A DC fixer's pitch to House Democrats: subpoena the crypto scammers, spare the tech giants

Juleanna Glover, a longtime adviser to chief executives working Washington and a onetime aide to Elon Musk, is telling the Democrats who may take power in November to leave the tech giants alone and spend their investigative bandwidth on crypto scammers, connected Kazakh mining companies, alleged Albanian mobsters and insider traders ^[1][2][3]. For anyone holding large-cap tech, the useful part is not the advice but the fact that the placement of 2027 oversight risk is now an active lobbying question, and the House committees say they have not settled it ^[9][11].

Glover's case, as reported by Semafor, is partly about win probability. Most Fortune 500 companies have largely operated inside the law when making payments to President Donald Trump's favored causes, she argues, and their lawyers will tie Democrats into knots ^[5]. She also wants Democrats to surface evidence that Democratic state attorneys general can take to court, which moves the venue from a hearing room to a docket ^[4]. And she is explicit about the political trade: "These are some of the most powerful business leaders in the world, and we need them on our side," she told Semafor. "We need their support in order to win the White House in 2028" ^[6].

Two disclosures matter for weighting this. Glover is a former Dick Cheney aide who is now firmly anti-Trump ^[1], and her client roster does not include the big tech CEOs photographed at Trump's 2025 inauguration ^[7]. Her track record on this exact play is mixed: in the summer of 2020 she texted Musk's phone number around Joe Biden's campaign after Musk began criticizing him on X, the campaign ignored her, and the administration ignored Musk ^[8].

The committee side sounds less accommodating in principle and vaguer in practice. Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on House Oversight, told Semafor "we can't do everything" and that Democrats are "narrowing down right now what our lanes are going to be" ^[11]. He named Trump family corruption, the Justice Department's handling of the Epstein files, immigration enforcement and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s work, and said the big lane would be "corporate corruption and going after folks that are ripping off the public" ^[12][13]. On the corporate payments, Garcia said the public "has a right to know what they were expecting in return" ^[15]. Trump and his family deny all wrongdoing and describe the monetization of the presidency as an open extension of the family business ^[16].

Revealed preference so far favors Glover. Oversight Democrats have little power in the minority and have mostly sent letters that recipients are not obliged to answer, and none of those public letters has targeted Big Tech's payments to Trump causes ^[14][1]. Semafor's own read is that for most of Big Tech the Trump administration has looked less like bribery than like extortion, a payment to be left alone ^[17].

What to watch: whether the first Oversight letters after November name tech payments, whether Democratic state attorneys general pick up the fringe cases Glover is steering them toward ^[4], and the calendar. Semafor argues the inauguration photograph of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Musk more or less guarantees testimony invitations in 2027, roughly two quarters after any new majority sets its lanes ^[19][2]. Also worth watching: the assumption that hitting Big Tech is good politics, which Semafor notes was complicated by the win of the pro-data-center candidate for governor of Wisconsin ^[18]. A handful of politically charged mergers are already on the target list ^[10].