Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler opened his much-anticipated probe with letters to 81 individuals, companies and government entities seeking a wide range of materials that go to the heart of allegations against President Donald Trump. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Congress House Democrats open sweeping corruption probe into Trump’s world The House Judiciary panel is requesting documents from more than 80 people or entities in Trump’s orbit, including his adult sons.

A key House committee with the power to impeach President Donald Trump kicked off a sweeping investigation on Monday, demanding documents from the White House and Trump’s namesake company, charity, transition team, inauguration and 2016 campaign, as well as several longtime associates and the president’s two adult sons.

Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) opened his much-anticipated probe with letters to 81 people, companies and government entities, seeking a wide range of materials that go to the heart of allegations against the president — including abuses of power, corruption and obstruction of justice.


“This is a critical time for our nation,” Nadler wrote to each recipient, all of whom, his staff noted, have already been ensnared in investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller or other federal prosecutors. “President Trump and his administration face wide-ranging allegations of misconduct that strike at the heart of our constitutional order.”

By initiating the wide-ranging demand for documents, the Judiciary Committee signaled it is creating its own insurance policy in the event that all of Mueller’s findings are not made public and it finds the kinds of evidence that would be grounds for removing Trump from office. Public hearings and closed-door interviews based off the materials will begin in a matter of weeks, a senior Democratic committee lawyer said.

The list of letter recipients reads like a who’s who of people in and around the president’s orbit — notably all of Trump’s senior 2016 campaign leaders, including Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale, the campaign manager for Trump’s 2020 reelection effort.

Trump’s White House, as well as former top aides including chief of staff Reince Priebus, counsel Don McGahn, deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland, communications director Hope Hicks and press secretary Sean Spicer, must also hand over documents tied to several incidents that have long been seen as central to the federal investigations swirling around the president, his campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Topics under review by the Democrat-led panel include the firing of national security adviser Michael Flynn after he lied to senior White House officials about his communications with Russian officials, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from overseeing the DOJ-led probes into the Trump campaign and the president’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey.

At The Trump Organization, top executives Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg and chief legal officer Alan Garten are covered under the Democrats’ document requests, as well as Trump’s longtime personal secretary Rhona Graff. Notably, the House panel didn’t include Trump’s oldest adult daughter, White House adviser Ivanka Trump, in its initial round of document requests, despite her long-standing connections to her father’s business empire.

Democrats also are seeking materials from several Trump officials who have been charged in the nearly 2-year-old Mueller probe, including Flynn, Manafort, 2016 Trump campaign deputy and Manafort associate Rick Gates, campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and longtime Trump associate Roger Stone.

The committee also targeted several other individuals and entities who have been ensnared in the various federal investigations, including Tom Barrack, a real estate developer and longtime Trump friend who helped spearhead the president’s inauguration; WikiLeaks; National Enquirer parent company American Media Inc.; the National Rifle Association; and Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign’s data firm. AMI and its CEO, David Pecker, were involved in “catch-and-kill” efforts related to women who said they had affairs with Trump.

Democrats also requested documents from the Justice Department and FBI tied to the agencies’ investigative work over the past two-plus years. They also asked for materials from Trump’s personal legal team, including attorney Jay Sekulow and former spokesman Mark Corallo.

Trump on Monday dismissed the Democrats’ probe as a “political hoax.”

“I cooperate all the time with everybody,” the president said. “You know the beautiful thing — no collusion.”

In a fiery statement late Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Nadler’s investigation “disgraceful and abusive,” and accused the committee of trying to intimidate Americans.

“Chairman Nadler and his fellow Democrats have embarked on this fishing expedition because they are terrified that their two-year false narrative of ‘Russia collusion’ is crumbling,” Sanders said. “The Democrats are more interested in pathetic political games and catering to a radical, leftist base than on producing results for our citizens. The Democrats are not after the truth, they are after the president.”

Sekulow said the president’s personal lawyers are “reviewing the request for documents and we will respond at the appropriate time,” while Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany called Nadler’s investigation “a disgraceful witch hunt with one singular aim: topple the will of the American people and seize the power that they have zero chance at winning legitimately.”

All recipients have until March 18 to comply with the document requests, and the committee plans to issue subpoenas if necessary within several additional weeks in order to force compliance, the Democratic committee counsel said. Many of the requests seek the same materials already turned over in the myriad ongoing probes, which Nadler said should help to avoid any battles with competing investigators and the Trump White House over claims of executive privilege.

“All the people on the list have given information already to either the special counsel or the Southern District or somebody,” Nadler said during an appearance on CNN on Monday night when asked why Ivanka Trump was not on the list. “And all we’re asking for at this point is information that they have already turned over, so that it can be done quickly and without questions of privilege.”

The document request was put together with signoff from prosecutors in Mueller’s office and the Southern District of New York, the Democratic counsel said. It also won’t be the only document request — Nadler’s staff said another round of letters would be going out soon and cautioned against reading into why some people didn’t receive letters on Monday. Nadler himself said it was “quite conceivable” that Ivanka Trump would be hearing from the committee.

Nadler views his effort as a complement to Mueller’s investigation, which is examining Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, potential collusion between Trump associates and Russian operatives and potential obstruction of justice. It’s also designed as a backstop if the special counsel’s work doesn’t become public. In his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Attorney General William Barr would not pledge to release Mueller’s entire final report. Further complicating efforts to release investigative materials about Trump is the Justice Department policy dating to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal that states a sitting president cannot be indicted.

Democrats aren’t limiting themselves to obstruction of justice allegations tied to the Russia probe. The committee also plans to examine potential violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits a president from enriching himself while in office, as well as witness intimidation and the dangling of pardons to senior Trump officials caught up in federal investigators’ crosshairs.

Nadler’s wide-ranging demands come on the heels of Michael Cohen’s public testimony last week before a different House committee, in which the former Trump attorney and fixer implicated the president in numerous alleged crimes and opened the floodgates for Democrats’ investigations by name-dropping Trump associates who may have been involved in crimes Cohen has pleaded guilty to, including lying to Congress and committing campaign-finance violations tied to hush-money payments.

In particular, Cohen said Weisselberg and Trump Jr. signed at least one reimbursement check for illegal hush-money payments to silence an adult-film actress who said she had an affair with the president. He also suggested that Trump Jr. informed his father in advance about a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Kremlin-connected lawyer and other senior Trump campaign officials.

The committee is also targeting WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Cohen testified to the House Oversight Committee that he overheard a phone conversation between Trump and Stone, during which Stone purportedly said Assange had informed him that “within a couple days there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” Stone last week told Politico that Cohen’s recounting of events was “not true.”

Republicans dismissed Nadler’s efforts as premature.

“We don’t even know what the Mueller report says, but Democrats are already hedging their bets,” Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the Judiciary panel, said in a statement. “After recklessly prejudging the president for obstruction, Chairman Nadler is pursuing evidence to back up his conclusion because, as he admits, ‘we don’t have the facts yet.’”

Later Monday, the chairmen of the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight committees requested all documents related to Trump's communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin. As the investigations ramp up, though, Democratic leaders remain wary to pursue impeachment proceedings against the president.

“This is not a pre-impeachment hearing,” Nadler said on CNN. “Our goal is not to decide whether there's impeachment. It may come to that if the facts show that, and it may not. Our goal is to protect the rule of law and our country and our liberties and our separation of powers against an administration that is violating all of them.”