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CR Catherine Rampell Catherine Rampell Catherine Rampell is economics editor at The Bulwark and an anchor at MS NOW (fmrly MSNBC).

“Democrats are figuring out how they are going to wield the gavel and wield their subpoena power once they return to the majority. … The Post reports that the House is laying the groundwork to investigate Trump's use of Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, to plan the military operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Lawmakers are also eyeing Apple over its hosting of tracking apps used by ICE, and Meta over its demands that local governments sign NDAs related to data center development.”

The Bulwark · Policy · November 2026

“Democrats are figuring out how they are going to wield the gavel and wield their subpoena power once they return to the majority. … The Post reports that the House is laying the groundwork to investigate Trump's use of Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, to plan the military operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Lawmakers are also eyeing Apple over its hosting of tracking apps used by ICE, and Meta over its demands that local governments sign NDAs related to data center development.” — Catherine Rampell, The Bulwark

Context

After the midterms, she runs through what a Democratic Congress might investigate in tech. She is relaying a Washington Post report on planned probes of Musk's companies, Apple and Meta; the specific items are the Post's reporting.

Transcript

The Bulwark
Catherine Rampell

But compared to other American EV makers, definitely blowing everyone else out of the water, although finally facing some more competition. So, yeah. So as

Jonathan V. Last

long as the government protects them from BYD, they're great.

Catherine Rampell

Yes. Yes. Well, government protection or government aggression also possibly playing into what's going on here in terms of Tesla and in terms of Elon Musk himself, because Democrats are figuring out how they are going to wield the gavel and wield their subpoena power once they return to the majority in both the House and the Senate in a few months. And, you know, the question is, like, how do they hold Elon Musk accountable for a bunch of the things that he has done when he was at Doge? Again, some of this, what certainly looks like self-dealing in contracts with Tesla or with SpaceX or others, the abuse of his power over some of these companies when it comes to our national security or the national security of some of our allies like Ukraine. So there was a good story today in the Washington Post that was getting into this. There's been a fair amount of coverage of what this might look like. The Post reports that the House is laying the groundwork to investigate Trump's use of Musk's AI chat bot, Grok, which I believe is under the SpaceX umbrella to plan the military operation and capture of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro. Lawmakers are also eyeing Apple over its hosting of tracking apps used by ICE. And they are also looking into Meta, Facebook, over its demands that…

Jonathan V. Last

Criminal defense attorney. You're going to need it.

Catherine Rampell

Yeah, for some of them, they probably will. This

Jonathan V. Last

is an homage to Eric Hirschman. This is what he told John Eastman, if people will remember from the J6 hearings.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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