House Democrats are already sharpening their knives before a single midterm vote is cast.

They’re building out a target list, staffing up for subpoena power, and coordinating across committees — all while insisting this isn’t about impeachment.

But what they’re actually planning will have President Trump’s supporters ready to fight back hard.

The Investigation Wish List Democrats Are Building Right Now

The Washington Post reported recently that Democrat aides are actively preparing investigations targeting President Donald Trump and his administration, operating under what they’re calling a “majority scenario” — the assumption that Democrats take back the House in November’s midterm elections and possibly the Senate as well.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who would likely chair the House Oversight Committee if Democrats win, said “There’s so much corruption and grift that it’s going to take the entire House on the Democratic side to do investigations appropriately.”

Garcia’s committee has already been running a tracker of Trump family profits from cryptocurrency deals and overseas transactions. The committee’s figures put President Trump’s foreign-sourced income at $2.25 billion during the first year of his second term — a number the administration disputes.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who is positioned to chair the House Judiciary Committee in a Democrat-controlled House, has been seeking information about venture capital firms “1789 Capital” and “American Ventures,” both linked to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. The allegation is that those firms received preferential treatment in landing government contracts with the Trump administration.

Also on the list: an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service that Democrats allege shielded the Trump family and its businesses from tax audits, the sale of “early access” rights to President Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, and business dealings tied to son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Democrats are also eyeing pardons granted to individuals for their roles in what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the circumstances under which those pardons were extended to Trump supporters who Democrats claim received favorable treatment in exchange for business interests.

The Same Script Democrats Ran in 2018

Americans with a memory longer than a news cycle will recognize this playbook.

Before the 2018 midterms, Democrats offered nearly identical assurances — they were focused on oversight, not impeachment, and were simply preparing to restore constitutional checks and balances. After winning the House that November, they proceeded to impeach President Trump twice: once over the Ukraine matter and again over January 6, both of which were partisan political exercises rather than dispassionate constitutional processes.

The current round of denials from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) closely tracks that 2018 messaging. Jeffries has declined to discuss impeachment on multiple occasions. But the same party that spent years insisting it wasn’t planning impeachment delivered two of them.

And the investigation list Democrats are now assembling is not some modest accountability agenda. It is a sweeping attempt to pull President Trump, his sons, his son-in-law, his businesses, his pardons, and his social media platform into years of congressional hearings — timed to consume the remainder of his final term.

Garcia confirmed he is already working closely with Raskin on potential investigations. Both men have been explicit about their priorities: Trump family finances, the Jeffrey Epstein matter, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, corporations they believe enabled Trump, and what Garcia described as “the destruction of our vaccination process” and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

That last target is telling. RFK Jr. has spent his tenure at HHS raising legitimate questions about regulatory capture, pharmaceutical industry influence over federal agencies, and the chronic disease crisis that public health bureaucracies spent decades ignoring. The MAHA movement he represents has broad support among Americans who watched federal health agencies get major calls wrong during the COVID-19 era. Democrats want to drag that work into a hostile congressional spotlight the moment they get the gavel.

What This Is Really About

Let’s call this what it is: a strategy to tilt the final two years of Trump’s presidency into a permanent investigation cycle designed to paralyze governance, generate damaging headlines, and lay the groundwork for a 2028 Democrat campaign built on “corruption” as its central theme.

Democrats don’t have the Senate votes to convict Trump on anything even in their rosiest midterm scenario. Impeachment, at least for now, is off the table not because they don’t want it but because it would backfire politically. So the plan is investigations — subpoenas, hearings, document requests, and a steady drip of allegations — without the accountability of actually having to prove anything in a trial.

The $2.25 billion figure Garcia’s committee has been promoting as Trump’s foreign-sourced income is a Democrat-generated number, not an independently verified finding. Attributing it as established fact is exactly the kind of thing these committees do when they want to create the impression of wrongdoing without the burden of proof that a court would require.

And the target list itself reveals the scope of the ambition. Venture capital firms linked to Don Jr. and Eric Trump. IRS agreements. Truth Social. Jared Kushner’s Middle East business dealings. Pardons. The list isn’t focused — it’s designed to be overwhelming, to generate as many investigative threads as possible so that something, somewhere, produces a damaging revelation before the 2028 election cycle begins in earnest.

Republicans have seen this before. The same permanent Washington apparatus that spent years trying to undo the 2016 election through the Russia investigation, through two impeachments, through a cascade of criminal referrals and civil suits, is now preparing the next round.

But there’s a reason historical trends favor the party out of power in midterms — and that reason cuts both ways. The same political environment that might give Democrats a House majority is also the environment that produced a Republican Senate in 2024 and sent President Trump back to Washington with a clear mandate. The American public is not uniformly interested in watching Congress spend two years investigating a president’s sons’ venture capital portfolios.

Garcia and Raskin may get their gavels. If they do, expect the investigations to begin immediately and to be prosecuted with maximum media coordination. What they won’t get is a conviction, a removal, or a public that has forgotten what Democrat-led investigations actually look like when they run their course.

The voters who sent Trump back to Washington in 2024 already gave their answer on who they trust to ask the right questions about American governance. Democrats are betting that two more years of investigations will change that answer. They made the same bet in 2019. It didn’t work then either.

Source: SBS News English, “US Democrats Prepare to Target Trump’s Wealth and Corruption Allegations Immediately Upon Retaking House”