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by Martin Longman January 11, 2019 POLITICAL ANIMAL
Washington Monthly
Excerpt:
Susan Glasser at The New Yorker has an interesting article on Representative Eliot Engel of New York, who is now the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Quite surprisingly, as least to me, Engel is going to turn what has traditionally been a policy shop into more of an investigatory committee.
As often happens when a new chairman takes over in Congress, Engel is reorganizing the subcommittees on Foreign Affairs. He’s eliminating the committee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade and replacing it with a panel that will devote all its time looking into Donald Trump. We don’t yet know who will chair this subcommittee, but we do have some idea of what will be on their agenda.
I asked for a list of what Engel proposed to investigate. It was long, although, he assured me, by no means exhaustive, since the subcommittee’s chair and membership have not yet been finalized. No matter who holds the gavel, the investigation is certain to start with the question of what, exactly, Trump agreed to at his private meeting with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, last summer. “It’s been many months since Helsinki, and we still don’t know what Putin and Trump talked about,” Engel said. He also pledged to look at “the business interests of the President” and the extent to which Trump’s financial dealings with places such as Russia and the Middle East have “affected what he’s done in foreign policy.”
Article
emphasis mine
