Subpoenas go to White House
But Trump already hints at defiance
WASHINGTON — For the first time, the impeachment inquiry reached directly into the White House on Friday as Democrats subpoenaed officials about contacts with Ukraine and President Donald Trump signaled his administration would not cooperate.
The demand for documents capped a tumultuous week that widened the constitutional battle between the executive branch and Congress and sharpened the political standoff with more witnesses, testimony and documents to come.
Trump said he would formally object to Congress about the House impeachment inquiry, even as he acknowledged that Democrats “have the votes” to proceed. They will be sorry in the end, he predicted.
“I really believe that they’re going to pay a tre
mendous price at the polls,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments to reporters at the White House came as fallout continued Friday from the late-night release of text messages by House investigators, while another key figure — Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community — testified in private on Capitol Hill.
Democrats have accused Trump of speeding down “a path of defiance, obstruction and cover-up” and warned that defying the House subpoena would in itself be considered “evidence of obstruction” and a potentially an impeachable offense.
Lawmakers are focusing their inquiry on Trump’s request to Ukraine this summer that it investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. A whistleblower complaint said that Trump sought to use military assistance for Ukraine as leverage to push President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate the 2020 Democratic hopeful.
“We deeply regret that President Trump has put us — and the nation — in this position, but his actions have left us with no choice,” wrote the three Democratic House chairmen, Reps. Elijah Cummings, Adam Schiff and Eliot Engel, in issuing Friday’s subpoena after White House resistance to the panel’s request for witnesses and documents.
Fighting the inquiry, the White House was expected to send a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi arguing that Congress could not mount its impeachment investigation without first having a vote to authorize it. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham derided the subpoena as coming from a Democratic “kangaroo court.”
But Pelosi insisted the House is well within its rules to conduct oversight of the executive branch under the U.S. Constitution.
In the letter accompanying the subpoena, the three chairmen agreed, stating, “Speaker Pelosi has confirmed that an impeachment inquiry is underway, and it is not for the White House to say otherwise.”
Trump’s comments at the White House came shortly before Democrats sent a separate extensive request for documents to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Ukraine.
Pence spokeswoman Katie Waldman dismissed the demand, saying that given its wide scope, “it does not appear to be a serious request.”
The House also has subpoenaed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
QUID PRO QUO
Trump insisted Friday that he had said nothing inappropriate during the July call in which he pressed Zelenskiy to investigate Biden and his son Hunter.
“When I speak to a foreign leader, I speak in an appropriate manner,” Trump said.
He also played down a series of texts between U.S. diplomats and a Ukrainian official that were released Thursday night that outlined his attempt to tie a possible White House meeting and military aid to an investigation of Biden.
Trump homed in on a comment from Gordon Sondland, a major Republican fundraiser appointed by Trump as ambassador to the European Union, who in one of the texts defended the president’s intentions and said there were no “quid pro quos of any kind.”
“If you look, he also said there was no quid pro quo,” Trump said. “That’s the whole ballgame.”
But in another text released Thursday, his own ambassador in Ukraine, William Taylor, said he suspected there was a quid pro quo. “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” he wrote Sondland on Sept. 9.
Speaking to reporters Friday as he left the White House to visit wounded military service members at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, the president said again that he had done nothing wrong in seeking the information.
Trump said his focus on Biden and his son was driven by a concern about corruption, not politics.
“This doesn’t pertain to anything but corruption,” Trump said of his interest in investigating the Bidens. “And that has to do with me. And I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about anything. But I do care about corruption.”
Trump claimed he “never thought Biden was going to win” and that “he’d be an easy opponent,” even as his campaign was set to air $1 million in ads targeting Biden in the early-voting states.
Trump made his comments the day after openly calling on China to also examine allegations against the Bidens.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Friday that China “will not interfere in the internal affairs of the U.S.”
“[W]e trust that the American people will be able to sort out their own problems,” the Global Times, a party-affiliated newspaper, reported Wang as saying.
On Thursday, Trump told reporters at the White House that “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.”
The president’s request came only moments after he discussed upcoming trade talks with China and said that “if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power.”
DESIRE FOR VISIT
Late Thursday, House investigators released a cache of text messages that showed top U.S. diplomats encouraging Ukraine’s newly elected president to conduct an investigation linked to Biden’s family in return for granting a high-profile visit with Trump in Washington.
The release followed a 10-hour interview with one of the diplomats, Kurt Volker, who stepped down as special envoy to Ukraine after the impeachment inquiry had begun.
Volker, in a text message on the morning of a planned July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy, wrote: “Heard from White House — Assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate / “get to the bottom of what happened” in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington.”
An adviser to the Ukrainian president appeared to go along with the proposal, which entailed investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board.
“Phone call went well,” wrote Andrey Yermak in a text to Volker later that day after the two presidents spoke. Yermak suggested several dates when Trump and Zelenskiy could meet in September.
But all that planning started to unravel when Zelenskiy’s aide tried to lock in a date for the Trump meeting before putting out the statement on the investigations.
“Once we have a date we will call for a press briefing, announcing upcoming visit and outlining vision for the reboot of US-UKRAINE relationship, including among other things Burisma and
election meddling in investigations,” Yermak wrote two weeks later.
Volker and the two other diplomats — Taylor, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, and Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union — discussed the statement Zelenskiy would issue in support of the investigation. As the negotiations progressed, Sondland said Trump “really wants the deliverable.”
Then, Trump put a hold on about $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine, which was depending on the funds as part of its defense against Russia.
“Need to talk with you,” Yermak wrote to Volker.
Taylor conveyed his concerns and questioned whether the money was being withheld until Ukraine agreed to Trump’s demand.
“Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” he wrote.
“This is my nightmare scenario,” Taylor texted his colleagues days later. Taylor said that by withholding the Ukrainian assistance, “we have already shaken their faith in us.”
The text messages show that within a month of the call, Trump canceled the visit with Zelenskiy, sending the diplomats into an effort to salvage a meeting with Pence or Pompeo.
6 HOURS OF QUESTIONING
On Friday, investigators in Congress heard again from Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general who brought forward the whistleblower complaint concerning Trump’s call with the Ukraine president that sparked the impeachment inquiry.
The House Intelligence Committee questioned Atkinson for more than six hours.
Atkinson had received the complaint and conducted his own preliminary investigation into its validity before seeking to deliver it to Congress. He arrived Friday morning on Capitol Hill for closed a briefing in the basement of the Capitol.
Democrats on Capitol Hill hoped Atkinson’s account would boost their efforts to build a fuller narrative of events.
A Trump appointee, Atkinson set off the present saga less than a month ago when he notified Congress’ intelligence committees that he had received an anonymous whistleblower complaint that he deemed to be “urgent” and credible.
In the complaint, the whistleblower wrote that numerous government officials had provided him information that “the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
Atkinson has already appeared once before the House Intelligence Committee, but he was barred then from speaking in detail about the complaint.
As Republicans search for a response to the investigation, the absence of a procedural vote to begin the probe has been a main attack line against Democrats.
Pelosi swatted back the need for such a vote as unnecessary.
“The existing rules of the House provide House Committees with full authority to conduct investigations for all matters under their jurisdiction, including impeachment investigations,” Pelosi wrote Thursday in a letter to House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy after he pressed for a floor vote.
There’s no clear-cut procedure in the Constitution for initiating an impeachment inquiry, leaving many questions about possible presidential obstruction untested in court, said Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University.
“There’s no specification in the Constitution in what does and does not constitute a more formal impeachment inquiry or investigation,” he said.
Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, dismissed the entire premise of the impeachment inquiry, which is centered on Trump asking Ukraine to investigate Biden.
“The president was not tasking Ukraine to investigate a political opponent,” Giuliani told The Associated Press on Thursday. “He wanted an investigation into a seriously conflicted former vice president of the United States who damaged the reputation of the United States in Ukraine.”
Democrats have sought to use their declared impeachment investigation to bolster their case to access documents from the administration, most recently secret grand jury information that underpinned former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin, Lisa Mascaro, Mark Sherman, Jonathan Lemire, Lisa Mascaro, Eric Tucker and Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press; by John Wagner, Colby Itkowitz, Shane Harris, Rachael Bade, Karoun Demirjian and Siobhan O’Grady of The Washington Post; and by Nicholas Fandos and Annie Karni of The New York Times.