Lawmaker: Obstruction ‘very clear’

House judiciary panel chief seeking Trump documents

WASHINGTON — Declaring it’s “very clear” that President Donald Trump obstructed justice, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said Sunday that he plans to request documents from more than 60 people and organizations connected to the president.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., told ABC’s This Week that the committee — the only one with the power to recommend impeachment of the president — wants to review documents from the Justice Department; the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.; and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, repeatedly referred to Weisselberg’s central role in Trump’s business transactions during his testimony before the

House Committee on Oversight and Reform last week.

Nadler said Cohen “directly implicated the president in various crimes, both while seeking the office of president and while in the White House,” singling out as a particular concern Cohen’s claim that he was reimbursed for hush-money payments to women who alleged they had affairs with Trump.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating possible Trump campaign collusion and Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. In Cohen’s testimony, he acknowledged he did not witness nor know directly of collusion between Trump aides and Russia but had his “suspicions.”

When Nadler was asked Sunday if he believed Trump has obstructed justice in Mueller’s investigation, Nadler said, “Yes, I do.”

“It’s very clear that the president obstructed justice,” Nadler said, pointing to the “1,100 times he referred to the Mueller investigation as a ‘witch hunt.’”

Mueller is also investigating Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey in 2017. According to Comey, Trump had encouraged the then-FBI director to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Trump has denied he told Comey to end the Flynn probe.

Trump, taking to Twitter after Nadler’s comments, criticized “more than two years of Presidential Harassment,” saying the Russia investigation was a partisan probe unfairly aimed at discrediting his win in the 2016 presidential election.

“I am an innocent man being persecuted by some very bad, conflicted & corrupt people in a Witch Hunt that is illegal & should never have been allowed to start — And only because I won the Election!” he wrote.

Those tweets followed a speech Trump gave Saturday to the Conservative Political Action Conference in which he criticized the people investigating him.

“So now we’re waiting for a report, and we’ll find out,” Trump said of the conclusion of Mueller’s investigation, which is expected soon. “You put the wrong people in a couple of positions, and they leave people for a long time that shouldn’t be there, and all of a sudden, they’re trying to take you out.”

‘BEYOND COLLUSION’

Nadler said his goal was to present “the case to the American people about obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power,” which could lay the groundwork for eventual impeachment proceedings or other congressional action. He also stressed that the committee’s investigation “goes far beyond collusion.”

Nadler said it would be an “impeachable offense” if Trump were found to have participated in any scheme to “sabotage a fair election.”

However, Nadler isn’t calling the inquiry an impeachment investigation — noting that “impeachment is a long way down the road” and “we don’t have the facts yet.”

“We have to do the investigations and get all this,” he said. “We do not now have the evidence all sorted out and everything to do an impeachment. Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen. You have to persuade enough of the opposition party voters, Trump voters, that you’re not just trying to … reverse the results of the last election.”

But he said House Democrats, now in the majority, are simply doing “our job to protect the rule of law,” accusing Republicans during the first two years of Trump’s term of “shielding the president from any proper accountability.”

When asked how far he was willing to go, Nadler said: “I’ve been in politics a long time, and I am here to defend civil rights, civil liberties, due process and the rule of law. And if I think that impeachment will help that, I will support impeachment. And if I think impeachment is the wrong way to go to that, I will oppose it.”

A person who was familiar with the committee’s pending document requests but was not authorized to comment publicly said the committee would also look at potential abuses of power by the Trump

administration, including the possible dangling of pardons and witness tampering.

A half-dozen House committees are probing Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 election, Trump’s tax returns, and possible conflicts of interest involving the Trump family business and policymaking.

The House oversight committee, for instance, has set a deadline of today for the White House to turn over documents related to security clearances after The New York Times reported that the president ordered officials to grant clearance to his son-inlaw Jared Kushner over the objections of national security officials.

GOP ANSWERS

Republicans have highlighted the threat of Democratic impeachment proceedings, believing that any attempt to remove Trump from office will motivate the Republican base and turn off swing voters.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on Sunday accused House Democrats of prejudging Trump as part of a query based purely on partisan politics, saying, “There’s no collusion, so they want to build something else.”

“I think Congressman Nadler decided to impeach the president the day the president won the election,” McCarthy said on This Week immediately after Nadler’s appearance. “Listen to exactly what he said. He talks about impeachment before he even became chairman and then he says, ‘you’ve got to persuade people to get there.’ There’s nothing that the president did wrong.”

“Show me where the president did anything to be impeached. … Nadler is setting the framework now that the Democrats are not to believe the Mueller report,” he said. “They’re now saying ‘we have to do our own investigation.’”

Rep. Douglas Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he and his staff received no advance notice of the document requests, learning the news from Nadler’s TV appearance. Collins, too, said it was noteworthy that Democrats are moving beyond the Mueller probe with their own investigations.

“Now that we seem to be getting closer to Mueller’s [report] coming out, they’re backing off ‘collusion’ and trying to find anything else that will stick,” Collins said in a phone interview. “I think the story here is that Democrats are just trying to find anything to make the president look bad.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has kept calls for impeachment at bay by insisting that Mueller first must be allowed to finish his work, and present his findings publicly — though it’s unclear whether the White House will allow its full release.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House intelligence committee, on Sunday also stressed that it’s too early to make judgments about impeachment.

“That is something that we will have to await Bob Mueller’s report and the underlying evidence to determine,” Schiff said on CBS’ Face the Nation. “We will also have to look at the whole body of improper and criminal actions by the president including those campaign finance crimes to determine whether they rise to the level of removal from office.”

But Cohen’s testimony has emboldened other Democrats to discuss impeachment.

Rep. Daniel Kildee, D-Mich., said Sunday in a CNN interview that Cohen “put some information into public circulation that’s pretty damning to the president.”

“If we find facts that clearly impugn the integrity of the president and potentially reveal crimes, we just don’t have a choice,” he said. “The Constitution is clear: Congress has to do its duty.”

Nadler