White House tells former Trump aides not to testify at House hearing
The White House has instructed two former aides to Donald Trump not to appear at a House judiciary committee hearing on Tuesday, saying Rick Dearborn and Rob Porter are “absolutely immune” from testifying at what the panel is calling its first impeachment hearing.
In a letter sent to the panel and obtained by the Associated Press, the White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote that the justice department has advised – and Trump has directed – Dearborn and Porter to defy subpoenas because of “constitutional immunity”. Lawyers for both men said they would follow Trump’s orders.
Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, who never worked for the White House, is expected to attend the hearing as its sole witness on Tuesday. In a separate letter, Cipollone said Lewandowski should not reveal private conversations with Trump beyond what is in the former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Democrats are challenging such claims of “absolute immunity” in a lawsuit against the former White House counsel Don McGahn, who defied a subpoena earlier this year on Trump’s orders. They say that such a claim does not legally exist.
The House judiciary committee chairman, Jerrold Nadler, invited the three men to testify at the hearing as part of the panel’s inquiry into Mueller’s report and what Nadler is call
ing an “aggressive series of hearings” this fall to determine whether Trump should be impeached. The committee has so far been hobbled by the White House’s blockade of witness testimony and document requests, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has said she wants to wait to see what happens in court before making a decision on impeachment.
In another letter to Nadler, Brant W Bishop, Porter’s lawyer, said that his client was trapped between “competing and incompatible demands from coordinate and coequal branches” and would, for now, defy the subpoena. He indicated that Porter would testify if he was instructed to by the courts.
“Such conflicting demands must be resolved through an accommodation between the executive and legislative branches, or by the Judiciary,” Bishop wrote. “In the meantime, because the inquiry at issue relates to his service as a senior official at the White House, Mr. Porter must respect the White House’s instruction.”
In the letter regarding Lewandowski, Cipollone wrote that his conversations with Trump “are protected from disclosure by long-settled principles protecting executive branch confidentiality interests”.
Lewandowski would be free to discuss Trump’s campaign, which he worked on until he was fired in the summer of 2016. But the judiciary panel is most interested in Mueller’s report, and whether Trump obstructed justice.
According to the report, Trump asked Lewandowski twice to ask the former attorney general Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s investigation. Trump said that if Sessions would not meet with Lewandowski, then Lewandowski should tell Sessions he was fired.
Lewandowski never delivered the message but asked Dearborn – a former Sessions aide – to do it. Dearborn said he was uncomfortable with the request and also declined to deliver it, according to the report.
Porter, a former staff secretary in the White House, took frequent notes during his time there that were detailed throughout the report. He resigned last year after public allegations of domestic violence by his two ex-wives.