Beyond the huge consequences for national politics, the arrival of opposition-party oversight can make daily life in the White House unbearable for senior officials and their aides. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP photo white house 'It's depressing as hell': Dem win would spell misery for Trump White House aides Veterans of past White Houses that faced hostile Congresses call life under the oversight microscope 'excruciating.'

Working for President Donald Trump has never been easy, but his staffers can expect a whole new level of mayhem if Democrats win control of the House on Tuesday.

Democratic control of even one chamber of Congress would unleash an onslaught of hearings, subpoenas and document demands as lawmakers investigate everything from the president’s personal tax returns to his controversial policies on immigration, health care and the environment.


Beyond the huge consequences for national politics, the arrival of opposition-party oversight can make daily life in the White House unbearable for senior officials and their aides, according to more than a dozen veterans of the Clinton, Obama and George W. Bush administrations interviewed by POLITICO. Their assessments offer a gut-churning preview of what’s in store for Trump administration officials should Democrats wield gavels come January.

White House staffers can expect to work past midnight battling congressional committees, wage exhausting fights over redactions to internal documents, suffer through mind-numbing meetings with government lawyers about the nuances of executive privilege and see their memos and emails leaked to the media by freshly empowered Democratic investigators.

One former Clinton administration official compared the experience to getting dental work without anesthesia. A former Obama administration aide described the period after Republicans regained control of the House in 2010 as “excruciating.” A former Bush administration official said it was one of the most demoralizing times of his career.

“I remember coming out of the White House one day in August and realizing it was the first time I’d been outside when the sun was still up in a long time,” recalled veteran Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, who worked on crisis communications in the Clinton White House as it was grappling with the Whitewater scandal.

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Special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election has given White House aides a crash course in responding to a major investigation. But former administration officials said the Trump White House itself has enjoyed only a taste of the hostile scrutiny to which Democrats would treat it.

Trump’s White House may have it even worse next year because of a rule change the House GOP approved near the end of the Obama administration granting unilateral subpoena power to all committee chairs, forgoing committee votes. “I suspect they’re not going to ratchet that back,” former Obama White House counsel Neil Eggleston said of a potential House Democratic majority.

Former administration officials said losing at least one chamber of Congress — much as Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did midway through their first terms, and Bush did in his second — transformed their daily lives.

“It’s depressing as hell,” said Leon Panetta, former chief of staff to Clinton. “That’s the first thing that hit the White House, the fact that the American people didn’t like everything that the president was doing. The president’s morale was pretty down.”

“You feel like you’re fighting what is really a political battle,” recalled one Obama White House lawyer. “You’re operating in a highly, highly partisan, political environment.”

If Democrats launch investigations, heretofore anonymous Trump officials can look forward to 15 minutes of unwelcome political fame as their private emails and memos are swept up in congressional document requests. During the Obama administration, for example, relatively unknown government workers — from IRS official Lois Lerner to White House energy aide Heather Zichal — saw their internal emails become national news as they were dragged before Congress.

Staffers also fretted that getting pulled into a congressional investigation would mean having to hire a personal lawyer and distractions from their day jobs.

“Am I going to be off my game because I have to worry about this?” was a common refrain in the administration, Eggleston said. “Am I suddenly now going to get sucked into the vortex of this? That’s a very debilitating feeling that hits people, and that’s very real.”

Another Obama White House lawyer said staffers sometimes spent days prepping nervous colleagues for congressional testimony.

“It is an incredibly, incredibly nerve-wracking process to be involved in,” the lawyer said.

Democrats have a long list of investigative targets — from outstanding questions about the Trump campaign’s 2016 contacts with Russia to policy decisions on multiple issues to the well-documented alleged ethical lapses of several Cabinet officials.

Democrats have also signaled plans to subpoena Trump’s tax returns, and the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee has said he wants to explore allegations that the Trump Organization has been a haven for money laundering.

Some Democrats warn against overreach, saying that Trump — much like presidents before him — will be quick to claim the opposition is abusing its power. Obama officials believed they were able to portray a House Republican fixation with the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, which led to hours of hearings and thousands of email disclosures, as politically motivated persecution.

“President Trump likes to be in the role of victim … Now he’ll actually have real bogeymen who are issuing subpoenas and document requests,” said Andrew Wright, an Obama White House lawyer. “If they come in and harangue witnesses and treat them shabbily, then that could turn more people off. What you want is oversight to be a process that makes government better.”

Experts in oversight say that if Democrats win oversight power, Trump will have to overhaul the White House’s existing structure and strategy, deploying a new cast of lawyers, communications operatives and political strategists.

Past White Houses have developed a playbook of sorts for surviving a barrage of post-midterm investigations. The formula includes establishing a dedicated team of anywhere from a dozen to two dozen staffers who can forge relationships with congressional investigators, respond to their document requests and — perhaps most important — develop an offensive strategy to discredit the incoming probes.

“It went from white shoes to brass knuckles,” another former Obama administration official said of the shift in the type of lawyers who were hired to work in the White House after Democrats lost the House in the 2010 midterms.

A similar scenario played out after the November 1994 elections, when Democrats lost both the House and the Senate in a stunning blow midway through Clinton’s first term.

In response, Panetta recruited lawyer Jane Sherburne to lead a scandal-response team that ballooned to about 15 people, including lawyers from the White House counsel’s office, legislative affairs staffers and press aides.

Bush had loyalists running his White House counsel’s office during his first six years, first with Alberto Gonzalez and then Harriet Miers. But after losing the House and Senate in the 2006 midterms, the Republican president shifted to Fred Fielding, a veteran GOP scandal handler who had served as White House counsel during President Ronald Reagan’s first term.

In an email to POLITICO, Fielding predicted the Trump White House recalibration if Democrats win the House “would be, at least on paper, a carbon copy of what I inherited in Bush 43, as well as earlier adventures.”

Obama also had to shift course after losing the House in 2010. His first two White House counsels were Greg Craig, who was known for his expertise on national security matters, and Bob Bauer, who served as the 2008 Obama campaign attorney. But after Republicans took the House, Obama turned in succession to two attorneys with specific experience in handling investigations: Kathryn Ruemmler and then Eggleston.

People close to Trump privately worry the current White House is not prepared for life with a Democratic House.

Trump currently lacks a permanent White House counsel. His pick for the job, Pat Cipollone, is still undergoing a background check and is not expected to start in a full-time capacity until mid-November.

“I think the new guy has to get into place before they start” hiring new lawyers, said C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel for President George H.W. Bush who noted that his entire four-year tenure involved dealing with Democratic oversight from both the House and Senate.

Inside the White House, preparations for a Democratic House are expected to kick into gear after the midterms, should Democrats win the majority. Aides refused to discuss their plans in detail, insisting that a House Democratic takeover is not a given.

Trump allies acknowledge the president — who has spent less than two years in Washington and has known only a GOP Congress — would be learning on the fly when dealing with a Congress run by Democrats. But they add that Trump’s history of political warfare could make him an unusually formidable foe for Hill investigators.

“Most people have never been through this. Many of the staff in the White House have never been through a congressional hearing,” said Harold Ickes, a former deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House. Ickes recalled dealing with more than 30 subpoenas and requests for his testimony.

Trump’s political team also would have its hands full on the investigative front, Ickes said. Recalling his work in the Clinton White House as it geared up for the 1996 reelection campaign, Ickes cited donors who needed to be reassured the president would make it through the investigations, as well as elected officials and other allies who were concerned the scandals enveloping the president would tar them and their own electoral prospects.

“No matter how much you try to wall it off,” Ickes said, “it’s still very distracting and time consuming.”

Former Clinton White House counsel Jack Quinn said his worst day on the job came in 1996 when the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee voted to hold him in contempt of Congress for not turning over documents tied to the firing of White House travel office personnel.

“There were more than a few days after that,” Quinn said, “when I drove to work at the White House wondering why Republicans on Capitol Hill whom I'd never met and who had never heard me out wanted to ruin my life.”