House subpoenas target Trump on several fronts
WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee will vote this week to authorize a bevy of new subpoenas on the Trump administration’s practice of separating children from their families at the border and on President Donald Trump’s possible obstruction of justice, summoning some of the biggest names to surface in Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The votes, scheduled for Thursday, will jolt two of the Democrats’ highestprofile oversight investigations into Trump and his administration and are certain to further inflame relations with the White House.
Among the targets are Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general; Michael Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser; John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff; Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general who appointed Mueller as the special counsel; Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager; and David Pecker, who as the head of American Media took part in a hushmoney scheme.
Taking aim at the administration’s border policies, the committee will also seek new authority that would allow the panel to subpoena current and former officials to answer questions and provide documents related to Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy — which separated children apprehended at the border from their families — and any talk of presidential pardons for Department of Homeland Security officials involved in carrying out the policy.
“For months, we have held hearings and sent letters to the agencies of jurisdiction involved with implementing a catastrophic and inhumane family separation policy at the southern border,” the Judiciary Committee’s chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said in a statement. “Many questions remain, and it is past time for a full accounting of this policy and practice.”
There is no guarantee that the administration will comply. Trump has pledged to resist subpoenas from the House, and his administration has routinely blocked testimony from government witnesses and access to sensitive executive branch documents.
In the case of the Mueller-related subpoenas, testimony of many of the senior officials in Democrats’ sights could be subject to claims of executive privilege or testimonial immunity by the White House that have been used to block others from appearing on Capitol Hill. Democrats say those claims are invalid, and any dispute is likely to end up in the courts.
Republicans will almost certainly oppose the subpoenas on both fronts. Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the committee, dismissed the subpoena votes as “today’s latest effort to relitigate the special counsel’s investigation.”
“Even if chairman Nadler still believes subpoenas are conversation starters, it’s hard to imagine this handful of subpoenas will do anything but reinforce the principal conclusions we’ve been able to read about for months,” Collins said.
The announcement from the Judiciary Committee comes as lawmakers on that panel and the House Intelligence Committee are preparing to hear directly from Mueller next week for the first time. The former special counsel resisted testifying but ultimately agreed to back-to-back two-hour public hearings with the committees.
Democrats hope the sessions will bring Mueller’s dense 448-page report to life and ignite public interest in the 10 or so episodes of possible obstruction of justice by Trump that the investigation documented. Republicans will be pressing another of Mueller’s conclusions: that his team did not find the evidence to bring a case that Trump’s campaign conspired with the Russians to undermine the 2016 election.
The new subpoenas related to the committee’s investigation of possible obstruction of justice and abuse of power by Trump would position Democrats to try to capitalize on any momentum Mueller may provide. They target former law enforcement and White House officials and individuals connected to hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign, part of efforts aimed at buying the silence of a pornographic film actress and of a Playboy model who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.
Also Tuesday, prosecutors announced they will not call former national security adviser Michael Flynn to testify at the upcoming trial of his one-time business partner.
Court documents unsealed in federal court in Alexandria, Va., show prosecutors changed their mind about putting Flynn on the stand at next week’s trial of Bijan Kian, who is charged with illegally acting as a foreign agent.