With Democrats poised to take control of both the Senate and the House in January, top Democrats have warned President Donald Trump and officials in his administration that they’ll be launching sweeping investigations immediately upon taking power.
Ahead of those investigations launching, The Telegraph reports that White House whistleblowers are alleging that officials throughout the administration are frantically “destroying documents” in the hopes of avoiding scrutiny when the new Congress is sworn in next year.
Allegations of Document Destruction
CNN reports that Democrats are demanding that the Department of the Interior preserve all records regarding the various projects that had been fast-tracked by President Trump. These include a redesigned golf course, restoration of the Lincoln Memorial Pool, repaving the White House Rose Garden — which had famously been planted by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962 — and construction on his “triumphal” arch.
On Tuesday, November 10, Rep. Jared Huffman — top Democrat in the House Natural Resources committee, which maintains oversight over agencies including the Department of the Interior — sent a letter requesting that officials “preserve all records and data responsive to oversight.”
The letter reportedly came in response to “multiple credible whistleblowers who have approached Huffman’s committee in recent weeks to voice concern that the Interior Department is getting rid of records in anticipation of forthcoming scrutiny,” the sources told CNN.
The department, however, pushed back on the whistleblowers’ claims, telling CNN those allegations are “100 percent false,” with a spokesman telling CNN, “The Department follows all federal records management obligations as directed by the Department’s ethics officials.”
Head officials at the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, which are part of the Department of the Interior, also received that letter.
‘Everything Is Coming’
As Huffman told CNN, he and his Democrat colleagues plan to use every tool at their disposal to compel Trump administrations to cooperate once they’re in the majority.
“Everything is coming; it’s all coming,” Huffman told CNN.
“It’s just going to be an entirely new day,” he stated, adding he was hopeful that the work of his committee will be able to halt the president’s various construction projects, “especially because we have standing to go to court if we have to. We’ll have tools to be able to stop a lot of it.”
A Turbo-Charged Timeline
While the committee has already been coordinating with the House Oversight and Judiciary committees to hit the ground running in January with the launch of multiple investigations, sources close to the approval process of those projects indicate there’s a renewed urgency to complete as much work as possible on those projects before the end of 2026.
At the moment, there’s a flurry of activity as some projects head for approval by federal agencies, while others must move through the historical preservation evaluation process.
“We’re going to start seeing all of these things happening simultaneously,” Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told CNN. “It is going to be like a storm where it plays out until the new Congress is seated.”
Whistleblowers Accuse Trump Administration Officials of Destroying Documents Before Dems Take Power in Congress