Democrats are preparing to unleash a wave of investigations that will probe the most sensitive and controversial actions of America’s largest corporations over the past two years, sparking a reckoning among Silicon Valley and Wall Street executives who courted the Trump administration — and who are now bracing for an onslaught.

Days after winning majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats are setting sharp priorities. They are zeroing in on Apple, Meta and the companies led by Elon Musk as early targets for congressional investigations, according to two people familiar with the plans.

The House is laying the groundwork to investigate President Donald Trump’s use of Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, to plan the military operation and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to those people. Lawmakers are also eyeing Apple over its hosting of tracking apps used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Meta over its demands that local governments sign nondisclosure agreements related to data center development.

This report is based on interviews with five congressional staffers, lobbyists, venture capitalists and lawyers familiar with the preparations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters, along with recordings of meetings reviewed by The Washington Post.

Those possibilities have prompted a flurry of activity in Washington, where corporate lawyers are hosting emergency online meetings, gatherings in co-working spaces and intimate bar conversations to dispense advice to founders and C-suite executives on how to prepare for the highly public investigations about to rain down on firms with ties to the Trump administration.

Multiple firms have crafted pitches for why they should serve as Musk’s personal counsel, aware that the world’s richest man is likely to receive a barrage of subpoenas and that any casework stemming from those investigations will be both lucrative and the highest-profile investigative work available in the coming year, according to two of the people.

It remains unclear in Washington’s corporate legal circles, however, whether Musk’s current team can manage these efforts, according to the two people. 

“This is a new era,” a lawyer at a prominent Washington law firm warned corporate executives in a private online meeting on Thursday. “If your company is caught up in this oversight, it’s likely to be much more highly publicized.”

Since Trump started his second term, tech billionaires and corporate executives have flanked the president at White House lunches, donated to his planned ballroom project and showered him with gifts in the Oval Office. Members of the Trump family, along with Wall Street executives, have also invested in a slew of firms that now receive billions of dollars in government funding.

Democrats have signaled privately and publicly that one major focus will be holding the business dealings of corporate America to account, in what some see as a generational reckoning for a cohort of firms with close ties to the Trump administration.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), who is poised to become chair of the House Judiciary Committee next year, said Wednesday that House lawmakers will target areas where the government has “been absolutely poisoned and contaminated by quid pro quo corruption.”

“We’re going to be advancing a whole series of investigations and hearings to shine a light on the corruption and then advance the laws that we need to shut this down for good,” he added.

“Lawyer up,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California), the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wrote on election night. 

Across Washington, firms are preparing for a multitude of investigations. Venture capitalists have advised Silicon Valley start-ups to close funding rounds before the end of the year in case money dries up in the event that executives are called into hearings or the Pentagon’s spending plans are curtailed, according to one person.

Jamie Bair, head of the congressional investigations practice at the law firm Crowell and Moring, said that the Democrats’ control of both chambers of Congress heightens the expectation that they will move with speed and severity.

“This is the story on everybody’s mind,” he said.

Apple, Meta, X and Musk did not immediately return requests for comment.

‘A whole new world’

On a rainy Thursday in Washington, corporate executives signed in to an online meeting to discuss how to prepare for potential upcoming congressional investigations.

The advice from the white-shoe lawyers was stark. Capitol Hill probes require a different skill than traditional lawsuits, a lawyer said, and it’s apparent that Democrats are throwing out the old playbook of polite investigations in favor of being much more aggressive.

The attorney noted that immediately after the midterm elections this week, lawmakers such as Garcia accompanied their warnings of upcoming investigations with Instagram posts that received media attention and thousands of reshares. 

“That is a whole new world compared to what sort of traditional Hill oversight publicity has been,” the lawyer said.

Congressional panels such as the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees will have a “higher-profile role” in oversight, the lawyer added, because the people affiliated with the administration have had many business dealings with foreign governments. “We would expect to see them pile into that space,” he said.

Republicans may still be looking to do their own oversight, even though they are in the minority. If Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) becomes the House minority leader, he may bring his reputation for partisan oversight to proceedings to counter Democratic machinations.

“If it’s Mr. Jordan, the chances that [Republican strategy] has an aggressive oversight-oriented lens to it, driven by their own political interests, gets even higher,” the lawyer said.

Lawmakers made it clear even on election night that investigating Silicon Valley would be a priority. “The titans of Silicon Valley dig bunkers for themselves and warn that the artificial intelligence they’re creating risks human extinction,” said Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) in his victory speech.

Tech executives “are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) said Tuesday night in a post on X.

After winning his race in Michigan, Democratic Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, said in a victory speech that he would be “taking on the corporations and the billionaires, special interests who’ve rigged the system against us for far too long.”

Bair said investigating corporations will be the best way to hold the Trump administration to account. It is likely investigators will issue congressional letters to the Trump administration and not get answers, he said. But corporations are likely to get more detailed letters of inquiry, and they are more apt to respond, and thereby more likely to divulge information about their dealings with U.S. officials, he said.

“That is the playbook you’re going to see,” Bair added.

Many of the Capitol Hill investigations will probably center on how the companies courted Trump and how they used that relationship to attain better fortunes.

A memo from the Groundwork Collaborative, a think tank, noted that large tech companies, private-prison corporations and natural gas firms would be “high-value” targets because of what they may have given Trump, what they may have received, and what kind of behavior they may have engaged in, the memo noted. The Washington Sun earlier reported the document.

Robert Kelner, chair of the election and political law practice group at the law firm Covington & Burling, said there’s “no question” that a wave of Democratic investigations will happen and that clients are hiring lawyers and determining what their priorities for legal protection will be.

“We’ve been telling clients all year that winter is coming,” he said. “Now winter has arrived.”

Ian Duncan and Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report.

CORRECTION

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the first name of Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California). 

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