House votes to ease approval for wide-ranging lawsuits to gather evidence about President Trump
Bart JansenWASHINGTON – The House of Representatives voted Tuesday to make it easier for committees to go to court to enforce demands for documents and testimony in their investigations of President Donald Trump's administration, beginning with those seeking documents from Attorney General William Barr and former White House counsel Don McGahn.
The resolution, approved by a vote of 229-191, could also hasten legal challenges from one committee seeking information about the administration's addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census and from another that has subpoenaed Trump's tax returns.
The Trump administration has widely refused to comply with demands from House Democrats that it produce documents and witnesses in the face of congressional subpoenas. Some Democrats said authorizing new lawsuits was the only way for the chamber to enforce those requests and gather evidence for their investigations of Trump, his administration and his private business.
“Oversight is our institutional duty to ensure against the abuse of power, protect the rule of law and expose the truth for the people,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who typically doesn't speak during legislative debate. “His administration has employed every tool it can find to obstruct legitimate committee oversight, everything from witness intimidation, to blanket stonewalling to spurious claims of executive privilege, absolute immunity and lack of legislative purpose. This obstruction violates decades of established legal precedent.”
Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said the resolution was needed to combat the president’s arrogant abuse of power.
Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide
“We have never faced such blanket stonewalling,” Nadler said. “We must go to court to enforce our subpoenas.”
But Republicans said Democrats were pursuing a risky legal strategy rather than negotiating for additional access to disputed documents. Republicans also echoed Trump in saying that Democrats simply wanted to extend the impact of the Mueller report.
“They continue to believe their worst conspiracy theories about the president,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.
Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said the strategy is “novel, untested and risky.”
“The goal is clearly to haul the administration into court in an attempt to pacify a base rabid for impeachment,” Collins said.
House committees traditionally asked the full House to authorize litigation to enforce subpoenas, after finding the subjects who defied them in contempt, as the Judiciary Committee has done with Barr. The Oversight Committee plans to vote Wednesday to hold Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt over the Census documents.
Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said the Trump administration was engaged in a widespread cover-up beyond the Mueller report because the White House hasn’t released documents this year that Congress requested about hurricane recovery in Puerto Rico, security clearances and hush-money payments.
“The White House has produced absolutely nothing,” Cummings said. “This begs the question: what are we covering up?
The change in the resolution Tuesday would allow the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, a five-member panel of House leaders now controlled by Democrats, to authorize litigation to enforce committee subpoenas.
“This is a dark time,” said Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., the Rules Committee chairman who introduced the resolution. “This Congress is being tested in this case not by a foreign adversary, but by our own president, a president who is undertaking a relentless campaign of obstruction and stonewalling.”
The House already is locked in a pair of court fights with Trump over subpoenas for his financial records. Two federal judges rejected Trump's efforts to block the subpoenas, and the president has appealed, arguing that "Congress is simply not allowed to conduct law-enforcement investigations of the president."
Republicans have argued that Democrats are filing lawsuits too quickly, which could hurt the House's chances of winning in court by making it look like negotiations for documents hadn't been exhausted. Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Rules Committee, said that the rush toward litigation was unprecedented before the full House had found either Barr or McGahn in contempt.
"I don’t understand the majority’s haste here," Cole said. "Without exhausting all other options – negotiation, discussion, and turning to a vote on contempt as a last result – the majority may be placing the House in a position that causes long-term damage to the institution."
The Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Barr for Mueller's entire report about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Barr blacked out portions of the report dealing with four areas, including grand-jury information and information about pending cases.
The Justice Department reached a compromise Monday to provide what Nadler described as "key evidence" from the report and millions of pages of underlying evidence. But Nadler said a potential lawsuit authorized Tuesday would help the committee seek other documents that weren't covered by the compromise, particularly dealing with McGahn.
McGahn cooperated with Mueller's team and appeared in several key portions of the report dealing with Trump's potential obstruction of justice during the investigation. But McGahn defied his subpoena for documents and testimony because the White House argued that top presidential advisers can't be compelled to testify.
Trump has threatened to defy subpoenas because he contends the Mueller investigation is closed and Democrats are trying to use the report for partisan attacks.
More about Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller's report:
'We're fighting all the subpoenas.' Congress and Trump prepare to battle over wide-ranging probes
