Is the House Oversight Committee taking the first steps to impeach Bill Barr?

| 11:15 pm EST November 26, 2019
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With today’s news that the televised House impeachment hearings are shifting from the House Intelligence Committee to the House Judiciary Committee, it’s starting to become clear what Speaker Nancy Pelosi meant when she said that several committees would get to take their best shot at exposing Donald Trump’s impeachable offenses.

This has raised the question about what role, if any, the House Oversight Committee will end up playing in impeachment. Committee Chair Elijah Cummings unexpectedly passed away weeks ago. But now that Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney has been elected as the new Chair, she’s taking swift investigatory action. Here’s the thing: she’s not directly targeting Donald Trump. Instead she’s going after two of his most corrupt cabinet members, including Attorney General Bill Barr.

The House Oversight Committee posted this tweet today: “Chair Carolyn Maloney filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the Committee against #AGBarr and #SecretaryRoss for refusing to produce docs regarding the Administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.”

This leaves us to wonder just how far Carolyn Maloney plans to take this. She’s using her position as House Oversight Committee Chair to forcibly obtain evidence that Bill Barr and Wilbur Ross committed crimes, so at the least she must be planning to hold public hearings on these crimes. It’s enough to make you ask if Maloney is starting the impeachment process against Barr and Ross, with the intention of eventually handing it off to the House Judiciary Committee. We’ll see where she’s taking this.