The Arizona House Committee on Investigations of the Trump-President-Electoral Correspondence, Rev. Dr. Ben Bowers, R.C. Cassidy Hutchinson, and the Department of Justice

Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee, was its obvious star, imbued with moral authority by the fact that she’d sacrificed her position in Republican leadership, and possibly her political career, to stand up to Donald Trump. But there were many others.

Rusty Bowers, the Trump-supporting speaker of the Arizona House who refused to help the former president subvert his state’s election results, was a portrait of rectitude, reading from his journal, “I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to.” Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Trump’s chief of staff, defied attempts at intimidation to describe a president at once calculating and berserk.

“When you look back at what has come out through this committee’s work, the most striking fact is that all this evidence comes almost entirely from Republicans,” the committee’s Democratic chairman, Bennie Thompson, said on Thursday.

After voting concludes Tuesday, look for the dominoes to start falling on a scramble of investigations from the Department of Justice and Republicans in the House of Representatives.

CNN’s justice team said that the DOJ investigations that were quiet in the lead up to the election could burst to life. A special counsel could potentially be appointed to oversee things in an effort to silo matters away from the Biden administration.

If investigators at the Department of Justice want to indict Trump before he officially launches a presidential campaign, they’ll have to act fast. He could announce his candidacy a week after Election Day on November 14, sources told CNN, although that date could change.

Trump wants to claim credit for GOP wins, assuming they occur on Election Day, and take control of the primary field before other Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis can get there.

Hunter Biden and the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees: The Early Stages of a New Reality on Capitol Hill

If American voters trade in Democrats for a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, everyone will be hearing a lot more about Hunter Biden, the current president’s troubled son.

Republicans have been trying to question President Joe Biden’s son for years, because the House committee shutting down on January 6 will be the only one open that day.

The federal government response to school board meetings, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Hunter Biden’s business activities are some of the issues the House Republicans intend to investigate.

It’s false to equate GOP efforts to investigate Hunter Biden’s business activities with the January 6 committee’s efforts to document the insurrection and Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

But it’s with a lingering taste of the January 6 hearings and also two Trump impeachment efforts – one of which was kicked off by Trump’s attempts to get Ukraine to investigate none other than Hunter Biden – that Republicans are planning to use the subpoena power of the House majority.

The letter sent to Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comer, the incoming chairmen of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, provides an early look at how the White House plans to contend with what are expected to be a litany of Republican probes, which Biden’s team views as politically motivated.

That’s the nugget at the top of a dizzying report by CNN’s Melanie Zanona, Manu Raju and Annie Grayer that ticks off all the things Republicans have promised or teased they will investigate about the Biden administration.

The majority of the bills are unlikely to overcome the veto of the president or the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to raise the borrowing limit, though they would have to pass legislation to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling.

Yet at Biden’s direction, White House officials have quietly engaged in early-stage preparations for the new reality on Capitol Hill, homing in on two key groups as they search for issues that can draw bipartisan support: moderate Republicans with a proven track record of working across the aisle and the incoming class of freshmen Republicans who flipped districts Biden won two years earlier.

For Biden and his team, who capitalized in their first two years in office on a number of moderate or bipartisan-minded Senate Republicans willing to work across the aisle on shared priorities, there are now opportunities among House Republicans that in large part have all but promised to declare outright legislative war on the White House.

The basic tasks of a functioning government will become high-stakes standoffs. Spending battles are going to shift from a walk to a fight. And the looming debt ceiling deadline next year and the potential for catastrophic debt default drew enough concern from White House officials that they weighed a push to address it in the current Congress to take it off the table entirely.

The White House legislative affairs team has begun to do deep dives on Republican lawmakers after seeing the results of their campaigns, according to a senior White. The White House’s goal: to better understand those lawmakers and what makes them tick as they seek out pressure points and areas of potential compromise.

While Republicans flipped the House, they did so with only four seat advantages on the backs of candidates who were not very close to Donald Trump. Several represent districts that voted for Biden in 2020.

Biden was often a key interlocutor with Republican lawmakers during his time as vice president under President Barack Obama and was elected in part on promises of finding common ground with Republicans.

The Pre-Contract Phase of the White House’s Legislative Affairs in the Light of Biden’s Electoral Campaign

The preparations for the months ahead remain in the early stage, officials said. The central focus remains on closing out the final days of unified power in Washington, DC, by securing the passage of the annual defense policy bill and a sweeping bipartisan spending agreement that includes significant new funding to assist Ukraine’s war effort, as well as a bipartisan measure to close loopholes in the Electoral Count Act that brought the country to the brink on January 6, 2021.

There is an ongoing fight within the Republican Party over who will become speaker of the House, with Californian Kevin McCarthy expected to be the next speaker and the issue of the new House majority itself. Biden spoke to McCarthy by phone shortly after the election and the California Republican was one of four leaders to meet with Biden at the White House a few weeks later.

McCarthy, after the meeting, told reporters he “can work with anyone,” but noted the new Republican majority clinched in the midterms signaled “America likes a check and balance.”

The continued uncertainty about McCarthy’s path to speakership has made it difficult for House Republicans to engage with one another.

The effort to connect Biden with people who care about the small things back home for elected officials, to rank-and-file members from both parties, will intensify after two years of looking for ways to do that.

The Democrat only legislative pathway that led to Biden’s two of his most consequential legislative wins is closed and so those efforts take on a new level of salience.

I will continue to work with the other side of the aisle to give the American people what they want. And it’s not always easy, but we did it the first term,” Biden said in his post-midterm election news conference last month. “I’m prepared to work with my Republican colleagues. The American people are clear that Republicans should be prepared to work with me as well.

Outreach from the White House to the newly elected members is sure to follow the preparation currently under way. Each member of the White House’s legislative affairs team is charged with liaising with a list of individual members and at least one committee, a senior White House official said.

A senior administration official said that they were content to let them shoot at each other. The president’s clear way in which we approach the importance of these relationships is something that we have a record for. That is what will be reflected in the next Congress.

The incoming New York Republicans – Rep.-elect Anthony D’Oso and Micheal Lawler – said they both want to work with the White House to pass legislation.

D’Esposito said that they have been named majority makers in New York. If we want to keep the seats that we flipped, we have no choice but to work together in a bipartisan fashion to deliver.

“When you have a small majority, everybody is empowered to a degree,” said Lawler, who defeated House Democrats’ campaign chief in suburban New York. “The objective should be to make sure that we are working as a conference to pass legislation that the conference can get behind and that has the best chance of passing the Senate and being signed by the White House.”

One House Republican told CNN that he gets the attention of the former president and the hard right group of House Republicans who hold significant sway inside the conference. I don’t know if they’ll use it, but we go nowhere without our freshmen.

Even if the White House can convince enough Republicans to go along with key bills, the speaker of the House has the final say over any legislation that comes up for a vote. Recent House GOP leaders have attempted to stick close to an unofficial idea that nothing should move forward without a “majority of the majority” in support of the measure, though the approach was often scrapped in times of crisis or must-pass legislative moments.

A senior White House official declined to say whether the White House would focus on trying to strike bipartisan agreements with Republican leadership or try and peel off moderate Republicans through the use of discharge petitions, calling those decisions premature.

A White House lawyer told two leading Republicans that the oversight requests they issued during the last Congress would have to be re-examined when the GOP assumes control of the House.

The White House has been working to assemble a team of lawyers and other advisers to handle the expected onslaught of oversight requests. The White House views oversteps as one of the things that the team is going to push back on.

When it became clear in November that Republicans would be able to take the majority in the chamber from Democrats, Jordan and Comer started demanding records from the Biden administration. They set deadlines in December.

But in his letter, Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber writes the two Republicans don’t yet have standing to make their requests – and that they would need to resubmit their requests once the new Congress begins next week.

The House and Congress have not delegated authority to individual members of Congress who aren’t committee chairmen, according to the White House’s top oversight lawyers.

“Should the Committee issue similar or other requests in the 118th Congress, we will review and respond to them in good faith, consistent with the needs and obligations of both branches. The new Congress is expected to take its oversight responsibilities in the same spirit of good faith.

In a statement, Comer said, “President Biden promised to have the most transparent administration in history but at every turn the Biden White House seeks to obstruct congressional oversight and hide information from the American people.”

“As we have over the past two years, we intend to work in good faith to provide appropriate information to Congress, but Americans have made clear they expect their leaders in Washington to work together on their top priorities, like lowering costs. Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, said in a statement that they were hoping that House Republicans would join the president in focusing on that.

“Unfortunately, political stunts like subpoena threats from the minority suggest House Republicans might be spending more time thinking about how to get booked on ‘Hannity’ than on preparing to work together to help the American people,” Sams said, referring to the Fox News program.