Sen. Richard Blumenthal ordered to preserve documents from inquiry into Trump ballroom

A Justice Department official called on Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on Wednesday to preserve documents related to what he claims is harassment of citizens during Blumenthal’s investigation into White House ballroom donors, threatening “significant legal consequences” if he does not comply.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Aaron Reitz, alleged in a letter to Blumenthal that his investigation equated to threatening “citizens for associating themselves with the President and other public officials.” The White House warned congressional Democrats on Wednesday that efforts to investigate the administration could be a crime.

In a post on X with a copy of the letter attached, Reitz equated Blumenthal’s investigation examining anonymous donors for the roughly $400 million project on White House grounds with wielding Congress as a “weapon” against Americans.

“I’m taking the first step to stop this abuse of power,” Reitz said.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, the second-highest-ranking official at the Justice Department, responded to Reitz’s post, saying, “The First Amendment expressly prohibits Congress from infringing the speech and association rights of Americans.”

“DOJ will defend against threats to those rights, period,” McCotter wrote.

Blumenthal said in a statement responding to the letter that he “will not be intimidated,” vowing to “vigorously pursue investigations into this Administration’s persistent misuse of taxpayer dollars and any corporate entity that has enabled their boundless corruption.”

“The Trump Administration is so afraid of transparency and oversight that they are weaponizing the Department of Justice to baselessly target Congress in direct violation of the Constitution,” Blumenthal wrote.

Blumenthal is the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The subcommittee is tasked with studying the economics and efficiency of government operations.

Blumenthal sent letters last month to a list of people whom a Washington Post report identified as having donated private funds to the ballroom’s construction. A news release said he was “leading an inquiry into waste, fraud, and abuse associated with the White House ballroom and other projects throughout the nation’s capital.”

President Donald Trump had vowed to release the names of the private donors, but he has made only a partial list public. A few donors have acknowledged their donations, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who is under investigation by the company and the FBI for an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Trump defended Huang in remarks to reporters this week.

Reitz’s letter cited the federal conspiracy against rights statute, as well as the federal deprivation of rights under color of law statute.

Such an overt investigative measure against a sitting member of Congress would typically have undergone an extensive review process within the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Office, but that office has been shrunk and sidelined in the second Trump term.

A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement that “the Department routinely requests that records be preserved when public officials take such extreme actions,” alleging that Blumenthal’s letters were an attempt to “suppress their First Amendment activities, including their philanthropic practices.”

Reitz, a former chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy for a few months last year before he launched an unsuccessful campaign for Texas attorney general. He has been U.S. attorney since July.

Trump’s ballroom project has faced a series of legal hurdles, but the Supreme Court ultimately decided in August that it could go forth indefinitely.