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MS NOW co-anchor Jacqueline Alemany says House Democrats are so convinced they will stampede the chamber in November that they are already planning to investigate U.S. companies that paid President Donald Trump millions for political favors.
Trump may thump his chest over Democrat-led House investigations, but tech giants, oil companies, defense contractors and Fortune 500 CEOs still fear congressional subpoenas and congressional scrutiny.
“Now, as House Democrats plot a return to the majority, they are pledging to probe the deals, mergers, settlements and regulatory favors that flowed to corporations doing business with the Trump administration,” reports Alemany.
Democrats are currently in the minority and limited to issuing “strongly worded letters and … toothless investigative authority,” but Alemany said they are already “laying the groundwork for a sweeping expansion of oversight targeting the companies and CEOs who have done business with the Trump family, or sought favorable regulatory treatment, merger approval, or policy changes from the administration — from Paramount to Palantir.”
“Trump’s running the presidency like a mob boss and everyone who has agreed to bribe him is a target for an investigation,” said a senior congressional staffer, speaking anonymously to MS NOW. “And although there’s a spectrum of wrongdoing with Elon Musk at one end and not much more than small businesses trying to get by on the other, there are very wealthy CEOs who know better. And we’re taking names.”
Critics may consider this retaliation against Trump’s corporate enablers but Democrats say this is a strategy that could “reshape corporate America’s relationship with Trump,” by making CEOs “think twice before opening their wallets or bending to presidential pressure.”
Biden administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with senior Democratic officials in December and encouraged them to hold the private sector more accountable as Trump embraced a more blatantly “transactional and retributive [form of] governance,” according to three sources in the meeting.
The idea caught on as a result of backlash to members of the national security community who have been fired or blacklisted by companies fearful of retribution from Trump. But the conversation quickly expanded to how completely companies have folded under pressure from the administration, said Alemany.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are already sending inquiries to chief executives of at least four oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Continental Resources, demanding information to determine “who stands to privately or personally benefit from President Trump’s actions and whether corrupt motives were a driving force in U.S. foreign policy decision.”
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:{Jan. 15, 2026,
By Lisa Rubin and Soorin Kim
As the 2026 midterm election year begins, MAGA Inc., a PAC aligned with President Donald Trump, boasts a war chest of almost $300 million built principally through deep-pocketed donors during the first year of Trump’s second term.
While public reporting on MAGA Inc.’s megadonors has focused on well-known tech and cryptocurrency figures, buried in the long list of the PAC’s 2025 contributors are two names that are lesser known in the usual Trump donor sphere — a New York-based oil heir and former executive who now sits on the board of directors of Chevron, the sole U.S. company currently operating in Venezuela, and his wife.
Federal campaign finance filings show that John Hess and his wife, Susan Hess, each contributed $1 million to MAGA Inc. on Dec. 12, 2025, just weeks before the U.S. took military action to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
On that same day, Trump raised eyebrows after a reporter asked if he intended to seize more oil assets from Venezuela after the U.S. seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast earlier that week. “I mean, it wouldn’t be very smart for me to tell you that,” he started. But in continuing to talk about attacks on boats, he added, “[And] now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening.”
By that point, the president for days had repeatedly said “we’re going to start doing those strikes on land too” as he spoke extensively about strikes on boats near the Venezuelan coast and in the Caribbean — a statement some interpreted to mean land strikes were imminent.
There is no indication that those comments factored into the sizable Hess donations on Dec. 12.
Although the couple have long been donors to various political causes and candidates, including occasionally to Democrats, their 2025 contributions to MAGA Inc. were rare seven-figure contributions from them. The Hesses’ $2 million contribution is dwarfed by other massive eight-figure dollar donations from tech giants and crypto companies to MAGA Inc. from the past year, but it’s nonetheless notable after their yearslong hiatus from contributions in support of Trump in the last few years.
John Hess’ last contribution to a Trump-affiliated fundraising vehicle was a $100,000 donation to the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee’s joint fundraising committee in late 2017. Earlier that year, he gave $1 million to Trump’s first inaugural committee — his only other seven-figure donation at the federal level. And during the 2016 election, Susan Hess gave $170,000 in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Prior to his recent seven-figure donation to MAGA Inc., John Hess’ federal political contributions have mostly gone to congressional campaigns and groups, including $500,000 to a Senate GOP-aligned super PAC in 2020.
Hess is perhaps best known as an heir to and a longtime executive of the former Hess Corp., which was acquired by Chevron last year in a transaction worth an estimated $53 billion. As a result of the merger, Hess was also appointed to Chevron’s board of directors.
Since 2007, when then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez seized assets from three major North American oil companies — Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil — Chevron has been the only U.S. oil company involved in production within Venezuela through a joint venture with the country’s state-owned oil company. And MS NOW’s sister network CNBC has reported that Chevron exported approximately 140,000 barrels per day from Venezuela in the last quarter of last year.
Last week, in an interview with CNBC, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he spoke with the CEOs of all three companies on Jan. 3, when the U.S. military struck Venezuela and removed Maduro from the country, to encourage their investment in Venezuela long-term.
But while he said Exxon and ConocoPhillips would need “normal, commercial business conditions, rule of law and some security to go back in” to Venezuela, he noted that Chevron is well-versed in this regime.
“Chevron has been there for over 100 years,” Wright told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan. “So with them, [the question for the administration is] how can we provide incremental tweaks or changes to allow their model to grow even more?”
In a response to questions from MS NOW about a possible connection between the Hesses’ MAGA Inc. contributions and Venezuela, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said after the U.S. took control there, “President Trump brokered a historic energy deal with Venezuela that will benefit both the American and Venezuelan people.”
“President Trump has called on all oil companies to make unprecedented investments and take advantage of this generational opportunity to restore Venezuela’s oil infrastructure,” Rogers said in a statement. “That’s why 20 different oil companies came to the White House last week to discuss this with President Trump.”
A spokesperson for MAGA Inc. declined to comment. Neither John Hess nor representatives for Chevron responded to MS NOW’s requests for comment.
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