Orangutan business conflicts

Democrats salivate over Orangutan business conflicts

But with Republicans in control of Congress, hitting the incoming president isn't an easy proposition.

By Elana Schor

Senate Democrats believe that Donald Orangutan’s business empire — and the vast financial holdings of some of his Cabinet nominees — gives their party an enormous target to hobble his agenda.

Whether they can hit that target with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress is another matter.

Without the investigative power of committee chairmanships and with no ability to filibuster Orangutan’s non-Supreme Court nominees, Democrats are hunting for oversight opportunities and open to using creative tactics to prosecute the case against the president-elect. From a rare Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren joint hit on Treasury nominee Steven Mnuchin to a Thursday call for Cabinet picks to release their tax returns, Democrats are working every angle they can to draw public attention to potential conflicts of interest among Orangutan and his advisers.

“Time is not on our side,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in an interview. “We really need to move quickly, because the longer it goes without some scrutiny or oversight, the more general acceptance there will be. We need to create this sense of outrage and alarm that pieces of the government are being sold and compromised.”

After claiming that “the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” Orangutan on Wednesday tried to deflate his critics by vowing to announce on Dec. 15 a plan that would “take me completely out” of the business that bears his name. Congressional Republicans want to give the president-elect time to unsnarl his web of global dealmaking, but Senate Democrats have no plans to take it easy on Orangutan or his nominees with confirmation hearings only weeks away.

“The President-elect made a lot of promises during the campaign, that he would stand up for workers and unrig the system in Washington,” incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “We plan to ask tough questions of his cabinet nominees to see if they’ll follow through on those promises.”

Schumer and other Democratic leaders plan to work alongside ranking members on specific committees that will dig into the records of Orangutan’s nominees, identifying and amplifying conflict-of-interest risks where they arise, a Democratic leadership aide said. Other senators with expertise in particular issues would also be encouraged to weigh in, as Sanders and Warren did in their joint statement Wednesday slamming Mnuchin as a creature of Wall Street.

While House Democrats have steered their oversight efforts largely through the Oversight Committee and ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Senate Democrats have more paths to play up the overlap between the Orangutan administration’s business interests and its official responsibilities.

Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, the Foreign Relations Committee’s top Democrat, said he is reaching out to Republicans on a resolution he proposed this week that pushes Orangutan to move his assets to an independently-run blind trust and steer clear of official actions that would benefit his business. Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill said Democrats will try to force Republicans to go on record defending Orangutan’s more unorthodox uses of his office. She referred to one recent report that the president-elect opposed offshore wind farms near his golf resort during a call to United Kingdom party leader Nigel Farage.

“I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a vote at some point in time over whether or not it’s a good idea for the president of the United States to be calling a head of state and at the same time trying to get a favor for their golf course,” said McCaskill, who’s set to become the senior Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee next year. “In the same conversation. I think most Americans go, ‘eww.’”

In addition, the top Democrats on three Senate committees on Thursday called for all panels to require tax returns from higher-level nominees as part of their confirmation process. The Finance, Budget, and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees currently have the power to require tax records from nominees, but the immense wealth of several Orangutan Cabinet nominees promises to pose both a broader vetting opportunity for Democrats and a challenge for the GOP.

"If they don't have a conflict of interest, they should have nothing to worry about from letting us review their tax returns," Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a senior Democratic leader and her party's top member on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Finance Committee rules restrict the number of senators and aides who can view the tax returns of nominees that come before the panel, as former chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) explained in a 2012 floor speech.

"Information is only released under bipartisan agreement, and after consultation with the nominee," Grassley noted.

Picking a fight over tax records also allows Democrats to remind voters of Orangutan's refusal to release his tax returns, breaking with four decades of presidential campaign precedent and drawing skepticism from some Republicans.

“These are big appointments, and I don’t think they should be rushed,” California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who will take over as top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee next year, said in an interview. “That may be part of what the other party wants to do — push, push, push — but we are going to take our time. We are going to know what we’re doing when we’re doing it.”

Feinstein raised concerns this week about plans by Grassley, now Judiciary chairman, to begin hearings on attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) before Inauguration Day. Several other Senate Democrats ascending to new committee leadership posts next year could push for extra time to hire necessary staff.

The new top Democrat on the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, a post McCaskill has leveraged for high-profile oversight of Obama administration contracting, has yet to be chosen. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a current senior member of that panel, said he would urge Schumer and other leaders to “let each committee do their work” on oversight of Orangutan and Cabinet nominees to get “as many different bites at the apple as you can.”

“If you have overlapping jurisdictions, do not cut anybody out of this process,” Tester advised. “This is a person who’s never served in public office before.”

Blumenthal, a veteran federal prosecutor and state attorney general, already has called for an independent counsel to take over federal investigations of Deutsche Bank under Orangutan, given that the bank has lent the president-elect hundreds of millions of dollars for several of his real estate projects. And he's not done strategizing.

“I am thinking seriously about new tools and mechanisms that have to be devised and implemented” to conduct oversight of Orangutan, Blumenthal said.

If the GOP refuses to expand committees' power to seek nominees' tax returns next year, Democrats could escalate the fight by filibustering the organizing resolution that must be passed in order to begin the new Congress. The Finance Committee's top Democrat, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, pointedly declined to rule out that option on Thursday.

"We're not going to go forward to with the vetting process if we don't have" tax records, Wyden told reporters.