As Democrats swept control of Congress on election night, Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, had a warning: “Lawyer up.”

Some of America’s biggest companies already have.

After two years spent courting President Donald Trump, they are bracing for Garcia, who is in line to chair the committee, and the other Democrats who will wield subpoena power come January. Some that expect to land near the top of the target lists have quietly opened back channels to the party, according to lawyers and congressional investigators familiar with the matter — a hedge against the reckoning Democrats have spent the year previewing.

Every modern administration has resisted congressional oversight to some degree. But in Trump’s first term, the White House went further, refusing to comply with a string of House Democrats’ subpoenas and declaring that it would not cooperate with the 2019 impeachment inquiry at all. This time, Democrats may have found a workaround. Much of the information Congress wants now sits in the private sector, with companies that have left a paper trail with this White House. Publicly traded companies are regulated, answerable to shareholders and vulnerable to stock drops and reputational damage, putting them under particular pressure to cooperate.

Inside Washington’s white-shoe firms, lawyers who handle congressional investigations have started fielding panicked calls. “People are terrified of the reputational issues,” said a lawyer who represents clients that have already been the target of Democratic oversight and was granted anonymity to speak candidly about client strategy. “At the end of the day, a lot of corporations don’t believe there will be a blanket pardon — they believe there’s going to be a pardon for people that Trump loves.”

More than a dozen people, including lawyers who represent subjects of investigations and congressional staff who work on investigations, told MS NOW they expect the vast majority of those targets to cooperate with Democratic investigators to some degree. They described executives who are less worried about a single bad headline than about what could come after the next presidential election: a Justice Department that could act on the referrals Trump’s Justice Department is expected to ignore.

“The world is long, power shifts,” said a lawyer who represents clients in congressional investigations. “If it’s a company and it’s a name that you’ve heard of before, it probably wants to be a company that you’ve heard of after the Trump administration is over.”

Even short of legal jeopardy, lawyers say, companies under investigation have plenty to worry about. First is reputational harm. A company could become a fixture of Democratic floor speeches and campaign ads, or a litmus test for 2028 candidates eager to prove they are tough on corporate influence.

Then there is the power of the purse. Several lawyers said clients fear Democrats could use spending bills to punish companies tied to Trump. One example would be language barring firms that have taken investment from a member of the president’s family from winning federal contracts. Such provisions would be unlikely to become law with Trump in the White House. But even a committee fight or a floor debate could hurt a company, and the threat could follow it into the next administration if Democrats control both Congress and the White House.

But the third-party strategy that gives Democrats their opening is also where the White House has begun building its defense. In August, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion extending executive privilege to some communications with private parties.

“For the executive branch, the opinion provides a potential new, but untested, framework for resisting disclosure of communications involving outside parties,” lawyers at the firm Covington & Burling wrote in a blog post analyzing the opinion. “And for anyone who regularly interacts with the White House or senior administration officials, the opinion will add further complexity to navigate when responding to an increasingly common variety of congressional inquiries directed to private parties.”

It remains to be seen how aggressively the White House will invoke privilege to block document requests. “As the President has said, he’s willing to work with anyone to continue delivering victories for hardworking Americans,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. “If Democrats choose to pursue sham investigations and radical left policies, they are choosing to work against the American people.”

But the expanded claim of privilege could further embolden a narrow group of potential targets: Trump allies and executives who have tied their fortunes to the president. They may be more willing to defy Congress and shrug off the pressures that keep most companies in line.

Elon Musk has already previewed that approach. He warned Democrats that he would come after them if they came after him, which one lawyer called “the middle finger strategy.”

Potential holdouts like Musk have reason to believe they will have more cover than the targets of any congressional investigation in recent memory. In an interview with the New York Post on Monday, Trump said he was prepared to issue preemptive pardons to Musk and others if he needed to. Such pardons can be granted before anyone is charged with a crime.

To some Capitol Hill veterans, that adds up to a playbook for defanging congressional oversight.

“Who is to say that Trump won’t issue blanket pardons for everyone who has had dealings with them? It will spare them from congressional scrutiny,” said a former senior congressional investigator. “The Democrats have already announced who they’re investigating … Just cover everyone and Democrats are screwed. And they can challenge that [Joe] Biden did it for Jan. 6 [committee] members and staff and Hunter Biden.”

A pardon, however, cannot shield a company’s share price. On Wednesday, Tesla and SpaceX shares fell sharply, with investors weighing what Democratic majorities mean for Musk’s companies.

Lawyers who work on congressional investigations also point to a weapon a pardon cannot touch: the courts. A pardon can shield someone from criminal penalties, but it does nothing to protect a company or an individual from a civil suit to enforce a subpoena, or from the court order that could follow. Taking a hard line can slow the process, said a lawyer whose clients Democrats have already targeted, but it cannot stop it.

“Companies that take a hard line and end up being held in contempt by the House will basically be gambling on the outcome of the 2028 election,” the lawyer added.

But some of the biggest obstacles to Democratic oversight may come not from the White House or its allies but from Democrats themselves. Current and former congressional investigators have questioned whether the party is ready to run disciplined, coordinated investigations with a coherent message, without committees competing for attention.

The other question looming is scope: whether Democrats will try to investigate too many things at once, instead of concentrating their resources. Spreading investigations too thin risks leaving them unable to investigate anything effectively, said a lawyer who has counseled executives and companies in investigations before congress.

But narrowing the list carries its own risks, too. “It does sort of give companies the hope that maybe they can sort of hang out on the sidelines and not be on that short list,” the lawyer said.

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From MS Now.