The White House, anticipating a surge of congressional oversight and legislative probes, has started staffing up its counsel’s office — with 15 additional hires so far — as it prepares to do legal battle.
Investigations are expected to ramp up aggressively in January.
“The last time around, Dems were very deliberate about pacing subpoenas,” said Brandon Rios, who was counsel to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. “This time, I’d be shocked if we don’t see them in January.”
“The investigations start now,” said Rios, who now co-leads the congressional investigations group at the law firm DLA Piper.
The aggressive pushback has already begun: On Wednesday, the White House released a letter from White House counsel Will Scharf accusing Democrats of making “abusive and capricious threats” that aim to “interfere with the lawful functioning of government.”
The letter to Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California), who is expected to chair the House Oversight Committee in the new Congress, made clear that the administration would resist congressional subpoenas on the grounds that they lack a “legitimate legislative purpose.” It went further to suggest that the administration might try to investigate the investigators, saying that “threats to executive branch officials” would go beyond Congress’s legitimate oversight role and “may cross the line into blatant criminality.”
The prospect of sustained clashes between the White House and a Democratic Congress already has private companies and law firms building up their staffs to prepare for an onslaught. Advisers and allies to President Donald Trump have lawyered up. And K Street lobbying firms are readying for questions from congressional committees looking to probe their ties to an administration that has not shied from its image of being open for business.
Preparations inside the White House began well before the election. David Warrington, then the incoming White House counsel, began planning for congressional oversight hearings as far back as the presidential transition in 2024. That work picked up this year as White House lawyers realized that Republicans could lose the House.
Lawyers from the counsel’s office have been meeting with agency general counsels for months to plan how to respond to congressional inquiries, according to a person familiar with the preparations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Scharf, who replaced Warrington as White House counsel in September, “is preparing the strongest, sharpest legal oversight team in the history of the country,” said Hunter Morgen, former special assistant to the president for policy and strategy. “This administration will not back down in protecting the innocence of the great patriots working every day to preserve our republic.
“I think the strategy, for lack of a better term, is ‘fight, fight, fight.’”
Trump’s choice of Stephen Miller as his chief of staff also suggests a combative posture.
“Stephen will want to be directly engaged in this,” said a former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Beyond arguing that congressional probes lack a valid legislative purpose, an August opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel previewed another claim the administration probably will make. The office concluded that executive privilege can shield communications even with advisers outside government when they concern official presidential decisions and involve the president or his direct aides.
Even if these challenges ultimately fail, litigation challenging subpoenas or other demands could take years, running out the clock until the end of Trump’s term, attorneys close to the White House said.
“There’s a lot of talk about lessons that congressional Democrats learned conducting oversight during the first Trump administration,” said Peter Rechter, partner at the law firm Wiley Rein and an associate counsel at the White House during the Biden administration. “But Trump administration officials learned lessons too. And I think one of those lessons is that litigation can be a powerful tool to slow things down.”
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said Trump was open to working across party lines. “As the president has said, he’s willing to work with anyone to continue delivering victories for hardworking Americans,” she said.
“If Democrats choose to pursue sham investigations and radical left policies, they are choosing to work against the American people,” Bis said.
Democrats have already signaled where some of their inquiries could go. On Nov. 5, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, renewed requests for records from donors to the White House ballroom, including defense contractors Palantir and Lockheed Martin. He asked recipients to begin producing records by Nov. 30 and said the subcommittee would look for other ways to obtain them if the donors failed to comply voluntarily by Jan. 4.
Private companies may be less willing than the White House to spend a year or more litigating while facing public accusations that they are obstructing Congress, Rechter said. Because of that, lawmakers are likely to seek records from companies that dealt with the administration.
“I would expect Democrats to pursue maximum pressure,” Rechter said. “And as part of that, they may look to the private sector for parties who are not going to be comfortable litigating for a year or risk taking a reputational hit. I think those are going to be the places that Congress focuses on if they encounter resistance from the executive branch.”
For the White House, that prospect will raise questions about how to deal with Congress targeting companies and business leaders over conversations and interactions on topics as varied as the ballroom, Trump’s inauguration, this summer’s Freedom 250 celebrations and policies on trade, tariffs, artificial intelligence deals and more.
Michael Toner, a former Federal Election Commission chairman now at Wiley Rein, said companies are weighing which records could draw scrutiny, who would testify on their behalf if called and how they would explain donations to projects such as the ballroom and the Freedom 250 celebrations.
Smart clients have been preparing for months “and are in full prep mode now,” he said. “This is going to be very intense. You’ve got to grapple with that.”
Isaac Arnsdorf and Michael Birnbaum contributed to this report.
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