa declared his intention to hold “seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks.”

In the spring of 2011, a government whistleblower prompted House and Senate Republicans to initiate an investigation into the “Operation Fast and Furious” gun-trafficking operation. The investigation lasted for more than six years and included an Oversight Committee vote to hold then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over what Republicans believed was an abuse of executive privilege.

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I pointed to this quote from Rep. Jim Jordan back in February and it’s worth revisiting given the frequency with which Jordan now defends Trump. During Holder’s contempt proceeding, Jordan pointedly asked, “How can you ignore the facts when you don’t get the facts? … I just want to get the information. … We just want the information so we have the facts.”

In case Trump is suffering from an acute attack of amnesia, he should be reminded that in the summer of 2012, House Republicans filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration in federal court over its use of executive privilege and ultimately won, with Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruling that “Congress could seek to enforce its duly issued subpoena.”

For House Republicans, Fast and Furious was just act one of their oversight agenda. In the fall of 2012, Republicans launched what would turn out to be a four-year investigation into the attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. This is the investigation that would unearth then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, a move that House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy openly admitted was part of a “strategy to fight and win” the 2016 election.

We didn't have corruption evidence

Just for context, the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller lasted for a little less than two years. While in control of Congress, House Republicans launched not one, not two but three multiyear investigations that each lasted longer than the Mueller probe. The third of these investigations was initiated in 2013 into the IRS’ alleged targeting scandal. It was eventually debunked as baseless, with even the Trump administration declaring in 2017 that prosecuting the matter “would not be appropriate based on the available evidence.”

The reality is our committee never had anything close to the severity and volume of smoking gun evidence of corruption that exists right now, and we still managed to hold hundreds of oversight hearings, issue hundreds of subpoenas and conduct multiple multiyear investigations.

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It was during this time that the standard for modern-day oversight was established, a standard that Republicans seemed all too willing to abandon the minute Donald Trump took office. As I noted earlier this year, it was when Obama was in office that the Jim Jordans of the world declared that “the only path to the truth" is through the House. It was during Obama's tenure that my former boss, Darrell Issa, said, “Our purpose has always been to get the information the committee needs to complete its work, that it is not only entitled to but obligated to do."

It was when Obama was president that the chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Trey Gowdy, said, “The notion that you can withhold information and documents from Congress no matter whether you are the party in power or not in power is wrong. Respect for the rule of law must mean something, irrespective of the vicissitudes of political cycles."

So, if Donald Trump is wondering what Republicans would have done to Obama? The answer is, everything the Democrats are doing to him and more.

Kurt Bardella, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and a former spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, joined the Democratic Party in 2017. Follow him on Twitter: @kurtbardella