Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., who is poised to become head of the powerful House Oversight Committee, said he would not “bend the knee” to President Donald Trump after the White House’s top lawyer sent him a letter threatening that investigations into the administration “may cross the line into blatant criminality.”

On Monday, White House Counsel Will Scharf sent a three-page letter to the California Democrat, accusing him and his colleagues of signaling plans to use their new majority to harass Trump administration officials rather than to “further a legitimate legislative task.” He said the administration would take action against oversight it considers unlawful.

Garcia told MS NOW’s Alicia Menendez on Wednesday that it was “outrageous” for the White House to try to prevent “any sort of oversight.” He said the president was trying to “stop us members of Congress from doing our job that is in the Constitution.”

“It’s shocking that the White House would send a letter that is clearly a threat to the Congress, a threat to me, when all we’re focused on is investigation and rooting out corruption,” Garcia added. Their work, he said, was about “taking on government corruption, making life more affordable through bringing down costs by actually going after the crooks and the criminals that are causing harm.”

Garcia said the committee’s investigations would have a legitimate legislative purpose and help prevent corruption carried out by future administrations. “We investigate so that we can actually write good laws to stop corruption,” he said. “We want to ensure that we are writing new laws so that the president’s family in the future does not somehow take advantage of the system, isn’t profiting off the presidency.”

“Maybe Donald Trump or his lawyers don’t understand that, but that’s the work that we’re engaged in every single day,” he continued. “And no letter or threat from the president is going to stop that work.”

The congress member said he and his fellow Democrats would not be “intimidated by the president,” and that the administration appeared to believe “in an authoritarian state” where “we all should bend the knee to Donald Trump.”

Garcia pointed to Democrats’ sweeping midterm victories as evidence that voters want the party to take on the administration. He said the results should give Democrats the “courage to take on these big fights.”

“When you have a family that is profiting off the presidency, that are billions of dollars richer, while the American public is struggling, that is a real issue that people care about,” he said, “and they want us to take on.”

You can watch Garcia’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.

The post Top Oversight Democrat rejects Trump White House ‘threat’: ‘We’re not bending the knee’ appeared first on MS NOW.

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