WashingtonHouse Republicans quietly halted a congressional investigation into whether Donald J. Trump improperly profited from the presidency, refusing to implement a court-supervised settlement that required Mazars USA, his former accounting firm, to provide financial records to Congress.
Rep. James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky, and chairman of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, made it clear that he had dropped the investigation into the president’s financial dealings—declaring that he was unaware of the probe that Democrats launched when they controlled the House—for the Instead, they focused on whether President Biden and members of his family were involved in an influence-peddling scheme.
“I honestly didn’t know who Mazars is,” said Comer, who was a senior Republican who served on the oversight panel last Congress as Democrats waged a lengthy legal fight to get documents from that accounting firm.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Comer added in a brief statement sent Monday to The New York Times.
“They have been investigating Trump for six years. I know exactly what I’m investigating: the money the Bidens received from China.”
He confirmed that the Trump investigation had ended after Democrats wrote to Comer concerned that Mazars, the former president’s former accounting firm that cut ties with him last year, had stopped turning over documents related to his finances.
That senior Democrat on the panel suggested that Comer had collaborated with Trump’s lawyers to end the investigation, a charge he denied.
Democrats fought in court for years to get financial records from Trump’s former accounting firm, and only last year — after settling with the court — they began receiving the documents, giving them new information about how in which foreign governments sought influence through the use of the Trump International Hotel.
