Eliot Engel, Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings have had it with the White House stonewalling Congress on what has quickly become one of the biggest scandals of the Trump presidency.
In a Monday letter, the three House chairmen gave Mike Pompeo until Thursday to let them know whether he plans on complying with lawmakers’ requests for documents around the president’s July call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. The original request was made earlier this month, prior to the Washington Post’s bombshell reporting which revealed that a whistle-blower complaint tied to the call involved a “promise“.
Acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire has so far refused to turn over the complaint, which was brought to the attention of Congress by inspector general for the intelligence community Michael Atkinson. Maguire was also given a Thursday deadline by the House chairs.
“Seeking to enlist a foreign actor to interfere with an American election undermines our sovereignty, democracy, and the Constitution, which the president is sworn to preserve, protect, and defend”, Engel, Schiff and Cummings wrote, in what amounts to a subpoena threat, adding that “the president and his personal attorney now appear to be openly engaging in precisely this type of abuse of power involving the Ukrainian government ahead of the 2020 election”.
Rudy Giuliani has been at pains to defend both his client (Trump) and himself amid questions about the call, during which the president reportedly pressed Zelensky no fewer than eight times to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.
Trump on Monday again denied that he linked the investigation request to US aid. “No, I didn’t”, he said during a meeting with Poland’s Andrzej Duda at the United Nations General Assembly.
Later, the Washington Post reported that Trump in fact ordered Mick Mulvaney to delay the $400 million in military aid a week prior to the call with Zelensky. That order was then conveyed to State and the Pentagon.
“Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an ‘interagency process’ but to give them no additional information – a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of September 11”, WaPo says, adding that “former national security adviser John Bolton wanted to release the money to Ukraine because he thought it would help the country while curtailing Russian aggression but Trump has said he was primarily concerned with corruption”.
“Joe Biden and his son are corrupt”, Trump angrily charged, during his meeting with Duda at the UNGA on Monday. “If a Republican ever did what Joe Biden did, if a Republican ever said what Joe Biden said, they’d be getting the electric chair by right now”.
“You got a lot of crooked journalists”, Trump seethed. “You’re crooked as hell”.
That’s obviously the silliest thing anybody has ever heard. Trump needs to be especially careful with this particular scandal because Nancy Pelosi is already under a lot of pressure to throw her full support behind an impeachment bid which, right up until this latest debacle, was all but dead, no matter how badly Jerry Nadler wanted to revive it.
But it ain’t dead anymore.
Pelosi on Monday warned that if the administration didn’t produce the documents by Thursday, she’d escalate things to a “whole new state of investigation”.
House Democrats are set to hold a caucus meeting on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the whistle-blower complaint and the president’s interactions with Ukraine.
We appear to be perilously close to, or already in, a fascist regime. This administration has revealed the weaknesses in our constitution regarding oversight of the Executive branch by Congress. What are the consequences when the Executive branch does not respond to demands from Congress? The Senate Republicans remain complicit, the Justice Department is headed by a leader loyal to the Executive’s priorities, and it remains to be seen if the Supreme Court has been compromised. The people must let the Senate and House know what we expect from them as our representatives. Regardless of whether there has been a breach by the President of his oath to uphold the Constitution, or not, the process of oversight must be respected and allowed to proceed. We need to hear the truth.