First posted on Instagram · @profilopolitics
Senator Elizabeth Warren warned on Sunday that anyone profiting by cheating American families and scamming investors should get ready for “serious investigations” once Democrats take control of the Senate in January, and when pressed on who exactly she was talking about, the Massachusetts Democrat named no one.
“Anyone who’s been cheating. That’s what investigations are all about,” she said on CBS News’s Face the Nation.
The warning came when host Margaret Brennan asked Warren, the expected incoming chair of the Senate Banking Committee, whether her focus in the majority would be legislation or investigation. “We have to do both,” Warren said. “But I do want to be clear: if you’ve been making your profits by cheating American families and scamming your investors, you better get ready for some investigations, serious ones.” Asked whether she already had a list of people she planned to subpoena, she offered no names, saying it was important to go through the steps for an investigation.
Warren framed the warning as a response to what she called a collapse in enforcement under President Donald Trump. She said Americans were “damn sick” of a White House that would not enforce the laws even when people got cheated, and that dropped investigations with an implied offer: “Oh, if you make a nice contribution to Donald Trump’s ballroom, then there won’t be any enforcement of the law when you’ve cheated millions of American customers.” “That has to end,” she said.
The power behind the warning is real. As the top Democrat on the Banking Committee, Warren is widely expected to become its chair when Democrats take over the Senate in January after their November 3 midterm sweep, giving her more staff and the power to issue subpoenas, demand testimony and advance legislation. Reuters reported on November 6 that she is likely to probe the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s August decision to approve a bank charter for Trump-backed World Liberty Financial, the administration’s mass firings of financial agency workers, and its attempts to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency she helped create. A White House spokesperson said Trump was willing to work with anyone on behalf of Americans, but that “sham investigations and radical left policies” would undermine such an effort.
Warren also used the interview to press her economic agenda, saying she was ready to work with Trump where they agreed. Trump has said he wants to cut credit card interest rates to 10 percent, and Warren said: “I got the bill, I’m ready to go.” She pointed to a bipartisan housing bill passed with a veto-proof majority that expands the housing supply, brings down housing costs and bans private equity firms from buying up single-family homes — now law even though Trump did not sign it — and said Democrats also had bills ready on price gouging, protecting rural hospitals and access to health care.
On Nvidia, Warren said there was substantial bipartisan support in the Banking Committee for restraints on exporting advanced chips to China. Senator Chris Coons, who is set to take over Senate Foreign Relations, has said he wants questions answered about Nvidia and its chief executive, Jensen Huang, after The New York Times reported that Huang may have had a close relationship with a spy from China. Warren said she had worked on a bipartisan basis to stop Trump from permitting Nvidia to send the chips to China, “and now we’re seeing some of the consequences of that.”
Warren also said the pressure was building to end the war with Iran, calling it illegal and saying the administration still could not explain its goals or its exit ramp. “The wind is at our backs to end this war,” she said, adding that Democrats had “a lot of different tools on the table” and inviting Republicans to join them.