“A tsunami of Congressional oversight is headed straight for corporate America. Barring a dramatic and improbable reversal of both current and historic political trends, Democrats will retake control of the House of Representatives (and possibly the Senate) in November’s elections, ushering in two years of divided government. With prospects for passing major legislation during that period hovering between slim and none, oversight will become the leading substantive and political weapon for newly ascendant Democrats,” write consultancy dickbags Tucker Eskew and Matt Miller in a “client note” headlined “The Subpoenas Are Coming: How Companies Should Prepare for Next Year’s Congressional Oversight Blitz,” plainly aimed at upselling them on their firm Vianovo’s services.

Miller and Eskew cite two reasons, the first being a “widespread belief among Democrats that major corporations have drawn too close to the administration for comfort” citing attacks on “crypto companies for allegedly funneling money to the president and his family, called antitrust review ‘pay-to-play corruption,’ and questioned the relationship between the White House and oil companies.”

Yeah… You’d think that maybe PR scumbags elite enough to get a free Axios advertorial might be a little craftier with their their copy than that. Or maybe just the invoices these guys command creates overestimation that they aren’t just working backward from a daydreamed response of “My gosh, what ever could have informed such ‘widespread belief’? Who’s spreading these deranged conspiracy theories among the Democratic political class? What pernicious fiends would dare propagate allegations about Eric and Don Jr’s crypto industry innovations or Trump seeking to block Netflix from acquiring Warner Bros or question why he has so many friends in the fossil fuel industry? These challenges require, nay DEMAND, the expertise of elite-tier public relations pros to coach our own comms team on how best to respond to such harmful misperceptions of our business conduct – or at least highlight that our competitor’s CEO is mentioned in the Epstein files WAY more times than ours. Vianovo sure seems primed to synergize a game-changing paradigm strategy!”

Like shouldn’t a PR firm’s own spin be good enough that you can’t tell that it’s spin?

ANYWAY, the second topline of the pitch is actually a pretty solid insight: Dems were largely stonewalled by the first Trump regime’s outright refusal to cooperate with investigations or comply with subpoenas in 2019 into 2020, so their crony capitalist oligarchs, who do not have any sort of bullshit “Executive Privilege” or other pretextual constitutional wrenches to throw in the gears, make for unprotected side doors as well as targets for oversight in and of themselves.

“For Democrats on the Hill, aggressive oversight of private companies is no longer just an end to itself, but a means for exposing alleged abuses by the Trump administration… They will probe the administration aggressively, but those efforts will be supplemented by piercing corporate investigations, both for companies with exposure to alleged administration shenanigans as well as industries that have traditionally fallen in Democratic crosshairs. To put it succinctly, why send a subpoena to a Cabinet agency that might produce documents in three years, when one to a company will produce them in three weeks?” Miller and Eskew write. That was indeed succinct.

Now earlier in the pitch they cited Top Oversight Dem Robert Garcia having “signaled that ‘larger corporations’ will be a central focus of Democratic oversight efforts,” and Axios bills Eskew and Miller as “veterans of high-profile campaigns,” Vianovo as a “bipartisan management and communications firm,” so one or both of them definitely has contact with House Dems. The point being that the overall shape of the investigative plans probably originated with Dem members/staff.

That said, these PR worms have their own imaginations and the above screenshot was their work product and not that of the minority counsel on the House Oversight committee. Easy to imagine that counsel eating his/her Wheaties this morning, clicked on Axios, then to the PDF, and silently thanking Vianovo for the idea to add DoorDash and Instacart to the 2027 subpoena shitlist.