Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Witness seeks ruling on inquiry testimony
Ex-Trump adviser says neither choice good
WASHINGTON — An ex-White House adviser who is supposed to testify before House impeachment investigators on Monday has asked a federal court whether he should comply with a subpoena or follow President Donald Trump’s directive against cooperating in what the president brands a “scam.”
After getting a subpoena Friday, former deputy national security adviser Charles
Kupperman quickly filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington. He asked a judge to decide whether he should accede to House demands for his testimony or to assert “immunity from congressional process” as directed by Trump.
On Saturday, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said that he asked Trump to make the phone call at the center of the impeachment inquiry because it was “important” for the country’s energy needs, while former Chief of Staff John Kelly said he warned the president before he left the White House not to replace him with a “yes man” because it would lead to Trump’s impeachment.
The lawsuit came as Democrats’ impeachment inquiry
continued at full speed with a rare Saturday session. Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state for Europe, took questions in private about Trump’s ouster in May of the ambassador to Ukraine and whether he had knowledge about efforts to persuade Ukraine to pursue politically motivated investigations.
Kupperman, who provided foreign-policy advice to the president, was scheduled to testify Monday in a similar session. In the lawsuit, Kupperman said he “cannot satisfy the competing demands of both the legislative and executive branches.” Without the court’s help, he said he would have to make the decision himself — one that could “inflict grave constitutional injury” on either Congress or the presidency.
The impeachment inquiry is rooted in a July 25 phone call Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. During the call, Trump asked the Ukrainian leader to pursue investigations of Democratic political rival Joe Biden’s family and Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election that propelled Trump into the White House.
At the time of the call, Trump was withholding congressionally approved military aid for Ukraine. He has repeatedly said there was no quid pro quo for the Ukraine investigations he was seeking, though witness testimony has contradicted that claim.
Kupperman’s filing says “an erroneous judgment to abide by the President’s assertion of testimonial immunity would unlawfully impede the House from carrying out one of its most important core Constitutional responsibilities” — the power of impeachment — and subject Kupperman to “potential criminal liability for contempt of Congress.”
On the other hand, “an erroneous judgment to appear and testify in obedience to the House Defendants’ subpoena would unlawfully impair the President in the exercise of his core national security responsibilities … by revealing confidential communications” from advisers, according to the filing.
He has asked the court to expedite a decision, but unless the judge issues an opinion by Monday, Kupperman’s testimony might not occur as scheduled.
Rejecting his arguments, the three chairmen of the House committees overseeing the inquiry told Kupperman’s lawyers in a letter that the suit was without merit and appeared to be coordinated with the White House. They called the suit “an obvious and desperate tactic by the President to delay and obstruct the lawful constitutional functions of Congress and conceal evidence about his conduct from the impeachment inquiry.”
The chairmen also said Kupperman’s defiance of the subpoena would constitute evidence in a contempt proceeding as well as additional evidence of Trump’s obstruction of the inquiry.
The lawsuit names Trump and several top House Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is leading the inquiry.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday. Neither did Schiff. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit came as Democrats investigating the president won a victory in a separate case. A federal judge ordered the Justice Department on Friday to give the House secret grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and affirmed the legality of the Democrats impeachment inquiry. That decision could affect Kupperman’s suit.
SIMILAR ACCOUNTS
In the House deposition Saturday, Reeker was expected to corroborate testimony from previous witnesses who have described the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine, according to a person familiar with Reeker’s role in Ukraine policy. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss the testimony and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Reeker expressed his concerns over the falsehoods about former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in conversations with David Hale, the third-highest ranking official in the State Department, and T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, an adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a second person said. But it remains unclear how much information they conveyed to Pompeo, and what role he played in Yovanovitch’s recall shortly after she was told she was doing such a good job her posting was being extended.
“He was trying to get the State Department to issue a strong statement in support of Ambassador Yovanovitch,” the person said of Reeker. “Ultimately it did not get released. His understanding is it [the decision] came from on the top.”
The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Reeker’s testimony.
Lawmakers leaving the meeting with Reeker said he was backing up testimony from previous witnesses, most all of whom have detailed concerns with Trump’s efforts to oust Yovanovitch and said they were wary of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who was driving the push for the Ukrainian investigations.
Another person familiar with the testimony said that Reeker told the lawmakers he was disturbed by the effort to oust Yovanovitch and that State Department officials had decided not to put out a statement in support of her. The person also requested anonymity to discuss the confidential meeting.
Rep. Denny Heck, D-Wash., a member of the House intelligence panel, would not give details about the closed interview but said it was “startling” how much in alignment the witnesses have been in their accounts.
As was the case with other witnesses, the Trump administration directed Reeker not to testify, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the interaction. But Reeker appeared anyway after receiving his subpoena from the House, the people said.
Although he is currently the top U.S. diplomat for Europe and has been since Yovanovitch was recalled earlier this year, Reeker was not directly involved in debate over aid to Ukraine, which other current and former officials have said was delegated to Gordon Sondland, a Republican fundraiser who had been named ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt Volker, the special envoy to Ukraine.
Volker testified and released text messages that detailed conversations among him, Sondland and William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine. In the messages, Taylor wrote that he thought it was “crazy” to withhold aid from Ukraine for help with a political campaign. Sondland and Taylor, who still work for the government, have already testified and detailed their concerns about the influence of Giuliani in the Ukraine matter. Giuliani was leading the push for the investigations.
Taylor testified that he was told the aid would be withheld until Ukraine conducted the investigations that Trump had requested.
Sondland and Volker also had been put in charge of the day-to-day business of executing U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Perry also played a significant role. Sondland has testified that Trump directed all three men to take their cues from Giuliani.
PERRY: PUSHED GAS
Perry told The Associated Press that he urged Trump to call Zelenskiy to offer Ukraine “an alternative to Russian gas” and said he never once heard the word Biden or Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that once employed Biden’s son.
Regarding Zelenskiy, Perry said he merely wished to deliver the same message he had to his predecessor.
“We had had enough conversations with him that we had felt comfortable that he actually was going to do what he said he was going to do when he ran for office, which was have that type of transparency, have that type of anti-corruption efforts,” Perry said in Dubai, where he was meeting officials and attending an international youth robotics contest. “[I said] Mr. President, call this guy. It’s good for him and it’s good for us and we can go forward in helping supply gas, preferably U.S. gas, to Ukraine. Pretty straightforward story.”
Perry recently announced that he will leave his job by the end of the year, citing the nation nearing its goal of energy independence. Perry, a former Texas governor, has been energy secretary since March 2017.
But the move comes as he’s been caught up in scrutiny over the role he played in the president’s dealings with Ukraine.
No evidence has emerged that Perry explicitly pressured Ukrainian officials to comply with Trump’s push. He has been subpoenaed for his involvement in the call but says he won’t cooperate.
Trump told a group of Republican lawmakers that it was Perry who had prompted the July phone call in which Trump asked Zelenskiy for a “favor” regarding Biden, according to an Associated Press source familiar with the president’s remarks.
KELLY’S WARNING
Saturday afternoon, Trump denied his former chief of staff’s assertion that he had warned the president he would be impeached if he replaced the former White House chief of staff with a “yes man.”
Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was chief of staff from July 2017 to January, said at an event sponsored by the Washington Examiner that he told the president he needed someone to keep him within the bounds of his authority to avoid impeachment.
“John Kelly never said that, he never said anything like that,” Trump said in a statement. “If he would have said that I would have thrown him out of the office. He just wants to come back into the action like everybody else does.”
Kelly said he believed Trump wouldn’t be facing an impeachment inquiry had he stayed in the job, a thinly veiled shot at Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff who was his replacement.
“I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached,” Kelly said Saturday at the newspaper’s political conference in Sea Island, Ga.
“It pains me to see what’s going on,” Kelly said, according to the newspaper. Information for this article was contributed by Deb Riechmann, Mary Clare Jalonick, Matthew Lee, Alan Fram, Aron Heller and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press; by Laura Davison and Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News; by Nicholas Fandos and Sharon LaFraniere of The New York Times; and by Derek Hawkins, Tom Hamburger, Colby Itkowitz and Josh Dawsey of The Washington Post.