President Trump Continues Congress on Subpoenas and Investigations Crisis



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President Donald Trump, while portraying himself as a victim in a political war, historically fights the aggressive investigations of the democratic majority of the Democratic House by refusing to comply with numerous subpoenas and other requests for surveillance.

At one level, this is not new. Previous congresses and white houses certainly disagreed on the amount of information to disclose. But the general mistrust of the Trump administration has reached a new level of obstruction in recent days.

"It's about as flagrant as I've ever seen, in the legal processes of an equal branch of government," said Laurence Tribe, constitutional law specialist at Harvard, Jennifer Rubin, editor-in-chief from the Washington Post.

According to Politico, citing House Democratic sources, the Trump government has denied or delayed the disclosure of information sought by Democratic committees more than 30 times, and half a dozen government officials have refused to appear before the House. House panels.

The dispute was brought to court this week when Trump's personal attorneys sued the chairman of the Oversight Committee, Elijah Cummings, following the summons Cummings gave Trump's accounting firm in search of his personal financial statements. The next day, the government missed a deadline to deliver the Trump tax returns requested by the House Ways and Means Committee, and the President himself called Robert Costa of the Washington Post to tell him that He did not want any help from the White House – like his former aide Carl Kline. , recently summoned and now risking contempt of proceedings – to testify before a panel of the House.

Trump told the post that he had done everything he had to do by cooperating with the special advocate Robert Mueller (who specifically asked him if he was obstructing the justice system). and left the question of knowing he should do it for Congress). The White House also announced this week its intention to fight a democratic subpoena of former White House lawyer Don McGahn, a critical figure in the Mueller saga.

"There is no reason to go further, especially in Congress, where he is very partisan," Trump told Costa. He told reporters that the White House would fight "all subpoenas" from Democrats.

Trump's lawyers are relying on the same argument in federal court, trying to overturn a summons from Cummings asking the firm Mazars to keep personal and professional records in the president's file for eight years.

Accusing the House Democrats of launching a "total war", the president's lawyers claimed that the purpose of the summons was " [Trump’s] private financial information with the aim of exposing them in the hope that they will result in something that Democrats can use as a political tool against the President, now and in the 2020 elections. "

Democrats in the House have been transparent about their intention to aggressively investigate Trump after taking power, saying the former Republican majority had given the president a free pass. According to Trump's lawyers, the Democrats have issued more than 100 summonses and other requests for information from the president and his associates.

The response of the White House has been to provide as much resistance as possible to this monitoring by the Congress. Even on the requests that were finally paid, the Democratic assistants said that the administration often slowed the requests or gave answers that did not answer.

Trump has challenged the conventional standards of transparency that we have been waiting for our presidents since before his election. During this latest escalation, he was prepared to face a constitutional crisis in order to continue to retain the information of Democratic legislators.

Trump challenged a remarkable number of Congressional assignments and demands

Cummings, as the supervisory committee leader, conducted the Trump administration inquiry and thus placed it at the center of the debate over what information the executive branch is required to convey to the legislature . Last month, the congressman wrote in a Washington Post editorial that his committee had sent at least 12 letters in search of documents from the administration and that all these requests had been ignored until present.

The Oversight Committee is investigating security clearances issued by the White House to Jared Kushner and other officials, Stormy Daniels 'hush money' payments and other controversies. But they received little cooperation from Trump and his subordinates.

"The White House is engaged in an unprecedented level of walls, delay and obstruction," Cummings wrote in his article.

Trump has been particularly vigilant about protecting the details of his financial health. In addition to the Cummings subpoena lawsuit, Trump Organization lawyers said they would also be fighting to block the subpoena of the House's intelligence committees. financial services requesting information from Deutsche Bank.

Much of the murmur came from large-scale topics potentially embarrassing for Trump, such as his tax returns or his investigations related to the Mueller Inquiry. Trump is already fighting subpoenas to financial institutions that hold his confidential archives. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler has summoned McGahn, who played a leading role in Mueller's investigation into the president's potential for impeachment, and the White House will now attempt to prevent McGahn from testifying, according to Politico.

But the Trump administration has shown itself stubborn on more obscure issues. The House of Commons Trade and Energy Committee has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct safety studies on a chemical, Pigment Violet 29, commonly found in paints and coatings. plastics.

The EPA rejected the claim, saying the studies contained confidential commercial information, a decision that Democrats strongly dispute under the law governing the disclosure of such studies. The agency has often been criticized for its friendliness with the industries that it regulates.

Trump has fostered a culture of secrecy since before his election

Trump defied a generation of political norms when, in the 2016 presidential campaign, he refused to disclose his personal tax returns. He testified that an ongoing audit precluded him from publishing all tax records – even though, as Vox noted at the time, Matthew Yglesias, no law prohibits a person under audit from publishing his statements.

These tax records would not only have allowed Trump's claims to be closely scrutinized with respect to his business acumen, but would also have revealed any potential conflict of interest – with, for example, the Russian kleptocracy that had been bothering the President since his entry into the United States. Oval Office. From Yglesias:

Trump's statements on NATO and the leak of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee, presumably stolen by the Russians, raised questions about Trump's financial relations with oligarchs linked to the Russian government. The tax disclosure would allow us to see how Trump's businesses work – to what extent it actually succeeds and how much of that success relies on the investments of foreign players who may have a more harmful agenda than real estate development.

But Trump won the elections, paying no political price for his lack of transparency. He has maintained the same position since he was sworn in. Democrats have tried all sorts of creative ways to open the lid on Trump's finances – congressional investigations into a lawsuit over the Trump Hotel in Washington and a possible bribery in payments to the president's business by parties with active interests in the White House. The Mueller Inquiry also took place, although it has been completed since without giving rise to any major revelations.

But Democrats have a new power to impose disclosure on Trump. During the first two years of his presidency, he did not have to worry that the Republican-controlled Congress was investigating his companies or the agenda set by his administration. But with Democrats picking up on the House the message of defeating Trump, he has been the target of a much more aggressive legislature.

Trump has created a culture of secrecy that rivals Richard Nixon. It will not publish its financial statements. Robert Mueller investigated him for obstructing justice. Now he does not want government officials to testify before Congress, one of the most mundane and sacrosanct examples of the country's balance of power systems. In court, Trump's lawyers argued for Congress's ability to investigate the executive power.

This kind of dispute is not totally new. The administration of George W. Bush sought to prevent Harriet Miers from testifying before the House Democrats as they investigated the dismissal of American lawyers during his tenure. Attorney General Obama, Eric Holder, has been found guilty of contempt of court at the Republican chamber after refusing to disclose all the information requested by lawmakers about the so-called Fast and Furious scandal.

As former House lawyer Stanley Brand said lawfare Podcasting, Congress never defined the actual ability of Congress to summon and seek information from the executive, certainly not from the Supreme Court. Trump's stubbornness once again brought this issue to the forefront of American politics.

This nascent constitutional confrontation may ultimately have to decide the degree of oversight that the legislature is entitled to exercise over the president and his administration.

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