The stone wall of Donald Trump is a massive assault against responsibility

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By destroying tradition, Trump ignores or challenges established practices of governance and personal transparency, seeking to maximize personal influence and consolidate power in the White House while resisting outside control.

"The context in which this is happening raises serious questions about the White House's commitment to long-standing standards of democratic governance," said Rudy Mehrbani, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.

In an interview with the Washington Post on Tuesday, Trump explained that he had no intention of cooperating with investigations by House Democrats – expressly stating that he did not want his aides past or present testify before groups led by democrats.

"There is no reason to go further, especially in Congress, where he is very partisan – obviously very partisan," he said.

"I do not want people to testify in front of a party, because that's what they do if they do," Trump added.

Just hours earlier, the administration had missed the deadline set by another Democratic committee to hand over six years of tax returns on Tuesday, possibly leading to a new legal conflagration.

"Although the federal law does not provide for a deadline to respond to your request, we plan to provide the Committee with a final decision on May 6, after receiving the legal conclusions of the Ministry of Justice," said the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, in a letter to the House of Ways and Means. President Richard Neal.

Democrats argue that the administration does not have any legal latitude to challenge a federal law stipulating that the Treasury "must" provide three designated congressional representatives with tax information of any person.

Trump's lawyers are seeking an injunction to prevent another committee of the House from obliging his accounting firm to hand over documents pertaining to his business empire.

And the White House has just ordered a former top official cited to appear not to show up at the hearing of a House committee investigating the security clearance process. senior officials.

"Based on these actions, it appears that the president believes that the Constitution does not apply to the White House, that he can order officials of their will to violate their legal obligations and that It may be an obstacle to congressional attempts to control the system, "said the president. Speaker of the House Watch, Elijah Cummings.

In the midst of a wave of surveillance that was lacking at the time of the majority of plaintiffs before the midterm elections, the Democrats also issued a summons to McGahn in order to to testify to the possible abuse of power of the President unveiled last week in the Mueller report.

"They do not want to know the truth, they want to contact this president," Hogan Gidley, deputy spokesman for the White House, told reporters on Tuesday, with the aim of developing the White House's argument which Democrat demands had nothing to do with supervision. unfair "presidential harassment".

Latest challenges

This litigation is only the latest challenge to the idea that the White House should be accountable to Congress and that legislators represent in recent days.

This is a small sample of the administration's many assaults on accountability, starting with Trump's refusal to be more transparent about his finances, including his management of foreign policy and how his White House is blocking a other body of control – the media.

According to the Washington Post account, the president has now lied more than 8,700 times – often to avoid the consequences of his own actions and statements.
He made disputed claims to the executive power for the construction of his border wall when Congress refused to fund it, openly defying the constitutional view that it is the legislators, not the President, who have the power to stock Exchange. As the Mueller Inquiry showed, Trump ordered his subordinates to lie to the press and the Pentagon. The White House and the State Department now rarely hold regular briefings.

In July 2017, wrestling with questions about the mysterious contacts of the Trump team with the Russians during the campaign of the previous year, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said "Every day we do our best to give the most accurate information possible".

"Our goal is to be as transparent as possible."

Yet just a few months earlier, as Mueller had revealed, Sanders had lied to White House journalists when she had declared "countless" FBI agents had told her that they were grateful the departure of President James Comey, the former head of the FBI.

There are many fewer public offenses to transparency.

The reports and revelations about the intimate relationship between Trump's cabinet members and industry lobbyists contradict the president's claim that he is drying up the Washington swamp.

His family employment raises questions of nepotism and he refused a bipartisan attempt by the Senate to report on the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul.

President's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has summed up the administration's attitude towards accountability when he said Tuesday that the investigations "had a much greater impact on our democracy "as the Russian interference in the elections.

And Trump made little fuss that another of his efforts to turn the page around Congress – his preference for "interim" Cabinet members who are unconfirmed – is designed to maximize his power.

"I like a little" play, "Trump told the press in January." That gives me more flexibility; do you understand that? I like to play ".

The failure of confirmation from cabinet officials – such as Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan or Acting Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt – does not simply repudiate the constitutional advisory-consent function of the Cabinet. Senate. It drains the power of their agencies and tarnishes the morale of government officials.

Some confrontations are constitutional

The confrontations between a president and the Congress are part of the American constitutional system and show, in many ways, that the system of political power sharing is working properly.

The Attorney General of President Barack Obama, Eric Holder, was found guilty of contempt of Congress by the Republican of the time for failing to hand over documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal on sales. illegal firearms. President George W. Bush fought against Congress after attempting to block public testimony from key collaborators about a controversy over the dismissal of federal prosecutors.

There are also often legitimate disagreements between a president and Congress about the division of powers and the executive privilege.

But the magnitude of Trump's refusal to comply with basic standards of transparency is so rampant that it raises fears that it can create precedents that reshape the principle of balance. powers enshrined in the Constitution.

The escalation of the legal trench war between Democrats is at the root of the question of how far a president has the obligation to the voters to be above all reproach and suspicion.

Trump showed that he did not have much time for such rituals.

His insult to transparency began before he took office, while he refused to yield to the request for publication of his tax returns – a tradition followed by presidential candidates for decades.

Trump then refused to completely disengage from his family business empire, to assure Americans that his decisions on national and economic security would not pose a conflict of interest.

This omission has given rise to a court case which accuses the president of not handing over the property of his hotel to Washington, in violation of the clause on the emoluments of the Constitution which prohibits public officials from receiving gifts or payments. Foreign states. It is possible that Trump is justified – but it is equally impossible to imagine that another president would place himself in such a situation.

Trump's latest legal battle, which is to prevent the publication of his accounting firm's documents, actually involves an effort by the executive branch of the government to defeat control protected by the Constitution.

The committee wants the files to review the claims of Trump 's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that his former boss would have used financial statements either to inflate the price of the company' s assets in order to reduce the cost of the company 's assets. obtain loans, either to minimize the value of properties in the insurance plans.

Alan Garten, a Trump Organization lawyer, called the summons "an unprecedented departure from Congressional authority".

But the challenge of Trump and his sons, who now run the company, shows no recognition that when a person assumes public trust, such as the presidency, they must also meet standards of transparency. who would not face it in public life.

By involving his lawyers, the president again resorts to the kind of litigant reflex that he often indulges in as a tycoon when he has been involved in thousands of lawsuits.

But his chances of thwarting the House committee may be slim, as his lawyers rely on a precedent from the 1880s, which was replaced by a 1927 decision.

And Trump's legal team often seems to be looking for retroactive reasons for decisions made on the fly by Trump.

"I think if you search for the word despair in the dictionary, I think you get a picture of Trump's legal team while she's desperately trying to follow the whims of the boss," said L & # 39; former federal prosecutor Shan Wu, who is not a CNN legal analyst. .

Trump's resistance to congressional oversight, in particular, may be an issue that survives the current difficult period of his presidency. Some analysts fear that this could set a precedent for future presidents – even those who are less instinctively programmed to test standards as Trump – to exploit.

"What we learn from Trump, is that there is an abundance of mechanisms that existed within the executive and that they have not been followed because They were required by law because of previous precedents and the expectation that they would be followed, "Mehrbani said.

"If this expectation no longer exists, the risk of abuse is important, so I think the Congress is obliged to react."

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