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President Trump and Larry Kudlow reportedly "had it out" after the top White House economic adviser contradicted the president publicly by saying everyday Americans would be hurt by tariffs on Chinese goods.An unidentified White House official told The Washington Post that the president and Kudlow spoke after the aide's appearance on "Fox News Sunday" last weekend. “Trump called Larry, and they had it out,” said the official, according to the newspaper, which added that two other sources described the exchange as cordial.Other sources reportedly said that Trump repeatedly told Kudlow during the conversation to “not worry about" the consequences of tariffs on U.S. businesses.The Trump administration announced it would hike tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese products last Friday. Beijing announced higher tariffs on $60 billion in U.S. goods as retaliation.Trump's former nominee to join the Federal Reserve Board, Stephen Moore, told the Post that the president is unlikely to back down from his threats for more tariff action against China unless a deal is struck to address U.S. concerns with U.S.-China trade policy.“I don’t see him crying uncle anytime soon,” said Moore. “It’s a high-risk strategy, but it’s not in his personality to back down. This goes back to what he said that first time he came down the escalator at Trump Tower.”Kudlow's remarks contradicting the president came during an interview with Fox News host Chris Wallace, who pressed him about the impact of tariffs."In fact, both sides will pay in these things, and of course it depends," Kudlow told Wallace."The Chinese will suffer [gross domestic product] losses and so forth with respect to a diminishing export market and goods that they may need," Kudlow added.Trump, however, has publicly defended his trade strategy, writing on Twitter that there is "no reason" U.S. consumers should feel the effect of tariffs."Their is no reason for the U.S. Consumer to pay the Tariffs, which take effect on China today,” he said. "This has been proven recently when only 4 points were paid by the U.S., 21 points by China because China subsidizes product to such a large degree. Also, the Tariffs can be completely avoided if you [buy] from a non-Tariffed Country, or you buy the product inside the USA (the best idea)."
They’d known each other for two decades, the New York real estate mogul and the Canadian-British owner of a transatlantic newspaper empire, working together as business partners on a Chicago skyscraper project.They showered praise on one another. Donald Trump was “a loyal friend in my late legal troubles,” Conrad Black once wrote.Trump returned the favor, at times. He once called Black “a tremendously strong man,” but in 2007, when Black was on trial for ripping off his own company, Trump was asked in a radio interview whether Black was his friend.“I just have to see,” Trump replied.On Wednesday, President Trump granted Black a pardon, wiping clean the fraud and obstruction of justice convictions for which the former owner of the Chicago Sun-Times served three years and two weeks in prison.Earlier this month, when Trump called Black to inform him of the decision, the two men, both objects of federal investigations for many years, bonded over their mutual loathing of prosecutors they view as overzealous.“I suggested that he knew ‘better than anyone’ the antics of some U.S. prosecutors,” Black wrote in his account of Trump’s call in the National Post, a Toronto-based paper.Trump noted that “We’ve known each other a long time,” according to Black, “but that wasn’t any part of the reason” for the pardon. Nor, the president said, was the pardon a reward for all the nice things Black has said and written about Trump.In a statement announcing the pardon, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders praised Black as “an entrepreneur and scholar [who] has made tremendous contributions to business, as well as to political and historical thought.”Whatever the president’s motivation, Black was effusively grateful. He had applied for a pardon from President George W. Bush, to no avail. He had good cause to hope his chances would be better with Trump.The president has now pardoned 10 people, most of them conservative political figures or people who have supported or praised Trump. This week, in addition to Black, Trump pardoned Patrick Nolan, the former Republican leader of California’s state assembly and a friend of the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nolan was convicted of racketeering after the FBI videotaped him accepting checks to support a bill to help a fictitious company open a shrimp processing plant.The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), Thursday said he will introduce a bill to give Congress access to investigative records about any figures in the federal investigation of Trump’s activities whom the president pardons. Schiff said the measure seeks to prevent the president from using pardons “to cover up crimes.”Black, 74, has been a fan of Trump for many years. In one of his books, Black listed Trump along with Carl Icahn and Kirk Kerkorian as one of the rare American business moguls who were “buccaneers” brave enough to admit to being capitalists.For many years, they were neighbors along Palm Beach’s row of oceanfront estates. Black met with Trump often at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s club there. Black was a guest at Trump’s last wedding and Trump went to a birthday party for Black’s wife.They found they had much in common.They share a talent for winning attention by deploying an acid tongue. During his trial in 2007, Black referred to the government’s lawyers as “Nazis.” On Wednesday, after his pardon was announced, Black attacked the judge who put him in prison as “self-serving” and declared that the whole case against him had been “nonsense, all of it” a miscarriage of justice in “the conviction-mad United States.”Like Trump, Black is a colorful character who enjoys showing his wealth — both men owned private jets and multiple homes — and relished being politically incorrect. He was not eligible to serve his time in a minimum-security setting for white-collar criminals, so while he was imprisoned in a general population facility, he quipped that he was “one more unjustly imprisoned Black man.”And like Trump, Black savors support from boldfaced names. Elton John wrote a letter lobbying for Black’s pardon, just as he had written a character reference for Black during the 2007 trial.Trump and Black also both have a distinctive way of minimizing actions that others might find offensive or outrageous. Black on Wednesday described his own actions in the case that led to his conviction like so: “It came to light that some payments from our American to our Canadian company and to certain executives, including me, . . . had not been fully authorized.”The scheme worked like this: Black was chief executive of Hollinger International, a company that owned newspapers, including the Sun-Times. When Hollinger started selling off many of its small papers, in 1998, Black and his fellow defendants, without permission from their company’s board, paid themselves millions in “phony management fees” for promising “not to compete with a company they themselves owned,” as then-Solicitor General Elena Kagan put it.Appellate judge Richard Posner described it as “pretty naked fraud.”After Black learned that federal authorities had launched a fraud investigation, he “removed 13 boxes of documents from his office,” an act that was caught by parking garage video cameras, Kagan wrote in the government’s brief.As the White House statement recounted it Wednesday, prosecutors alleged that Black “committed several acts of mail fraud and obstruction” but the Supreme Court “largely disagreed and overturned almost all charges in his case.”In fact, in a unanimous decision by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2010, the Supreme Court threw out Black’s conviction on two fraud charges because the jury had been given unclear instructions, but left untouched his conviction for obstruction of justice. The case was sent back to the lower court to be reconsidered, Black’s convictions on two counts were upheld and he was returned to prison.Black and Trump also share a penchant for pushing back aggressively against those who criticize them — and lavishly praising those who support them.Trump sued one of his biographers, Timothy O’Brien, for $5 billion in a libel suit that was eventually found to be meritless, but he also has a long history of showering praise on writers who publish glowing reports about his success.Black has given the president plenty of reason to see him as one of those writers. Last year, he published a sparklingly upbeat biography titled “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.”“He is not, in fact, a racist, sexist, warmonger, hothead, promoter of violence, or a foreign or domestic economic warrior,” Black wrote. He explained that Trump is “not a liar as much as a disbeliever in absolute secular truths. . . . For Trump, establishing the facts of a matter is as much a competition as anything else.”Beginning in 2001, Trump and Black became business partners. Trump wanted to build a 92-story residential and commercial skyscraper on the site of the Sun-Times’s riverfront headquarters. Originally, the two were equal partners in the deal, but after Black got into legal hot water, Trump took full control of the property.From the start, Black has written, directors of his company warned him to be cautious about dealing with Trump, to “keep my hand on the company’s wallet, that Trump was a scoundrel who could not be relied on for anything.” But Black says Trump “came in on budget all the way through” and “delivered exactly what he had promised under our contract.”“I found Trump a good deal more ethical and honest than many other businessmen,” Black wrote.On the day before he was pardoned, Black, who now calls himself a historian and “justice reform advocate,” published an article in the National Review headlined “Smooth Sailing Ahead for Trump.”The story predicts a clear path to a reelection victory for the president because “The times are good and his opponents are not. . . . Barring something completely unforeseeable, this president will have a stronger argument for reelection next year than any president since Richard Nixon in 1972 after his extraordinarily successful first term . . . ”
President Trump’s pardons were self-serving before, and they became even more so Wednesday night, after he pardoned two prominent conservatives who had already completed their sentences.Trump pardoned billionaire Conrad Black, who a year ago published a book called “Donald J. Trump: A president like no other.” The book is more hagiography than biography. It defends Trump against charges that he is a racist, stating flatly that he is not. It hails his “very successful” foreign policy ventures. It credits his “unquenchable energy,” “sheer entertainment talent” and “raw toughness.” It misleadingly hails his 2016 election win by saying he won “more votes than any previous Republican candidate for president,” without noting that this was mostly a function of population growth and that Trump lost the popular vote. He called Trump’s win a “stunning rebuff” of the media.The second pardon went to Patrick J. Nolan, the former Republican leader of the California state assembly. This one is less obviously self-serving, but it is. Nolan has been a prominent conservative voice for criminal justice reform since finishing his sentence and has served in prison ministry. But he, like Black, is close to the Trump family. Appearing at a White House ceremony celebrating the passage of criminal justice reform legislation, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner called Nolan “my friend,” and Nolan called Kushner “just a superstar. I’m impressed with him so much.” Last year, Nolan criticized special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. He said it was symptomatic of how law enforcement personnel “decide who they’re going to prosecute and then hunt for a crime."That these pardons went to two Trump allies who said things he likes, and whose pardons could send signals to other Trump allies, doesn’t seem like a coincidence. Trump has now pardoned 10 people in his two-plus years in office. Of the nine living ones, eight are either conservatives or further Trump’s political narrative in some way.To recap:Dinesh D’Souza is a close analog to Black, publishing books attacking Democrats including Hillary Clinton and former president Barack Obama.Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio is an immigration hard-liner who supported Trump in 2016.The two Hammond brothers’ case launched a standoff with the federal government that briefly became a cause celebre among some conservatives. As with D’Souza and Arpaio, the pardons could be understood as reaching out to an extreme group that could support Trump down the road.Kristian Saucier was the Navy sailor who argued that his sentence was too harsh by citing Hillary Clinton — a comparison Trump often repeated on the campaign trail.Lewis “Scooter” Libby was a White House official in the Bush administration whose case bore some striking similarities to Trump’s own legal issues — and whose pardon was pushed for by lawyers Trump briefly hired.The other two pardons went to the late boxer Jack Johnson and, earlier this month, Michael Behenna, a former Army first lieutenant convicted of murder while serving in Iraq. Trump has also commuted the sentence of two others, including Alice Marie Johnson, whose clemency was pushed for by Kim Kardashian, who is married to Trump ally Kanye West.The point isn’t that presidents don’t pardon their allies; they have. Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, who had given large sums to both the Democratic Party and the Clintons, was a massive controversy.But they often do it sparingly, late in their terms (the Rich pardon came on Clinton’s last day in office), and they mix it in with many other pardons that don’t so clearly and obviously benefit themselves. The scale and audacity with Trump is on another level completely. Trump seems to have very little regard for the perception this creates. Perhaps that’s because he likes the signal it sends to his allies that they too could one day benefit from his broad executive power — even if in ways far shy of a something as big as a pardon. Trump’s dangling of pardons for some of his top aides convicted of crimes drives that home.The Black pardon, in particular, really tests the limits of what is appropriate. But as with many other norms, Trump is happy to bulldoze it.
A 2½-year-old Guatemalan boy apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border died Tuesday night in El Paso after several weeks in the hospital, according to the Guatemalan Consulate and another person with direct knowledge of the case.The boy, who was not identified, arrived at the border with his mother days after now-acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan held a news conference near a crowded holding facility in El Paso on March 27 to warn that a surge of Central Americans was pushing the system to the “breaking point.”The boy is the fourth migrant child to die since December after being apprehended at the southern border and taken to the hospital. All have been from Guatemala, a Central American nation experiencing severe drought and poverty, and where smugglers have been offering discounted trips to families traveling to the United States.Record numbers of families from Guatemala and other northern Central American countries are surrendering at the border and seeking asylum, with nearly 100,000 crossing in April, the highest monthly total in a decade. The White House has asked Congress for $4.5 billion in aid and increased enforcement, saying the influx is risking lives, while advocates for immigrants have raised concern about health and safety conditions in cramped federal holding facilities.The Washington Post confirmed the death with two sources, including Guatemala’s Consul Tekandi Paniagua, who covers the El Paso area. Another source confirmed the death on the condition of anonymity.Paniagua said the boy, who had spent three days in federal custody, appeared to have developed a form of pneumonia, but the death remains under investigation. The El Paso medical examiner’s office and the hospital declined to comment.It is unclear when the boy fell ill. A Customs and Border Protection official familiar with the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the CBP apprehended the boy and his mother on April 3 near the Paso del Norte International Bridge.On April 6, the official said, his mother alerted agents that he was sick. An ambulance took him to a hospital in Horizon City that day, and officials transferred him the next day to Providence Children’s Hospital in El Paso.On April 8, federal officials formally released the family from Border Protection custody with a “notice to appear” in immigration court.CBP officials are required to notify Congress of a death in custody within 24 hours, and it was not immediately clear whether officials would do that when The Washington Post inquired about the death because the boy had been released from custody.Later, an official said they would notify lawmakers.After two Guatemalan children died in December, Homeland Security officials expanded care for children at the border. They have required health screenings of all children in custody and deployed scores of medics and equipment to the border to quickly triage new arrivals, some arriving in groups of 300 at a time.Hundreds of people have been taken to the hospital. Some have arrived with preexisting health concerns, including influenza and liver disease.Two weeks ago, U.S. border agents along the Rio Grande recovered the body of a 10-month-old boy after his family’s raft capsized while crossing the river near Eagle Pass, Tex.On April 30, a 16-year-old unaccompanied minor from the southeastern state of Chiquimula suffered a severe brain infection and died after several days in federal custody. He had been apprehended more than a week earlier and transferred to a Health and Human Services shelter. His was the first known death in HHS custody.In December, two young Guatemalan children died after being apprehended by CBP. Felipe Gomez Alonzo, 8, died of complications from influenza B infection, and Jakelin Caal, 7, died of a bacterial infection.Among the worst crowding is in the El Paso sector, where on March 27 agents held almost 3,500 migrants in custody, well above capacity, and some families were held under a bridge.Paniagua said the consulate has warned families in Guatemala that the trip is risky.“We have reiterated the message that trips to the United States, in the condition in which the Guatemalan families are undertaking them, is highly dangerous,” Paniagua said in a statement. “We’ve seen four cases in a row of children who have lost their lives in this way.”
Anti-money laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government.The nature of the transactions was not clear. At least some of them involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious.Real estate developers like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner sometimes do large, all-cash deals, including with people outside the United States, any of which can prompt anti-money laundering reviews. The red flags raised by employees do not necessarily mean the transactions were improper. Banks sometimes opt not to file suspicious activity reports if they conclude their employees’ concerns are unwarranted.But former Deutsche Bank employees said the decision not to report the Trump and Kushner transactions reflected the bank’s generally lax approach to money laundering laws. The employees — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their ability to work in the industry — said it was part of a pattern of the bank’s executives rejecting valid reports to protect relationships with lucrative clients.“You present them with everything, and you give them a recommendation, and nothing happens,” said Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank anti-money laundering specialist who reviewed some of the transactions. “It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything.”Ms. McFadden said she was terminated last year after she raised concerns about the bank’s practices. Since then, she has filed complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators about the bank’s anti-money-laundering enforcement.Kerrie McHugh, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman, said the company had intensified its efforts to combat financial crime. An effective anti-money laundering program, she said, “requires sophisticated transaction screening technology as well as a trained group of individuals who can analyze the alerts generated by that technology both thoroughly and efficiently.”“At no time was an investigator prevented from escalating activity identified as potentially suspicious,” she added. “Furthermore, the suggestion that anyone was reassigned or fired in an effort to quash concerns relating to any client is categorically false.”Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, the umbrella company for the Trump family’s many business interests, said: “We have no knowledge of any ‘flagged’ transactions with Deutsche Bank.” She said the Trump Organization currently has “no operating accounts with Deutsche Bank.” She did not respond when asked if other Trump entities had accounts.Karen Zabarsky, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, said: “Any allegations regarding Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Kushner Companies which involved money laundering is completely made up and totally false. The New York Times continues to create dots that just don’t connect.”Deutsche Bank’s decision not to report the transactions is the latest twist in Mr. Trump’s long, complicated relationship with the German bank — the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to do business with the real estate developer.Congressional and state authorities are investigating that relationship and have demanded the bank’s records related to the president, his family and their companies. Subpoenas from two House committees seek, among other things, documents related to any suspicious activities detected in Mr. Trump’s personal and business bank accounts since 2010, according to a copy of a subpoena included in a federal court filing.Mr. Trump and his family sued Deutsche Bank in April, seeking to block it from complying with the congressional subpoenas. The president’s lawyers described the subpoenas as politically motivated.Subscribe to With InterestCatch up and prep for the week ahead with this newsletter of the most important business insights, delivered Sundays.SIGN UPSuspicious activity reports are at the heart of the federal government’s efforts to identify criminal activity like money laundering and sanctions violations. But government regulations give banks leeway in selecting which transactions to report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.Lenders typically use a layered approach to detect improper activity. The first step is filtering thousands of transactions using computer programs, which send the ones considered potentially suspicious to midlevel employees for a detailed review. Those employees can decide whether to draft a suspicious activity report, but a final ruling on whether to submit it to the Treasury Department is often made by more senior managers.In the summer of 2016, Deutsche Bank’s software flagged a series of transactions involving the real estate company of Mr. Kushner, now a senior White House adviser.Ms. McFadden, a longtime anti-money laundering specialist in Deutsche Bank’s Jacksonville office, said she had reviewed the transactions and found that money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals. She concluded that the transactions should be reported to the government — in part because federal regulators had ordered Deutsche Bank, which had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians, to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.Ms. McFadden drafted a suspicious activity report and compiled a small bundle of documents to back up her decision.Typically, such a report would be reviewed by a team of anti-money laundering experts who are independent of the business line in which the transactions originated — in this case, the private-banking division — according to Ms. McFadden and two former Deutsche Bank managers.That did not happen with this report. It went to managers in New York who were part of the private bank, which caters to the ultrawealthy. They felt Ms. McFadden’s concerns were unfounded and opted not to submit the report to the government, the employees said.Ms. McFadden and some of her colleagues said they believed the report had been killed to maintain the private-banking division’s strong relationship with Mr. Kushner.After Mr. Trump became president, transactions involving him and his companies were reviewed by an anti-financial crime team at the bank called the Special Investigations Unit. That team, based in Jacksonville, produced multiple suspicious activity reports involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.Some of those reports involved Mr. Trump’s limited liability companies. At least one was related to transactions involving the Donald J. Trump Foundation, two employees said.Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, either, according to three former employees. They said it was unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client.Mr. Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank spans two decades. During a period when most Wall Street banks had stopped doing business with him after his repeated defaults, Deutsche Bank lent Mr. Trump and his companies a total of more than $2.5 billion. Projects financed through the private-banking division include Mr. Trump’s Doral golf resort near Miami and his transformation of Washington’s Old Post Office Building into a luxury hotel.When he became president, he owed Deutsche Bank well over $300 million. That made the German institution Mr. Trump’s biggest creditor — and put the bank in a bind.Senior executives worried that if they took a tough stance with Mr. Trump’s accounts — for example, by demanding payment of a delinquent loan — they could provoke the president’s wrath. On the other hand, if they didn’t do anything, the bank could be perceived as cutting a lucrative break for Mr. Trump, whose administration wields regulatory and law enforcement power over the bank.In the past few years, United States and European authorities have punished Deutsche Bank for helping clients, including wealthy Russians, launder funds and for moving money into countries like Iran in violation of American sanctions. The bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and is operating under a Federal Reserve order that requires it to do more to stop illicit activities.On two palm-tree-lined campuses in Jacksonville, Deutsche Bank has thousands of employees who vet customers and transactions. Six current and former bank employees there said the operations were deeply troubled.Anti-money laundering workers were pressured to quickly sift through transactions to assess whether they were suspicious, the employees said. As a result, they often erred on the side of not flagging transactions.Two former employees said that they had raised concerns about transactions involving companies linked to prominent Russians, but that managers had told them not to file suspicious activity reports. The employees were under the impression that the bank did not want to upset important clients.Several employees said they had complained about the bank’s anti-money laundering processes to Joshua Blazer, the head of Deutsche Bank’s financial crimes investigations division in Jacksonville, and had then been criticized for having a negative attitude. One employee said she resigned last summer over concerns about the bank’s ethics.Mr. Blazer, hired by Deutsche Bank in 2017 to strengthen the bank’s financial crime-fighting apparatus, declined to comment.Ms. McFadden’s job at Deutsche Bank was to inspect clients and transactions in the company’s private-banking division — the unit that lent money to Mr. Trump. She joined the bank in 2008, after working for Bank of America, also in Jacksonville.Ms. McFadden had left Bank of America in 2005, and later sued for racial discrimination and wrongful termination. According to court records, her lawsuit was settled on confidential terms the same year she joined Deutsche Bank, where she went on to win multiple performance awards.Around the time she flagged the Kushner Companies’ transactions, Ms. McFadden said, she also complained about how the bank was scrutinizing the accounts of high-profile customers, such as those in public office. Those customers — known as politically exposed persons — are regarded as at heightened risk of being involved in corruption. As a result, their accounts are subject to extra vetting.Ms. McFadden said she had told her superiors that dozens of politically exposed clients of the private-banking division, including Mr. Trump and members of his family, were not receiving that added attention. Her superiors told her to stop raising questions, according to Ms. McFadden and the two former managers.After taking her complaint to the human resources department, Ms. McFadden was transferred to another division. She was terminated in April 2018. The bank told her that she was not processing enough transactions.Ms. McFadden disputed that. She said her superiors had reduced the number of transactions she was assigned to review after she voiced her concerns. She and the two former managers said they perceived her termination as an act of retaliation.“They attempted to try to silence me,” she said. “I’m at peace because I know that I did the right thing.”
President Trump attacked Representative Justin Amash as a “total lightweight” and “loser” on Sunday, a day after the Michigan Republican said Mr. Trump’s behavior as president had reached the “threshold for impeachment.”The president’s attacks reinforced Mr. Amash’s isolation within his party, as even the Republican lawmakers who might be most sympathetic to his position avoided stepping forward to join him.Earlier on Sunday, Senator Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican who has been one of the few members of his party to even mildly chastise Mr. Trump in public after the release of the Mueller report, described Mr. Amash’s statement as “courageous.” But Mr. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, dismissed the idea of impeachment, saying on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the evidence lacked “the full element that you need to prove an obstruction-of-justice case.”Mr. Trump — who has stonewalled requests by House Democrats for documents and has commanded current and former aides to turn down requests to testify before investigative committees — was not so circumspect.“Never a fan of @justinamash, a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy,” Mr. Trump wrote in a midmorning Twitter riff that included, among other things, criticism of the “Fake News Sunday Political Shows” and boasts about his judicial appointments and health care policies.“Justin is a loser who sadly plays right into our opponents hands!” he added.On Saturday, Mr. Amash, 39, became the first sitting Republican member of Congress to suggest that Mr. Trump’s actions, as described in the report of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, met the constitutional threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors.“President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct,” Mr. Amash wrote in a series of Twitter messages after reading the redacted version of the 448-page report.Contrary to the public statements and summaries offered by Attorney General William P. Barr, “Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” wrote Mr. Amash, a self-described strict constitutionalist who has considered running against Mr. Trump in the 2020 Republican primary.It is a judgment not publicly shared by any other Republican member of Congress.“Justin Amash has reached a different conclusion than I have,” said Mr. Romney, who has said he was “sickened” and “appalled” by Mr. Mueller’s report.Mr. Trump and his team have successfully cowed Republican critics through sheer political force: The president is overwhelmingly popular among the Republican base — and the White House and national Republican organizations controlled by Trump loyalists have threatened anyone who opposes them with supporting potential primary opponents.“It’s sad to see Congressman Amash parroting the Democrats’ talking points on Russia,” Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, said in a statement. “The only people still fixated on the Russia collusion hoax are political foes of President Trump hoping to defeat him in 2020 by any desperate means possible.”“Voters in Amash’s district strongly support this president, and would rather their congressman work to support the president’s policies,” she said.On Saturday, State Representative Jim Lower, an outspoken Trump supporter who lives in Mr. Amash’s Grand Rapids-area district, suggested he would challenge the five-term congressman next year.“This cannot go unchallenged! I support @realDonaldTrump, I support West Michigan values, I support our party’s values,” Mr. Lower tweeted. He promised a major announcement on his potential challenge in the coming week.Mr. Amash’s conclusions track closely with those of many Democrats. While Speaker Nancy Pelosi has sought to block attempts to impeach Mr. Trump based on the findings of the Mueller report, she declared her openness last week to initiating an impeachment inquiry as a means of forcing administration officials to comply with the subpoenas of the six House committees investigating Mr. Trump’s conduct.Mr. Amash was one of 14 Republicans to side with Democrats in their unsuccessful attempt to override the president’s first veto, which upheld an emergency declaration to divert funding from other federal projects to build a wall along the southwestern border.
A federal judge on Monday denied President Trump’s bid to quash a House subpoena for years of his financial records from his accounting firm and stayed his order seven days to allow the president’s lawyers time to appeal.The ruling handed an initial defeat to Trump’s vow to defy subpoenas by House Democrats and came in one of the first courtroom challenges to a series of lawmakers’ investigative demands for his bank records, accounting statements and tax returns.U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of Washington, D.C., refused to block the records request to Mazars USA from the House Oversight and Reform Committee while litigation continues. Attorneys for Trump and associated businesses filed suit April 22, arguing Congress is not entitled to investigate his past personal financial dealings for potential corruption.“So long as Congress investigates on a subject matter on which ‘legislation could be had,’ Congress acts as contemplated by Article I of the Constitution,” Mehta said in a 41-page opinion. Mehta ruled the committee’s claims that Trump’s records will help it consider strengthening ethics and disclosure laws and enforce a constitutional ban on acceptance of foreign gifts by a president were “facially valid,” saying, “It is not for the court to question whether the Committee’s actions are truly motivated by political considerations.”In an additional blow to Trump’s lawyers, Mehta denied their request to stay his order beyond the seven days both sides previously agreed to for an appeal, finding the public’s interest in “maximizing the effectiveness of the investigatory powers of Congress” was greater than any harm to Trump or his businesses.In court, Douglas N. Letter, general counsel of the House of Representatives, has charged that the lawsuit would dismiss Congress’s constitutional oversight powers as “a nuisance . . . getting in [Trump’s] way while he’s trying to run the country.”Meanwhile, Trump’s private attorney, Jay Sekulow, said when the lawsuit was filed that the president’s team “will not allow Congressional Presidential harassment to go unanswered.”“Mazars USA will respect the legal process and fully comply with its legal obligations,” the company said in a statement Monday.An appeal would test decades of legal precedent that have upheld Congress’s right to investigate, arguing the theory that a president’s past dealings are irrelevant to the legislative branch’s fundamental job of writing bills. The legal battle comes as House Democrats seek to probe Trump’s finances, his campaign and allegations he sought to obstruct justice in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.In the Mazars case, Mehta cut down Trump lawyers’ complaint that Congress was usurping the Justice Department’s powers to investigate “dubious and partisan” allegations of private conduct, by inquiring into whether Trump misled his lenders by inflating his net worth.Rather, Mehta said, a congressional investigation into illegal conduct before and during a president’s time in office fits “comfortably”with Congress’s broad investigative powers, which include an “informing function,” or power to expose corruption.“It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct — past or present — even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry,” Mehta wrote.On that question, he observed, “History provides a useful guide,” noting that twice in the last 50 years Congress has investigated alleged criminal violations by a president before initiating impeachment proceedings, citing Watergate and Whitewater investigations into the Nixon and Clinton presidencies.Trump, his three eldest children and companies also are attempting to block a subpoena by the House Financial Services Committee for Trump’s bank records issued to Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corp. which a federal judge in Manhattan is set to hear Wednesday.The White House is also resisting House demands for former White House counsel Donald McGahn’s records and testimony pertaining to federal investigations of Trump, as well as by testimony by Mueller over his recently concluded report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.Democrats have called the lawsuits long-shot bids to delay the unearthing of politically damaging information about Trump until after the 2020 election, and to obscure from the public ongoing conflicts of interest by officials charged with executing the nation’s laws.
President Trump returned to one of his favorite stalled agenda items on Sunday: infrastructure.But rather than clarify how the $2 trillion plan would be funded, he pivoted to blaming Democrats for the stalling talks.“I think we’re being played by the Democrats a little bit, you know, I think what they want me to do is say, ‘Well, what we’ll do is raise taxes’ … and then they’ll have a news conference, see, Trump wants to raise taxes,” Trump said during his 11th Fox News Channel interview of 2019. “So it’s a little bit of a game, but I do believe they’re doing that.”Putting aside that Trump himself has reportedly signaled an openness to raising the gas tax to pay for infrastructure, the president has apparently forgotten how he has personally derailed more than half a dozen White House infrastructure initiatives in the past two years, which you can watch in the video above.Let’s review the White House’s repeated attempts, and failures, to get “infrastructure week” off the ground:1.) Week of May 15, 2017What: Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao promises $1 trillion infrastructure plan “in the next several weeks.”What derailed it: Hours later, The Washington Post reported that Trump shared highly classified intelligence with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador.2.) Week of June 5, 2017What: The first official White House “infrastructure week” (which notably kicked off without a plan).What derailed it: Former FBI director James B. Comey accused Trump of lying in congressional testimony. The next day, Trump accused Comey of lying.3.) Week of Aug. 14, 2017What: Trump signed an executive order he said would streamline the infrastructure approval process.What derailed it: Trump spent much of a nearly 45-minute news conference meant to tout the order blaming “both sides” for violent protests in Charlottesville.4.) Week of Oct. 9, 2017What: Chao again touted Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan without providing the details of said plan.What derailed it: The Post reported that Chao repeatedly used taxpayer-funded private jets to fly to events when cheaper commercial flights were available.5.) Week of Feb. 12, 2018What: Trump announced a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan, much of it funded by states and private investment.What derailed it: The resignation of a White House aide over domestic violence allegations, reports that Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen paid hush money during the 2016 campaign to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, the indictment of 13 Russians in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation and a massacre at a high school in Parkland, Fla.6.) Week of March 26, 2018What: Trump gave a speech in Ohio touting his infrastructure plan.What derailed it: As The Post’s Heather Long reported at the time: “This latest [infrastructure] week is happening while Congress is on recess, Trump faces high-profile allegations of marital infidelity, the Russia investigation continues to make headlines, and the administration grapples with staff turnover and contentious firings.”7.) Week of April 29, 2019What: Trump and congressional Democrats agreed to invest $2 trillion in infrastructure, even as Trump’s acting chief of staff and congressional Republicans cast doubt on it.What derailed it: Hours after Trump’s infrastructure meeting with Democrats, The Post reported that Mueller wrote a letter to Attorney General William P. Barr in March complaining that Barr’s letter describing Mueller’s principal conclusions “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s investigation. Senate Democrats hammered Barr about it during a hearing the next day.
When a freshman congresswoman asked U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson at a congressional hearing Tuesday whether he knew what the housing term “REO” was, Carson thought she was referencing the similar-sounding cookie.“An Oreo?” the secretary asked.No, said Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), her tone firm. She spelled it back to him, twice. Carson came up with: “real estate e-organization.”It’s actually “real estate owned.”The term refers to property owned by a bank or a lender after it’s been foreclosed. Porter wanted to know why there was disparity in the rate of REOs issued by the Federal Housing Administration compared to other government-owned real estate.Hours after the hearing ended, Carson tweeted a photo of a package of Oreos next to a note thanking Porter for participating in the hearing, with the caption: “OH, REO! Thanks, @RepKatiePorter. Enjoying a few post-hearing snacks. Sending some your way!”Carson appeared before the House Financial Services Committee for more than three hours, fielding questions on housing policies. Several times he stumbled as Democrats, especially the women on the committee, tried to poke holes in his knowledge of the agency he runs.Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) asked him if he was familiar with “OMWI.”“With who?” Carson asked.“OMWI,” the congresswoman repeated.“Amway?” the secretary replied.The acronym stands for Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. Beatty wanted to know whether HUD had such an office and whether he worked with its director.“Of course we have an office of . . . ” Carson trailed off.“OMWI,” the congresswoman repeated.Except HUD doesn’t have an OMWI. Instead, it has an Office of Diversity and Inclusion, which performs a similar function. Either way, Carson couldn’t name the director of that office.Then, near the end of the hearing, freshman Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) chided Carson and the Trump administration for failing to improve conditions in low-income housing. During a lightning round in which Pressley wanted yes or no answers to her questions, Carson failed to do provide them.During one particularly contentious moment, Carson said, “Reclaiming my time.”“You don’t get to do that,” Pressley retorted.Pressley then asked Carson if he would allow his grandmother to live in public housing under his watch.“It would be very nice if you could stop . . .” Carson trailed off, and Pressley’s time expired.
President Trump was “thrilled” that his campaign acquired northern Virginia office space at “bargain basement” rates, a campaign official told the Washington Examiner in an interview in the plush 14th floor offices overlooking the Potomac River from Arlington, Va.But campaign finance specialists say the "steal" could violate election law, which views below-market rates for rent as an illegal in-kind campaign donation.The deal was presented as a story of real estate prowess that was a fitting reflection of the man who authored The Art of the Deal. Campaign manager Brad Parscale took advantage of a long-term lease inked in 2013 by a financial firm formerly led by Politico CEO Patrick Steel. The firm, FBR & Co, was acquired in 2017 by B. Riley Financial, and the offices were no longer needed.“We would not normally have such sleek office space,” the official told the Examiner as he sat in a boardroom with a view of the Washington Monument. “This was a steal. The president was thrilled. We saved multiple millions of dollars. Brad found it and the deal was struck.”Asked further about details of the deal, the campaign offered two different rental rates. After the issue of election law requirements was raised, the Republican National Committee said that it, and not the campaign, was paying for the office space, but did not identify the rate per square foot.As first described, Parscale played a starring role finding the spot and then agreeing to a lump sum payment for a period of two years. A campaign official initially said they believed the sublease rate was $36 per square foot, a rate that would have saved the campaign about $1 million over the original lease terms, which specify roughly $57-$58 per square foot.“Brad found out about it and went to them and said, ‘Hey, would you do a lump sum payment cash up front for the next two years? They said, ‘Sold!' We took it off their hands and sublet it from them. And it came with all the furniture,” the official said. “We saved millions of dollars. I think Brad said we got it for about $36 per square foot, which is bargain-basement for well-situated commercial real estate in Northern Virginia.”Motioning toward Washington with a building in the way, the official noted, with some chagrin: "The White House you can’t see because Politico is blocking the view.”Asked for confirmation of rental figures, the official later said financial staff believed the rate was $46, which would roughly halve savings over the original lease. The official said the Trump campaign was paying about $1 million a year for the space, consistent with a $46 rate. A firm called Transwestern secured the deal, the official said. That company declined to comment.“We are getting a better deal than other newer occupants of this building. Somebody just told me they went in and acquired office space in the building for $57 a square foot, so we are locked into a better rate,” the official said.When responding to a follow-up inquiry, the campaign official said the original boast of savings reflected the relative cost of Trump Tower in New York, the official campaign headquarters, where market rates would be $4 million more over two years.Actual steal or bad deal?Federal election law requires campaigns to pay market rates for rent, or else risk receiving an illegal in-kind donation. At the higher $46 rate, however, it’s possible the sublease resulted in overpayment, which would be allowable.Subleases are complicated to judge for the Federal Election Commission, and rental rates can deviate from leases without an election law violation, meaning loss to the leaseholder may not necessarily indicate an illegal in-kind donation."You can’t get a good deal that’s not available to anyone else, that's a contribution,” said Bradley Smith, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission. Smith added: "Generally, if the accused party has a reasonably plausible basis for their calculation, they are going to be fine. The FEC is not going to be eager to say the amount charged is wrong.”In the Rosslyn neighborhood that’s home to the Trump offices, vacancy rates rose in recent years, though the November announcement of Amazon’s looming arrival nearby boosted interest. The Trump campaign arrived in December.Pointing at potential overpayment, the 15th and 16th floors of the same building currently are advertised for $33 per square foot for a sublease through December. Like the Trump office space, they come furnished, said broker Brent Mathis, who believes the floors have been available roughly three years, meaning when the campaign was looking.The lower rate for the higher floors could undercut the notion of a "steal," though the official hearing of other new tenants paying higher rates cuts the other way.It's unclear if luxury features on the higher floors match those of the Trump space on the 14th floor, which also was desirable to the campaign due to specific availability through 2020.What Disclosures ShowAbout 40 campaign staff now occupy what will become the operational hub of Trump’s reelection. But it’s not immediately clear from FEC filings what rental rate was paid.Brendan Fischer, director of the federal reform program at the pro-transparency Campaign Legal Center, said FEC filings available online for the RNC indicate two payments to FBR & Co.: One on Oct. 19 for $250,000, and one on Nov. 14 for $1,060, 277.If the larger amount was for a one-year lease covering only the 14th floor, the rate would be about $50 per square foot. The rate would be $25 if it was a lump-sum for two years. Neither rate neatly aligns with figures cited by the campaign. FBR leased two other floors in the building, and it's unclear if any of that space is available to the Trump campaign.Fischer said his group is among those likely to push for more transparency about the arrangement. “The public has a right to know how campaigns and parties spend money and if they are doing it lawfully. And to know from where campaigns and parties are receiving contributions," he said.B. Riley Financial ignored repeated requests for comment, as did a spokeswoman for the Washington Real Estate Investment Trust, which bought the building last year for $250 million.Mike Reed, a spokesman for the RNC, confirmed the committee pays for the headquarters, saying in an email: "Yes, the RNC pays for its headquarters space. We now have headquarters offices in both Virginia and Washington D.C. There are RNC, Trump campaign, and other party operatives working out of both headquarters."Reed did not respond to additional inquires about the rental rate or how the rent was disclosed to the FEC."The office space was a good deal, which is in keeping with the President’s desire to run an efficient campaign," Tim Murtaugh, campaign spokesman, said in a statement. "It even came with all of the furniture."
Donald Trump’s golf habit has already cost taxpayers at least $102 million in extra travel and security expenses, and next month will achieve a new milestone: a seven-figure presidential visit to another country so he can play at his own course.U.S. taxpayers have spent $81 million for the president’s two dozen trips to Florida, according to a HuffPost analysis. They spent $17 million for his 15 trips to New Jersey, another $1 million so he could visit his resort in Los Angeles and at least $3 million for his two days in Scotland last summer ― $1.3 million of which went just for rental cars for the massive entourage that accompanies a president abroad.And, notwithstanding Trump’s campaign promise that if elected he would not play golf at all, the White House has done preliminary work for Trump’s visit to his resort on the west coast of Ireland next month, according to Irish media and government sources, even though no official meeting with Irish leaders is planned in the capital, Dublin.Late Tuesday afternoon, the White House announced that Trump would meet with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in Shannon, just 30 miles by air from Trump’s golf resort in Doonbeg. It will be the first time Trump will visit a foreign country — with the staggering footprint of personnel and equipment that entails — for the main purpose of playing golf, though an official purpose was layered on after the fact.“It’s obviously an incredible waste of money,” said Robert Weissman, president of the group Public Citizen. He then quipped: “Of course, the more time he spends golfing, the less time he spends governing, the better.”The $102 million total to date spent on Trump’s presidential golfing represents 255 times the annual presidential salary he volunteered not to take. It is more than three times the cost of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that Trump continually complains about. It would fund for six years the Special Olympics program that Trump’s proposed budget had originally cut to save money.While Republicans and Trump himself frequently criticized former President Barack Obama for his golf outings, Trump has spent more than twice as many days on the links, to date, as Obama did at the same point in his first term. And because Trump has insisted on dozens of trips to New Jersey and Florida to play at his resorts there, taxpayers are spending more than three times as much as they did for golf by the same point in Obama’s term.The White House did not respond to numerous queries regarding this story. North Carolina Republican congressman Mark Meadows, a close Trump ally, dismissed the $102 million figure as insignificant.“There’s a lot more important things to worry about than the rounding errors that we sometimes have on these things,” he said Tuesday.Just as troubling as the amount Trump has spent so far on golf trips is the fact that his visits have been to his own properties — for-profit businesses that put money in his own pocket and that Trump routinely praises during his visits.During his trip to Scotland last year, for example, Trump wrote: “I have arrived in Scotland and will be at Trump Turnberry for two days of meetings, calls and hopefully, some golf - my primary form of exercise! The weather is beautiful, and this place is incredible!”“His top priority with these trips is not the business of the American people, it’s the business of the Trump Organization,” said Jordan Libowitz of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The American presidency has become another tool to advertise his golf properties.”The vast majority of Trump’s golf costs result from his insistence on playing at his Florida courses in West Palm Beach and Jupiter, where he has spent 61 days while staying at his resort in the nearby town of Palm Beach. A weekend trip to Mar-a-Lago averages $3.4 million, with most of that resulting from the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs each hour to fly both the modified Boeing 747 that serves as the primary Air Force One, as well as the C-17 cargo planes required to move all the support vehicles in Trump’s motorcade.Determining the cost of Trump’s golf visits is not easy. The White House is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and Trump’s press office does not answer most questions about his golf visits — even refusing to confirm whether he is, in fact, playing golf when he is physically at his golf courses.But a recent Government Accountability Office report regarding Trump’s four early 2017 visits to Mar-a-Lago has provided hard data and a methodology that HuffPost followed in its own analysis.The HuffPost analysis took a conservative approach to determining costs. For example, it used a per-hour rate of $15,994 for Trump’s use of the smaller Air Force One that he takes to Bedminster, New Jersey, even though that figure accounts only for fuel and maintenance, not the additional factors that GAO used when it determined the $273,000-per-hour cost of operating the larger plane.Any presidential outing requires coordination of multiple offices and agencies and incurs additional costs compared to staying in the White House. Even one of Trump’s day trips to his course across the Potomac River in northern Virginia — there have been 52 to date — requires fuel for all the motorcade vehicles and some personnel costs if overtime is necessary for Secret Service agents and others. (Those expenses, however, are minimal compared to flight costs, and HuffPost did not include them in its $102 million total.)And the price increases exponentially the farther Trump travels.Flying the Marine Corps helicopters — three of them are used each time ― from the White House to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, where Air Force One is based, costs $57,000 for the round trip, according to the GAO report. Flying the massive C-17 transports loaded with Trump’s 7-ton armored limousines and other specialized support vehicles costs $800,500 per Mar-a-Lago trip.And for each of those trips, the Coast Guard winds up spending an extra $855,500 to patrol the Atlantic Ocean to the east of Mar-a-Lago and the Intracoastal Waterway to the west. That figure includes the expense of getting necessary ships, boats and crews to South Florida from stations as far away as Boston and Houston, the GAO reported.When Trump travels overseas, the costs rise even higher, as yet more agencies become involved. Dozens of White House staff members may travel with Trump during a weekend to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, but that number swells to several hundred on an overseas trip. The administration avoids lengthy motorcades on foreign soil, so Marine helicopters and V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft must be pre-positioned. A backup Air Force One is sent along as the support plane.According to a Scottish newspaper last summer, the U.S. State Department paid a local car rental agency $1.2 million for vehicles for all the staff who relocated from London, where Trump had met with Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Theresa May, to Scotland, where Trump wanted to play golf at his Turnberry resort before heading to Finland to meet Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.Between that expense and the costs of moving equipment from London to Glasgow and then 55 miles southwest to Turnberry, those two golf days cost taxpayers at least $3 million beyond what they would have spent if Trump had simply stayed in London, according to HuffPost’s analysis.
NEW YORK — A federal judge on Wednesday rejected a request by President Trump to block congressional subpoenas for his banking records, dealing the latest blow to the president in his bid to battle Democratic investigations into his personal finances.The decision in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York could clear the way for Deutsche Bank and Capital One to hand over the president’s financial records to Democrats in the House. Trump’s attorneys could appeal the decision.Attorneys for Trump, his family and the Trump Organization filed for a preliminary injunction earlier this month as part of a lawsuit seeking to block the two institutions from handing over documents to the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees.“There will be no way to unring the bell once the Banks give Congress the requested information,” William S. Consovoy, Patrick Strawbridge and Marc Mukasey wrote. “The Committees will have reviewed confidential documents that this Court may later determine were illegally subpoenaed.”But U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos said Wednesday that Trump’s lawsuit was unlikely to succeed.Deutsche Bank and Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The ruling comes two days after a federal judge in Washington rejected the Trump legal team’s argument in a separate case seeking to block the House Oversight Committee’s demands for records from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA. Trump’s attorneys notified the judge on Tuesday that they have appealed “all aspects” of that ruling.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) welcomed Wednesday’s ruling, saying she was “very excited” by the news.“Two in one week: Mazar Monday, Deutsche Bank today,” she said.Deutsche Bank has been a major lender to both the Trump Organization and Kushner Companies, which previously was run by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who now is a presidential adviser.Deutsche Bank has loaned or been a co-lender of at least $2.5 billion to Trump’s business, much of it at a time when other banks declined providing money to him, according to a Wall Street Journal report. At one point, when Trump had trouble paying back a loan for a Chicago tower, Trump sued the bank, saying it had played a role in a broader financial crisis that hurt the project. Trump and the bank eventually settled the case.Shortly before Election Day in 2016, Deutsche Bank finalized a $285 million loan to Kushner’s real estate company, The Washington Post has previously reported. At the time, the bank was negotiating settlements with federal and New York regulators. Congressional Democrats have long said they want to examine the bank’s loans to the Trump and Kushner businesses, particularly to see if there is any connection to money-laundering in Russia.During Wednesday’s hearing, protesters holding signs stating “Congress has a right to know” and “You can sue but you can’t hide” were admonished by the judge after they stood up in the courtroom.Strawbridge argued during the hearing that the committee subpoenas were overly broad and claimed that House Democrats were acting as law enforcement rather than legislators.“They are looking for records about minors, about in-laws,” said Strawbridge, claiming that even information about Trump’s grandchildren could be swept up in the subpoenas.An attorney for the House Democrats, Douglas Neal Letter, said the committees have issued “a whole batch of subpoenas . . . having nothing to do with Trump or his family.”“This is not an investigation just about Trump and his family,” Letter said.In his ruling from the bench, Ramos said he would not halt enforcement of the subpoena.Ramos said his ruling rejecting a preliminary injunction was of “little consequence” because Trump and his family “are unlikely to succeed on merits of their claims.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has done it before. Earlier this year, she called President Trump’s bluff, held tough and forced him to reopen the government after he shut it down over the wall. She has a knack for making Trump look especially peevish. So it was on Wednesday:President Trump abruptly ended a meeting with Democratic leaders on Wednesday, saying he was unable to work with them on legislation following comments by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that he was “engaged in a coverup.”Trump made an unscheduled appearance in the Rose Garden shortly afterward and in a meandering 10-minute address said he had left the meeting with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) at which they were supposed to talk about working together on a $2 trillion infrastructure plan.Trump was apparently aggrieved that Pelosi accused him of conducting a coverup. The man who paid off Stormy Daniels to keep his extramarital affair quiet during the campaign insisted that “I don’t do coverups.”Trump’s fit amounts to saying “I will NOT do my job so long as Congress is doing its job!” That’s what this amounts to, a confession of sorts that his legal stonewall strategy may not be sufficient and that his personal vulnerability is so great that he is unable to do his job. That would seem, well, grounds for impeachment. But while impeachment is unpopular, a president refusing to do things he promised to help voters because he is under investigation is even more unpopular.In her comments to the media after Trump stalked out, Pelosi observed that maybe it was “lack of confidence on his part” that caused him to short-circuit infrastructure talks. “He just took a pass and it just makes me wonder why he did that,” she said. “In any event, I pray for the president of the United States. And I pray for the United States of America.” She certainly knows how to rub it in.However, she was not done. Appearing shortly afterward at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference, she recounted, “In an orchestrated, almost to an ‘oh, poor baby’ point of view. . . . [Trump] came into the room and said that I said that he was engaged in a coverup.” She continued, “It’s really sad.” As she put it, it was all “very, very, very strange.” For good measure, she added, "This president is obstructing justice and he’s engaged in a coverup. And that could be an impeachable offense.”Whether Pelosi intended this result or not, her ability to treat Trump as a spoiled child and provoke even more self-destructive behavior has several positive benefits for Democrats in this context. First, it puts the blame for not accomplishing anything on infrastructure — or anything else — squarely on Trump’s shoulders. Second, he makes it nearly impossible for incumbent Republicans to run in 2020 on any record of accomplishment. The GOP will rightfully be called the do-nothing party. (Well, in fairness they do plenty — excusing Trump, enabling Trump, ignoring Trump’s wrongdoing, etc.) Third, it’s a preposterous position — what else will he refuse to do? — for someone who will be running for reelection in 2020. Fourth, more than anything, he has shown how panicked he is about investigations, thereby giving Pelosi the ability to talk to frustrated members of her caucus who want to start on impeachment the perfect comeback: We’ve got him on the run. Fifth, if they ever do get around to impeachment, Democrats can add another count against him: Refuses to do his job while lawful investigations are going on.All in all, Pelosi once again demonstrated that the best person to deal with a weak narcissist prone to temper tantrums is a mother and grandmother.
President Trump showed up angry in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, an apparent continuation of his mood from the morning's activity on Twitter.“I came here to do a meeting on infrastructure with Democrats, not really thinking they wanted to do infrastructure or anything else other than investigate,” he said, after calling a news conference outside the White House on short notice. “And I just saw that [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi, just before our meeting, made a statement that ‘We believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a coverup.’ ”Trump complained about the Russia investigation for a moment and bragged about the success of the economy, boasting about how the former hadn't prevented the latter. Then he returned to Pelosi's comment."I don’t do coverups,” he said. “You people” — the media — “know that probably better than anybody.”Well, about that, Mr. President.There was, you might recall, the matter of Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who alleges that she had a consensual affair with you in 2006. After David Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., told your team in August 2015 that he would help bury negative stories (according to the Justice Department), AMI paid McDougal to buy the rights to her story but never ran it. The August 2015 meeting might ring a bell, because Wall Street Journal reporting indicates that you attended it. The payment will certainly be familiar to you, since you and your former attorney Michael Cohen discussed it in a conversation that Cohen recorded.The gist of the conversation? You and Cohen wanted to buy the rights from AMI in case Pecker was “hit by a truck” (in your words), and someone else at the company decided to run with it.If that doesn’t ring a bell, there’s also the payment that was made in October 2016 to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Daniels alleges that you and she had a sexual encounter in 2006, a claim that she detailed to InTouch magazine in 2011, well before you were a candidate for political office. Cohen admitted to federal investigators that he made the arrangement with and payment to Daniels at your behest. You essentially admitted in a tweet that you had approved the agreement.Those agreements could reasonably be described as coverups. In tweets about the Daniels agreement, you even noted that such agreements to stay silent were common for celebrities such as yourself.But those aren’t the only examples. There’s also your effort to mask the meeting that occurred at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016. When the New York Times learned about the meeting in July 2017, you wrote a misleading statement for your son Donald Trump Jr. to provide the paper in response. Your attorneys later admitted to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that you had written the initial, obviously incomplete statement.Why offer a statement that was easily undercut by emails exchanged between Trump Jr. and his associate Rob Goldstone? According to Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for your legal team, a member of your communications team, Hope Hicks, insisted that those emails would never come to light. That was during a phone call in which you and Hicks allegedly chastised Corallo for giving an honest description of the meeting to another media outlet.Sort of coverup-y.At Wednesday’s news conference, you spent time talking about how Mueller’s probe cleared you of wrongdoing, including that there had been no obstruction of his investigation. That was not for lack of trying, according to evidence compiled by Mueller. The special counsel detailed 10 separate incidents that seemed as if they might constitute criminal attempts to obstruct the probe that were generally unsuccessful, he wrote in his report, “because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”Among the efforts to impede the investigation were the Trump Jr. statement and other repeated directives that staffers not publicly disclose information about the Trump Tower meeting. After pressuring former White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire Mueller, you allegedly then tried to get McGahn to deny that you had done any such thing. And then, after the Mueller report documenting this incident came out, you reportedly asked McGahn again to defend you on this point.Your own contribution to the Mueller report, of course, came in the form of written responses to questions offered by the special counsel’s team. Those questions that you did answer mostly earned variations of “I don’t recall.” Mueller’s team decided not to subpoena you for additional testimony under the belief that they had enough evidence at hand already to determine that they could “not exonerate” you on the obstruction question.Whatever you know has remained covered.Since the Mueller report came out, your administration has embarked on a blanket effort to stymie Democratic investigations into Russian interference, your campaign, your private business, your inauguration and your presidential transition. That’s included your administration refusing to respond to subpoenas, demanding that potential witnesses similarly refuse to offer testimony and declining to provide requested documentation. Your White House even blocked McGahn from testifying about information that he already gave to Mueller, invoking executive privilege in a way that legal experts think will be quickly thrown out in court.The argument made is that Mueller already investigated and came up empty, an argument that both overstates the scope of what the special counsel was looking at and misrepresents what he found. There’s a term for going out of your way to prevent investigations from moving forward, though it escapes me at the moment.In essence, the Wednesday news conference itself was an effort to maintain a coverup.“I’ve said from the beginning — right from the beginning — that you probably can’t go down two tracks,” Trump said. “You can go down the investigation track, and you can go down the investment track or the track of let’s get things done for the American people.” It echoed Trump’s comments during his State of the Union address that “if there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” (That comment itself mirrored something Richard Nixon said during the Watergate probe.)In other words, if Congress wants to get anything done — even something on a shared priority such as infrastructure — Trump is demanding that investigations into his administration and business ties first cease.But, no, Trump doesn’t do coverups.
Despite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) best efforts, House Democrats are seriously considering beginning impeachment proceedings against President Trump.The case for impeachment has been building over the past month. Here’s a run-down of some key flash points that have brought an increasing number of Democrats (and one Republican) on board:The Mueller report is released: There were some Democrats who thought that the obstruction-y actions outlined by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in his report released April 18 were enough to impeach the president. But the majority stuck with Pelosi, who privately urged her caucus to take it slow.Elizabeth Warren takes the stage: She was one of the first 2020 Democrats to come out in favor of impeachment and gave an eloquent, forceful explanation why at a CNN town hall April 22 that drew headlines and became a bumper-sticker argument for the pro-impeachers: “There is no ‘political inconvenience’ exception to the United States Constitution.”The Mueller letter comes out: On April 30, a letter is leaked that showed that Mueller was unhappy with how Attorney General William P. Barr characterized the special counsel’s report. Mueller sent that letter to Barr in March, urging him to release more and warning of “misunderstandings.” This followed reports that Mueller’s team thought Barr’s summary had been too easy on Trump, and it gives the perception among some Democrats that there is a coverup in the Trump administration. Speaking of . . .Trump blocks a lot of congressional investigations: Impeachment talks were continuing in Democratic circles, but the lawmakers who mattered — Pelosi and Democratic leaders of key committees — had settled on another plan. They were investigating all aspects of Trump’s life, including the Mueller report, without starting impeachment proceedings. “Impeach or nothing. No, it’s not that,” Pelosi would later explain.But Trump had other ideas. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” he said. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.”He sued his accounting firm and Congress to prevent them from getting his financial information. His treasury secretary said he won’t release Trump’s tax returns, despite an IRS interpretation of the law otherwise. His former top aides refused to comply with subpoenas to testify. If Trump was stonewalling traditional investigations, what other options did Congress have but to consider impeachment, some Democrats wondered.“I think what he’s trying to do and I think what they think he’s trying to do is render us toothless and say we’re not that important,” said House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who was one of the first lawmakers to call for impeachment.Attorney General Barr doesn’t show up, so Congress holds him in contempt: A sitting Cabinet secretary refused to come to Congress to testify about the Mueller report. Barr said his problem was with the format, but it added to the perception that the White House was blocking Congress from its constitutionally mandated role of oversight.On May 8, the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Barr in contempt of Congress for not showing up. He is only the second sitting attorney general in U.S. history to be held in contempt. But if this was a big deal symbolically, practically speaking, it didn’t change much. Barr still hasn’t testified in front of Congress.Pelosi says Trump is “becoming self-impeachable”: The morning of the contempt vote, Pelosi sat at a Washington Post Live event and said Trump is “becoming self-impeachable.” It wasn’t immediately clear what she meant — that he was making his own case that he should be impeached, or that he was damaging his election chances by blockading Congress. But it did seem like a turning point in Pelosi’s language, that she was more open than ever to considering impeaching Trump. At least, we wrote, she’s laying the groundwork to consider impeaching Trump if it comes to that.Justin Amash is open to impeachment proceedings against Trump: A sitting Republican member of Congress, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), tweeted over the weekend that he had finished reading the Mueller report and he thought Trump “engaged in impeachable conduct.” This one Republican wasn’t going to change Pelosi’s calculations to avoid impeachment, but suddenly, Democrats’ impeachment efforts were technically bipartisan.Donald McGahn ignores a subpoena to talk to Congress: On Tuesday, another big name in Trump World refused to show up to Congress. McGahn was the White House’s top lawyer, and he is a key witness in the Mueller report to Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel then lie about it. The House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to force him to talk, but McGahn, under pressure from Trump, did not show up."We will hold this president accountable,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said at the hearing, with an empty seat where McGahn was supposed to be, “one way or another.”To many Democrats on the fence about impeachment, this was the last straw. The night before, Nadler and top Democrats had urged Pelosi to consider impeachment proceedings, even if it doesn’t lead to articles of impeachment against the president.What other choice does Congress have at this point, they argued? If potential crimes outlined in the Mueller report weren’t deserving enough, the cover up has been, they argued.Pelosi accuses Trump of a coverup and says that “could be an impeachable offense”: She made the remarks at a gathering of progressives on Wednesday, just hours after tamping down impeachment calls from her party in a private meeting. It was the most open to impeachment that Pelosi has ever publicly been.
On May 20, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued his decision in Trump v. Committee on Oversight and Reform, ruling that President Trump cannot block the committee’s subpoena to Trump’s accountant, Mazars. The judge found that the committee had demonstrated a facially valid legislative purpose for its investigation and the issuance of the subpoena. As of this morning, Trump has already filed his appeal.The 41-page opinion is lengthy, thorough and detailed, given the relative simplicity of the issues. It was also issued astonishingly swiftly—the complaint was filed on April 22, oral arguments occurred less than a week ago and the record was closed only two days prior to the judge’s ruling. Judge Mehta’s opinion provides a clear rejection of Trump’s arguments that Congress lacks a legitimate legislative purpose—an argument Trump is making across the board in order to reject oversight attempts by House Democrats. The speed of consideration and the content of the opinion could provide a blueprint for similar cases that are already in court or likely will be soon.For example, oral arguments in Trump v. Deutsche Bank AG are scheduled for May 22 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York before Judge Edgardo Ramos. That case involves two different House committees—the financial services committee and the intelligence committee—but the arguments are likely to sound similar to the Mazars case. Trump is seeking a preliminary injunction to block subpoenas directing Deutsche Bank and Capital One to turn over his bank records, as well as those of his three oldest children and various Trump businesses.Meanwhile, on May 17, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin made clear he would not comply with a congressional subpoena to hand over Trump’s tax returns to Rep. Richard Neal, the chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means. Mnuchin’s one-page letter used the same reason as most of the other refusals by the executive branch to provide information to Congress—that the request lacks a legitimate legislative purpose even though there is a statute that requires Treasury to turn over such documents upon request of the committee. This issue, too, is likely to land in court soon.It is difficult to predict how quickly the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will move to consider and decide the Mazars case. The legal reasoning in Mehta’s opinion is not surprising and breaks no new ground, so it is difficult to see the appeals court reversing the decision. Below is an overview of Mehta’s opinion, which will likely become an important touchstone in Congress’s efforts to overcome attempts by Trump and the executive branch to avoid congressional oversight.Judge Mehta begins his opinion by grounding the issue before him firmly in history, quoting an objection by President James Buchanan to an investigation by a congressional committee in 1860s. Like Trump, Buchanan complained that Congress’s real aim was harassment.Mehta lays out the well-established legal principles that bear on the facts of the case. First, he recounts the Supreme Court’s repeated support for the broad investigative power rooted in Congress’s legislative power laid out in Article I, Section 1, of the Constitution. He also identifies a related function—Congress’s “informing function”—which was recognized by the Supreme Court in Watkins v. United States as permitting “Congress to inquire into and publicize corruption, maladministration or inefficiency in agencies of the Government.” Unsurprisingly, Mehta also recognizes that Congress’s powers are not unbounded—Congress can neither inquire into private affairs unrelated to a valid legislative purpose nor exercise the powers of law enforcement assigned under the Constitution to the executive and the judiciary.Next, Mehta indicates—citing McGrain v. Daugherty—that a court’s analysis of whether Congress has used its investigative power improperly must be highly deferential to the legislative branch. The court likewise may not look into the motives of committee members to negate an otherwise facially valid legislative purpose.Mehta takes pains to use Supreme Court case law to establish that Congress’s investigative function need not be tied to specific legislation and that the critical inquiry is not legislative certainty, but legislative potential. That is, if the subject matter of the investigation is one on which legislation could be had, then Congress is acting within its legislative function.Mehta then examines each of the four prongs of the committee’s investigation that spurred the issuance of the subpoena and evaluates their legitimacy under this standard. He finds that each of the prongs of the investigation is a subject “on which legislation could be had.”First, Congress can reasonably consider Trump’s financial documents in connection with deciding whether to legislate on federal ethics laws and regulations, and as such “there can be little doubt that Congress’s interest in the accuracy of the President’s financial disclosures falls within the legislative sphere.”Second, investigating whether the president is abiding by the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution is likewise a subject on which legislation, or similar congressional action, could be had because the Constitution expressly vests in Congress the unique authority to approve the president’s acceptance of emoluments. Mehta states that “without such power, Congress’s constitutional function to approve or disapprove Emoluments would be severely and unduly constrained. The Founders could not have intended that result.”Third, the committee’s investigation to determine whether the president has any conflicts of interest lies firmly within Congress’s province to legislate. Exposing conflicts of interest is one of the core objectives of the Ethics in Government Act, a statute that shows Congress’s belief that public disclosure of conflicts of interest is desirable despite its cost in loss of personal privacy.Fourth—and perhaps most significantly—Mehta finds that a congressional investigation into illegal conduct before and during the president’s tenure in office fits comfortably within the broad scope of Congress’s investigative powers. The judge cites Congress’s “informing function” as encompassing the power to inquire into and publicize corruption. Importantly for the current circumstance, Mehta then states:It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct—past or present—even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry.Mehta cites the Watergate and Whitewater investigations and states that “Congress plainly views itself as having sweeping authority to investigate illegal conduct of a President, before and after taking office. This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.”The judge considers and rejects each of Trump’s substantive arguments, again grounding his analysis in Supreme Court rulings, in this case the standard laid out in Tenney v. Brandhove: “To find that a committee’s investigation has exceeded the bounds of legislative power it must be obvious that there was a usurpation of functions exclusively vested in the Judiciary or the Executive” (emphasis added by Mehta). Regarding Trump’s contention that any regulation of the president’s finances or conflicts of interest would be unconstitutional, Mehta states that such a contention “flies in the face of decades of legislation covering the President,” citing the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act and other laws that require reporting by the president and other executive branch officials. He then goes further to limit the role of the court: “But there is an even more fundamental problem with Plaintiffs’ position. It is not the court’s role in this context to evaluate the constitutionality of proposed or contemplated legislation. Doing so would go beyond its limited powers.” For emphasis, Mehta points out that in no case since 1880 has the Supreme Court or the D.C. Circuit interfered with a congressional subpoena.In addressing the procedural aspects of the case, Mehta treats the parties’ briefing as cross-motions for summary judgment, arguing that the legal issues presented do not require the court to resolve any fact contests because the material facts are not in dispute. He emphasizes the importance of deciding the case speedily, citing the Supreme Court’s statement in Eastland v. U.S. Servicemen’s Fund that motions to enjoin a congressional subpoena “be given the most expeditious treatment by district courts because one branch of Government is being asked to halt the functions of a coordinate branch.” The court also restates “the fact that the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause forecloses Plaintiffs from compelling discovery from the Oversight Committee, its Members, or staff.” On the question of whether to grant a stay pending appeal, Mehta notes that “the President is subject to the same legal standard as any other litigant that does not prevail” and that Trump has not raised a serious legal question going to the merits of the case. The judge declines to stay the return date of the subpoena beyond the seven days that had already been agreed upon by the parties.This opinion does not break any new ground in its substantive legal arguments, but it does show that, amidst a flood of challenges between Congress and the president, judges can make conscious decisions to try to move cases along quickly. If other judges considering these disputes take the same urgent approach, it is possible that some aspects of the disputed contours of the separation of powers between the executive branch and Congress—which if left to their own devices tend to take divergent positions that favor their respective constitutional roles—could be substantially clarified by the courts during the current Congress.Such expeditious treatment by courts of a different separation of powers question could be the next substantive legal issue to be decided: specifically, whether former White House Counsel Don McGahn must appear before the House judiciary committee to testify about matters described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and obstruction of justice by Trump. On May 20, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) advised the White House Counsel’s office that Congress may not constitutionally compel former White House Counsel Don McGahn to testify. Notwithstanding the length and breadth of executive branch practice, however, the only judge to have addressed the issue of “testimonial immunity”—Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia—roundly rejected the theory as “without any support in case law.” The case ended in a negotiation between the executive and legislative branches and, as a result, was never considered by an appeals court or the Supreme Court.In theory, the McGahn case could land in court and be decided fairly quickly if the judges were so inclined. And depending on how it unfolds, the outcome this time around could be both more definitive and more enduring.
As the confrontation escalates between the House of Representatives and the White House over the production of documents, the appearance of witnesses and compliance with congressional subpoenas, so too have calls for Democrats to initiate impeachment proceedings. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi continues to push for further investigation of the president rather than an impeachment inquiry, while some members of her caucus and its leadership team and several candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination appear more willing to begin impeachment proceedings.There are a number of different ways to frame the decision that House Democrats must make as they move forward. First, impeachment is a fundamentally political phenomenon: A wide range of political goals and motivations bear on whether individual, elected members of Congress see it as an appropriate path. The aggregation of those preferences, as filtered through party leaders with agenda-setting power, may or may not lead to the opening of an impeachment inquiry. Another framing focuses on the question of whether Congress has a responsibility to pursue impeachment, conveyed by the portion of the oath members take that requires them to “faithfully discharge the duties of the office.”A third framing, which we address here, is a more practical one: whether, for the purposes of carrying out further investigation, the House’s hand would be strengthened significantly if it initiated impeachment proceedings. A May 15 letter from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, brings this question into stark relief. The 12-page letter states, in essence, that the White House will not be providing any documents or information requested by the committee as part of an investigation announced on March 4 “into the alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption, and other abuses of power by President Trump, his associates, and members of his Administration.” In its response, the White House outlines a host of political and legal arguments, relying heavily on the premise that Congress has no “legitimate legislative purpose” for requesting the materials. This sweeping repudiation of Congress’s oversight powers brings into stark relief the question of whether there are procedural advantages in pursuing the same information and lines of inquiry under the banner of impeachment proceedings.Several experts have argued that the House might have a stronger legal position in disputes with the executive branch over information and witness appearances if it were undertaking impeachment proceedings rather than investigations. Michael Conway, who served as counsel on the House judiciary committee during the Watergate investigation, has advanced a similar argument. In particular, he points to a staff memo written in April 1974, which argues that “the Supreme Court has contrasted the broad scope of the inquiry power of the House in impeachment proceedings with its more confined scope in legislative investigations. From the beginning of the Federal Government, presidents have stated that in an impeachment inquiry the Executive Branch could be required to produce papers that it might with‐hold in a legislative investigation.” Others are more skeptical—like Alan Baron, a former attorney for the House judiciary committee on four judicial impeachments, who has cautioned that impeachment proceedings don’t “make all the problems go away.” Certainly—as was suggested during our conversation on the Lawfare podcast last month—we would expect members to ask different kinds of questions during hearings if the goal is to establish a case for impeachment than if they are doing more general investigative work. But that is a separate issue from whether impeachment proceedings would meaningfully change the process members can use to obtain information in committee, the kind of material the committee could obtain and the speed at which the committee would be likely to obtain it. The answer to all these questions is: It depends.While several House committees are engaged in oversight work that could bear on an impeachment inquiry, the House judiciary committee, which would conduct impeachment hearings, will be our focus here. Historically, the initiation of impeachment proceedings has had implications for the way the judiciary committee obtains relevant material. But broader changes in congressional rules and procedures in recent years mean that today’s judiciary committee may not need the same kind of special powers it was granted as part of previous impeachment inquiries.The impeachment proceedings against both Presidents Nixon and Clinton began with a vote by the full House of Representatives directing the judiciary committee “to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach” the president in question. In both cases, the resolution granted several specific powers to the committee for it to use in the course of completing the investigation with which it was charged by the full House. First, the authorizing resolutions outlined procedures for issuing subpoenas. Second, the measures laid out a process for taking staff depositions.Specifically, the Nixon and Clinton resolutions allowed subpoenas to be issued by the chairman and the ranking minority member “acting jointly.” If either declined to act, the individual proposing the subpoena could issue it alone unless the other requested the issue be referred to the full committee for a vote. (Alternatively, the full committee vote could be the first step in the process.) As described in the 1998 report from the judiciary committee accompanying the authorizing resolution, this approach balances “maximum flexibility and bipartisanship.”It was important for the House to enhance the judiciary committee’s subpoena powers in 1974 and 1998 because of the state of the chamber’s rules at the time. In 1974, only a few House committees had subpoena power under the rules of the House—though other committees, including the judiciary committee, were granted subpoena authority through separate investigative authorizing resolutions reported from the House Committee on Rules in each Congress. As part of broader reforms to the committee system that took effect in 1975, the House provided all committees with subpoena power as part of the rules. In 1977, the House adopted a rule change that allowed individual committees to, if they wished, delegate the power to issue subpoenas to the chairman alone, without the need to consult the full committee. But in 1998, when the House commenced impeachment proceedings against Clinton, the judiciary committee had no such provision granting that authority to its chair.Indeed, until recent years, unilateral subpoena power was relatively rare for House committee chairs. But between the 113th and 114th Congresses, the number of chairs given this power by their committees doubled—and the judiciary committee was among them. The judiciary committee chair retains this authority in the current Congress; its rules stipulate that “a subpoena may be authorized and issued by the Chairman … following consultation with the Ranking Minority Member.” And while Chairman Jerrold Nadler indicated in January 2019 that he would hold votes on any subpoenas to which Ranking Member Doug Collins objected, the rules do not specifically require that he do so. The need to seek full House authorization for expanded subpoena powers as part of an impeachment inquiry, then, is not as pressing as it was in 1974 or 1998.There has been a similar evolution in the rules surrounding depositions taken by committee staff, which allow committees to pursue additional information without imposing on members’ time and in a private setting that may be more likely to produce candor from witnesses. Under practices in place in 1974 and 1998, deposition power for committee staff was periodically authorized by the full House for the purpose of specific investigations. The resolutions authorizing both the Nixon and Clinton impeachment proceedings granted the judiciary committee this authority.Since 1998, however, the rules of the House governing staff depositions have evolved to give committees access to the tool more regularly. In 2007, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was given the ability to set its own rules “authorizing and regulating the taking of depositions by a member or counsel of the committee.” In 2015, the House gave four committees (Energy and Commerce; Financial Services; Science, Space, and Technology; and Ways and Means) the ability to conduct staff depositions; this power was initially granted for the first session of the Congress only but was later extended to the second session. Under subsequent rules issued by the House Committee on Rules for the conduct of such depositions, “at least one member of the committee shall be present … unless the witness to be deposed agrees in writing to waive this requirement.” In 2017, the rule permitting staff depositions was extended to cover almost all standing committees, and the member attendance requirement was modified such that it did not apply if the committee authorized the staff deposition to take place when the House was not in session.In January 2019, the opening day rules package for the 116th Congress again provided committee chairs with the authority to order the taking of a deposition; under the current rules, either a member or committee counsel is permitted to do so. Members may participate, but their presence is not required. So the judiciary committee already has the power to conduct staff depositions and does not need a special grant of authority to do so.Yet while today’s judiciary committee already has some of the useful powers for impeachment proceedings available, it could pursue additional procedural items if the House chooses to specifically authorize impeachment. For example, under a resolution introduced by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Al Green directing the judiciary committee to “inquir[e] whether the House of Representatives should impeach” President Trump, the power to take depositions and affidavits would be extended to “any subcommittee or task force designated by the [Judiciary] Committee,” and depositions could be taken by “consultants” as well as members and staff. The Tlaib/Green resolution also provides for additional funding for the judiciary committee in the context of an impeachment inquiry. (The 1974 resolution authorized the committee to use its existing resources on the investigation, and while funding was not addressed specifically in the 1998 resolution, there had been an earlier dispute in the 105th Congress about whether additional resources allocated to the committee were meant to prepare for possible impeachment.)It is worth noting that in both 1974 and 1998 impeachment proceedings, the House judiciary committee voted to give the president procedural rights in the committee’s deliberations. The president and his counsel were invited to attend all executive session and open committee hearings, and the president’s counsel was entitled to cross-examine witnesses, make objections regarding the pertinence of evidence, respond to the evidence produced and even suggest additional evidence the committee should receive. Attorney James D. St. Clair represented Nixon before the House judiciary committee during the impeachment proceedings, essentially arguing that Nixon’s statements looked bad but were not criminal. Although St. Clair was not a government employee and was acting as Nixon’s private attorney, he insisted at the time that he was representing the office of the presidency rather than Nixon personally: ''I don't represent Mr. Nixon personally …. I represent him in his capacity as president.'' He made his final arguments before the House judiciary committee in July 1974 as it prepared articles of impeachment against Nixon. During the House judiciary committee’s proceedings to consider impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, Clinton’s private attorney David Kendall questioned Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for an hour.The current judiciary committee would not be bound by precedents to afford the president these same procedural rights, but committees often adhere to precedents unless there is a good reason to deviate. One can imagine President Trump sending Attorney General William Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, White House Special Counsel Emmet Flood or his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to the House impeachment proceedings to take full advantage of such rights in televised proceedings. He could even show up personally. So while impeachment proceedings do not unlock significant new procedural avenues for the judiciary committee, they could, in theory, afford the president more opportunities to inject himself or his lawyers into the spotlight.Impeachment proceedings may also give the judiciary committee a stronger case for obtaining certain materials protected from disclosure by statute, like the grand jury materials from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Under Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, certain people—including the government attorney presenting the case—involved in a grand jury proceeding “must not disclose a matter occurring before the grand jury.” There are certain exceptions in the statute that would allow a judge to authorize disclosure for certain specified purposes, including “preliminarily to or in connection with a judicial proceeding.”As we wrote on Lawfare last month, there is some historical precedent for the House judiciary committee to obtain such information from the court—most notably in the context of the Watergate impeachment proceedings. The relevant court opinion relied largely on a theory of inherent judicial authority, rather than an exception in statute, to turn the Watergate “road map” over to the House judiciary committee.But on April 5, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that judges don’t have inherent authority to release grand jury materials and must instead rely solely on exceptions outlined in Rule 6(e). So if the committee wishes to access that information, Nadler will likely need to convince the judge overseeing the Mueller grand jury that release of materials to the committee is “preliminarily to or in connection with a judicial proceeding.” Bottom line: It is easier to argue that an open impeachment proceeding is akin to a “judicial proceeding” than it is to argue that any run-of-the-mill oversight activities are preliminary to a judicial proceeding.There are also important questions about whether impeachment proceedings would produce compliance with congressional subpoenas—by either the executive branch or the courts.The White House’s principal justification for its current stonewalling strategy for ongoing House investigations would not be relevant in the context of impeachment. On April 24, the president told reporters, “We’re fighting all of the subpoenas,” and Cipollone’s May 15 letter supplies various legal arguments in support of this approach. First, the letter relies heavily on the argument that there is no legitimate “legislative purpose” for the request. (Congress’s general investigative powers are derived from its power to legislate.) Whatever the merits of this argument, it would simply not be relevant in the context of impeachment proceedings, because the power to impeach is contained in an entirely separate and discrete section of the U.S. Constitution.Second, the letter argues that even if a legitimate legislative purpose can be articulated, committees have limited authority to explore in detail any particular case of alleged wrongdoing, because Congress does not need such details in order to craft legislative fixes. Again, this would likewise not be relevant in the context of impeachment proceedings. The decision of whether to impeach requires the development of a detailed, backward-looking factual record of specific conduct by the president. While it is of course possible the White House could come up with different theories for stonewalling in the context of impeachment proceedings, these two arguments would fall away, leaving only arguments related to executive privilege to be made before the courts.Beyond the substance, it’s unclear whether courts would consider and decide such cases more quickly in the context of impeachment proceedings than similar cases pursued under the Congress’s investigative authority. One district court judge expedited consideration of one of the current investigative impasses—the House oversight and reform committee’s quest for Trump’s financial and accounting records from Mazars—and ruled in favor of the committee. Trump has already appealed the case, and it is unclear how long this appeal and similar appeals will take. Moreover, the case does not involve any claims of executive privilege. Sorting out the scope of executive privilege is the most thorny and time-consuming issue in cases involving congressional requests for information from the executive branch.We think it is entirely possible—probable even—that judges would recognize the primacy of impeachment proceedings against the president of the United States and expedite consideration of such cases. The case of U.S. v. Nixon—in which the Supreme Court ruled that the president had to turn over the infamous Oval Office recordings to the special prosecutor—was decided just over three months after the relevant grand jury subpoena had been issued. That was a criminal investigation, so the analogy is not entirely apt, but we think it reasonable to assume courts would take a similarly expeditious view in the context of a subpoena issued pursuant to impeachment proceedings. Of course, it is worth remembering that the Supreme Court has never decided a case concerning a congressional subpoena for information issued to an executive branch official where the president has asserted executive privilege. In theory, the Supreme Court could decide the issue is a political question and leave it to the other two branches to sort out in some other way.What House Democrats ultimately choose as a course of action remains to be seen, Recent comments from Pelosi about how President Trump may “self-impeach” are open to several different interpretations about where Democratic leaders are headed. The uncertainty at hand isn’t just a matter of politics; it’s also a matter of information: what members of Congress would get and how they would get it.
It has been a month since the public release of the Mueller report, and House Democrats are still arguing over the merits of opening an impeachment inquiry. The Democratic leadership seems to be more or less in the same place it was immediately after the report’s release, when House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, before walking his comments back, told the press that impeachment proceedings were “not worthwhile.” Even after Republican Rep. Justin Amash called for the president’s impeachment over the weekend, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that she had not changed her mind about the downsides of an impeachment inquiry. But both the Washington Post and Politico have reported on dissent within Pelosi’s caucus, particularly among Democratic members of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and some of that disagreement is now spilling over into the public eye: The committee’s second-ranking Democrat, Mary Gay Scanlon, announced on May 21 that “the time has come to start an impeachment inquiry,” and Rep. Jamie Raskin of both the judiciary and oversight committees argued in the Post that “the logic of an impeachment inquiry is pretty overwhelming at this point.”Shortly after the report’s release, Susan Hennessey and I wrote that if the House of Representatives “wants to actually confront the substance of the report, it will introduce a resolution to begin an impeachment inquiry.” The same is true today. The need for an inquiry is, as Raskin says, “overwhelming”—but the longer the House waits to take up its constitutional responsibility, the more it weakens its own case.As Hennessey and I argued, the president’s conduct as described in the Mueller report amply meets the standard for beginning an impeachment inquiry. President Trump has lied repeatedly to the American people about the existence of a plot by a foreign government to interfere in a democratic election, and about his campaign’s connections to that plot; he repeatedly sought to abuse his power by impeding or doing away with an investigation into his own behavior; and he pressed for groundless investigations into his political opponents. Influenced by the Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC) opinion prohibiting indictment of a sitting president, the special counsel withholds judgment on whether Trump committed a crime. But the report itself hints that, even with the door closed to prosecution, judgment of Trump’s conduct is squarely the responsibility of Congress.The president’s behavior in the four weeks since then has not been mitigating. In fact, he has pushed again for the abuse of the law enforcement power to harm his opponents—this time, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his family. And he has adopted a posture of stonewalling all congressional requests for information in the many ongoing inquiries into him. This conduct echoes the third article of impeachment adopted against President Nixon in 1974, which accused Nixon of having “failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives[.]”This stonewalling seems to have played a role in shifting sentiment toward an impeachment inquiry within the judiciary committee’s majority. Rep. David Cicilline announced on May 20 that it would be “time to begin an impeachment inquiry” if the president impeded the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn before the committee. Trump directed McGahn not to testify hours later. Likewise, Scanlon’s letter refers to McGahn’s absence as an “inflection point,” arguing “[t]he President’s refusal to provide evidence or permit witness testimony defies not only the rule of law but the basic protections of our Constitution.” And Raskin linked the conduct described in the report to Trump’s recalcitrance before Congress: “The evidence came galloping off the pages of the report and into the halls of Congress. He now refuses to cooperate with any committee of Congress. He’s ordering his subordinates not to comply with subpoenas and not to appear as witnesses.”Despite an adverse district court ruling, the president has shown no indication of softening his attitude toward Congress. So perhaps the longer the House waits to begin an inquiry, the more evidence will inevitably stack up against Trump as far as the matter of congressional obstruction goes. But this is not a reason for delay. The longer the House waits, the more it sends the message that the conduct described in the Mueller report is not, in itself, enough to merit impeachment proceedings—and the more it weakens its own potential argument that such proceedings are a matter of moral and constitutional necessity, rather than the Trump camp’s refrain that they are a bare political calculation. After all, if the president’s obstructive acts, as set out in the Mueller report, were sufficiently dire as to demand an investigation into whether he had violated his constitutional obligations, surely the proper thing would have been to begin that investigation right away. And for that reason, delaying impeachment proceedings signals that the devastating material in the report is not really so devastating at all.The moral urgency of impeachment can only remain ripe for so long. To keep dithering is to move closer and closer to Gerald Ford’s infamous definition of an impeachable offense as “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history,” instead of understanding impeachment as a constitutional check inflected by politics but chiefly to be used against unacceptable abuses of power. (The OLC memo prohibiting prosecution of a sitting president argues that “the constitutionally specified impeachment process ensures that the immunity [from prosecution] would not place the President ‘above the law.’”) In a time when the major challenge to constitutional government is the president’s repeated breaches of norms, it will do little good for the House to abandon impeachment’s role as a mechanism for setting certain presidential behavior beyond the pale.In 1974, Charles Black wrote:The election of the president (with his alternate, the vice-president) is the only political act that we perform together as a nation …. No matter, then, can be of higher political importance than our considering whether, in any given instance, this act of choice is to be undone, and the chosen president dismissed from office in disgrace. Everyone must shrink from this most drastic of measures.The initiation of impeachment proceedings is, as Black wrote, “drastic.” But the solemnity of the act does not mean it should never be undertaken—only that Congress should behave with seriousness befitting the situation. And at this point, for the House to write off the availability of impeachment as a remedy to the current crisis is not constitutionally serious.