Adam Schiff says Congress would begin investigating whether Trump targeted CNN and the Washington Post as political payback

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The Democrat likely to lead the House intelligence committee next year said Congress would investigate whether Donald Trump used “the instruments of state power to punish the press” in at least two alleged instances.

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California representative Adam Schiff described two prongs of what is likely to be a broad campaign by House Democrats to investigate the Trump administration after the party takes charge of committees following its victory in last week’s midterms.

Democratic leaders have discouraged talk of impeaching Trump and said they would like to cooperate with the president on legislation. On Sunday the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, told CBS’s Face the Nation that Democrats would not conduct “any investigation for a political purpose, but to seek the truth”.

But senior Democrats have also said they are determined to root out alleged corruption in the White House.

Schiff said the intelligence committee would look into whether Trump tried to jack up postal rates paid by Amazon and whether the president tried to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner, which the justice department appealed after it concluded in August.

Either act might represent political payback. Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, considered by Trump to be a foe. Time Warner owns CNN, a frequent Trump target.

Trump “was secretly meeting with the postmaster [general] in an effort to browbeat the postmaster [general] into raising postal rates on Amazon”, Schiff said in an interview with Axios on HBO to air Sunday evening.

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“This appears to be an effort by the president to use the instruments of state power to punish Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post.”

In the attempted AT&T-Time Warner merger, Schiff said: “We don’t know, for example, whether the effort to hold up the merger of the parent of CNN was a concern over antitrust, or whether this was an effort merely to punish CNN.

“It is very squarely within our responsibility to find out.”

In their own Sunday interviews, other committee chairs-in-waiting began to raise the curtain on their agendas.

The incoming House judiciary chairman, Jerry Nadler, told CNN’s State of the Union Democrats were “very far from” considering impeachment, but said the committee planned to summon the acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, appointed by Trump, to testify about his past statements about the Robert Mueller investigation.

The likely oversight committee chairman, Elijah Cummings, meanwhile, told ABC’s This Week he would investigate whether Trump killed plans to relocate the headquarters of the FBI because doing so could harm business at the Trump Hotel across the street.