The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has quietly dropped an investigation into whether former President Donald Trump made improper profits during his presidency.
The House Oversight & Accountability has refused to enforce a court-supervised settlement that required Mazars USA, the former president’s accounting firm, to submit his financial records to Congress, The New York Times reported.
“Honestly, I didn’t even know who or what Mazars was,” said Representative James Comer of Kentucky, who is chairman of the committee Times. Rather, Comer said he would focus more on investigating President Joe Biden’s family.
“What exactly are they looking for?” he said. “They investigated Trump for six years. I know exactly what I’m investigating: the money the Bidens received from China.”
The Democrats had previously written to Mr. Comer, who was a former senior committee member when the Democrats controlled the House in the last Congress, and expressed concern that Mr. Trump’s accounting firm, which had cut ties with him, had stopped handing over the committee’s documents.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat on the committee, said Mr. Comer worked with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to successfully conclude the investigation, which Mr. Comer denied.
“It has come to my attention that you may have colluded with former President Donald Trump’s lawyers to prevent the committee from receiving documents subpoenaed as part of an investigation into unauthorized, unreported, and unlawful payments made by foreign governments and others to then-President Trump, Mr. Raskin wrote to Mr. Comer on Sunday.
But Mr Comer denied any knowledge of any attempts to coordinate with the former president’s lawyers to block the investigation, but did not issue any subpoenas regarding Mr Trump’s finances.
The closing of the investigation comes after Democrats spent much of their time between 2019 and 2023 trying to obtain financial records from Mr. Trump’s companies. They received and released Trump’s tax records just before handing over control to the Republicans.
