Jeffries vows immediate anti-corruption push next year: ‘Hold the crooks accountable’

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is vowing that Democrats, if they win the House in next month’s midterms, will launch immediate investigations into corruption allegations against President Trump, his family and other associates who have benefited financially during the early years of his second term.

“What we’ve seen from the Trump cartel is that they’re more focused on enriching themselves, their family members, their friends and their donors than they are with making life more affordable for the American people,” Jeffries said Thursday during a press conference in his Brooklyn district.

“And our promise to the country in the new Congress is that, beginning on Day 1, we’re going to hold the crooks accountable.”

The remarks come amid a flurry of new reports about administration officials, donors and advisers profiting, or seeking to profit, from their connections to the White House.

Last week, The New York Times reported that the administration’s efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine featured an emerging agreement over Russian oil that’s poised to benefit a billionaire Trump donor and Middle Eastern businessmen with ties to Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law.

On Tuesday, The Times reported that a pair of top campaign advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to help reelect right-wing Balkan politicians allied with Russia.

That was followed a day later by a Wall Street Journal report revealing that Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former fiancé of Donald Trump, Jr., and now the U.S. ambassador to Greece, had pressured a wealthy Trump donor to pay off $100,000 in credit card debt in return for political favors.

“It absolutely was a quid pro quo,” the Trump donor, Eric Deters , said Thursday in an interview with MS NOW.

Such episodes have outraged Democrats on and off of Capitol Hill. Many liberals in the party are already pushing for impeachments — a step Jeffries and other Democratic leaders have so far resisted.

Their focus has been to make the campaign a referendum on the high cost of living and economic volatility that’s accompanied Trump’s second term. Party leaders are vowing quick action on a series of legislative fixes — rolling back tariffs, ending the Iran War, reversing Medicaid cuts — designed to ease consumer costs.

But Jeffries’s promise to launch an immediate and parallel effort to investigate potential corruption in the administration aims to ease the liberals’ concerns, sending a message that the economic focus won’t distract from efforts to hold public officials accountable for wrongdoing.

Such investigations have been virtually non-existent while both chambers of Congress have been controlled by Trump’s GOP allies. But the top Democrats on the various investigative committees — most notably the Oversight and Judiciary Committees — are vowing to change that if they get the gavels.