Impeachment battle escalates with subpoenas
House Democrats demand the White House turn over Ukraine records and Pence documents.
WASHINGTON — In an extraordinary escalation of the impeachment battle, House Democrats subpoenaed the White House on Friday for a sweeping array of documents on President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and demanded numerous records from Vice President Mike Pence.
The subpoena was the Democrats’ most aggressive step yet in the 10-day-old impeachment inquiry, and it came as Trump angrily insisted, at least 27 times in a 23-minute news conference, that he was only seeking to root out corruption when he pressed Ukraine to investigate a Democratic foe.
“The White House has refused to engage with — or even respond to — multiple requests for documents from our committees on a voluntary basis. After nearly a month of stonewalling, it appears clear that the president has chosen the path of defiance, obstruction and cover-up,” top Democrats wrote in a letter to Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff.
The White House is expected to fight Democrats’ demands, setting the stage for a potential court battle. That raised the specter of Watergate, when the Supreme Court unanimously ordered President Nixon to hand over Oval Office tapes and other material in 1974, a decision that swiftly led to Nixon’s resignation.
Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for Pence, dismissed the Democrats’ request as not serious, given its scope, and dubbed it “just another attempt by the Do Nothing Democrats to call attention to their partisan impeachment.”
House Democrats were bolstered by newly released text messages that showed
senior U.S. diplomats in Kyiv, Ukraine, had discussed whether Trump was seeking a quid pro quo by blocking millions of dollars in U.S. military aid while pressing Ukraine’s new president to launch investigations that would help Trump politically.
At one point in the texts, the White House dangled an Oval Office meeting to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky if he would investigate debunked rightwing theories that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
“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,” Kurt Volker, the U.S. special representative for Ukraine, wrote to Andrey Yermak, an advisor to Zelensky.
The message was sent shortly before a July 25 phone call in which Trump pressed Zelensky to target former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential opponent in the 2020 election. Trump also wanted help undermining the Russia investigation, though it ended last spring.
Several weeks later, when it became apparent Trump had blocked nearly $400 million in military and other congressionally approved aid to Ukraine, another U.S. diplomat raised concerns that the decision was politically motivated. “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Bill Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador in Ukraine, wrote on Sept. 9.
Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, pushed back, texting that Trump did not want to trade favors.
Volker, who resigned last week, gave the texts to Congress on Thursday during a 10-hour deposition behind closed doors. House Democrats have asked Sondland for a deposition, but no date has been set.
Republican lawmakers have either stayed mum since the impeachment battle began, or assailed Democrats, saying they’re pursuing a partisan investigation.
Rep. Mark Meadows (RN.C.) said Friday that only “cherry-picked text messages” had been released instead of Volker’s entire deposition, which he said “directly undermined Democrats’ impeachment effort.”
But some cracks appeared in the GOP firewall of support for the president. The loudest rebuke came from Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. He said Trump’s public appeal on Thursday to Ukraine and China to investigate Biden was “wrong and appalling.”
“When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated,” he said in a statement.
Trump insisted repeatedly Friday that he was seeking to investigate corruption, not his opponents, when he asked Ukraine — and then China — to investigate Biden. “I don’t care about Biden’s campaign,” Trump told reporters.
Since the scandal erupted, the president has spread unsubstantiated allegations that Biden, as vice president under President Obama, forced the ouster of Ukraine’s top prosecutor to protect his son Hunter, who was on the board of Burisma Holdings, a gas company.
Speaking to reporters in Los Angeles, Biden again denied wrongdoing and called Trump a “coward” who doesn’t want to face him in the next election. “I’m worried that he gets so unhinged that … he does something really, really, really stupid in terms of our international interests,” Biden said.
Ukraine’s new prosecutor general said Friday that his office would audit over a dozen legal cases that were closed or dormant, including several involving Burisma, but he did not say Biden’s role was in question.
“We are reviewing all the cases which were closed down or broken into smaller [cases] to decide whether they were closed illegally and should be reopened,” Ruslan Ryaboshapka told reporters in Kyiv.
The earlier probe involving Burisma did not touch on Hunter Biden’s activities. It examined whether the company, controlled by businessman Mykola Zlochevsky, had improperly obtained government licenses.
Ryaboshapka suggested prosecutors will focus on Ukrainian businessmen, not Hunter Biden. “As far as we can see, this is more a question of Zlochevsky and [Ukraine businessman Sergei] Kurchenko than Burisma and Biden,” he said.
Ryaboshapka replaced Yuri Lutsenko, former chief prosecutor and a source of allegations about the Bidens to Trump’s private lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani.
Lutsenko told the Los Angeles Times last weekend that he’d seen no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens.
Lutsenko was fired in August amid accusations of corruption and incompetence. Ryaboshapka and his team have, so far, won praise for their independence.
Volker told lawmakers during his deposition Thursday that he believed the allegations against Biden were unsubstantiated, and he provided details on the behind-the-scenes diplomatic effort involving Ukraine.
Trump was originally opposed to meeting with Zelensky after he took office in May, and described Ukraine as a corrupt country filled with “terrible people” who “tried to take me down,” a reference to allegations that Ukrainians assisted the investigation into Russian election meddling in 2016, according to Volker.
But Volker and other U.S. diplomats were determined to foster a relationship between Trump and Zelensky, and eventually a phone call was arranged for July 25.
When Trump pushed Zelensky to investigate Biden and CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that worked with Democrats in 2016, Zelensky responded vaguely but accommodatingly.
“I guarantee as the president of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly,” he told Trump, according to a White House account of the call.
U.S. diplomats began discussing when Zelensky would visit Washington, but Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the EU, warned of a possible hang-up. “I think [Trump] really wants the deliverable,” he wrote Volker on Aug. 9.
By then Giuliani had spent months networking with Ukrainian officials to push for the investigations that Trump wanted.
Volker helped arrange for Giuliani to meet with Yermak in Madrid on Aug. 2. Volker testified he set up the meeting hoping it would smooth over the dispute between Washington and Kyiv.
Giuliani said he told Yermak that he supported a meeting between Trump and Zelensky — with a caveat. “I think a meeting is always a good thing. But I do think you have a big problem,” Giuliani recalled telling Yermak. He said there were “very substantial allegations of corruption” that “have to be investigated.”
Volker and Sondland began talking with Yermak about a potential statement Kyiv could issue about corruption. But when they shared a draft with Giuliani, he wasn’t satisfied, according to Volker.
Volker said Giuliani wanted the statement to specifically reference Burisma, where Biden’s son was a board member, and the 2016 election. The Ukrainians hesitated, and ultimately no statement was issued.
Giuliani declined Friday to discuss his role in the statement.
Taylor, acting U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, began expressing concerns about the Pentagon aid Trump had blocked while Giuliani was demanding the Biden probe. “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” he texted Sondland on Sept. 1.
Sondland made clear he wanted to take the discussion off-line. “Call me,” he wrote.