‘This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.' - A Yellow Wall Nightmare

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Former White House counsel Dean describes parallels between Trump and Nixon

Former White House counsel John W. Dean III testified Monday about parallels between President Trump and his former boss, Richard M. Nixon, at the first hearing of the House Judiciary Committee aimed at understanding Robert S. Mueller III’s findings.

“In many ways the Mueller report is to President Trump what the so-called Watergate roadmap … was to President Richard Nixon,” said Dean, whose congressional testimony in 1973 ultimately led to the resignation of Nixon. “Special counsel Mueller has provided this committee with a roadmap.”

While acknowledging he was not a “fact witness” on the Mueller report, Dean highlighted similarities he saw between the two presidents, particularly on the matter of pardons and whether they were used to obstruct justice.

Mueller identified 10 potential cases of obstruction of justice by Trump in his report, but the former special counsel said his office could neither clear nor accuse Trump of obstructing his investigation, citing a long-standing Justice Department opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

Committee Republicans mocked Democrats for bringing in Dean — a name from a bygone era who has a CNN contract — and several other former U.S. attorneys who have TV contracts. Rep. Douglas Collins (R-Ga.), the top GOP lawmaker on the panel, said if Democrats really cared about stopping Russia interference in future elections, the committee would be asking experts — not cable commentators — to testify.

“I can catch your testimony on TV!” Collins said to the witnesses before pivoting to Dean specifically: “This committee is hearing from the 70s and they want their star witness back.”

He added: “Here we are again with priorities in this committee turned upside down.”

Dean, 80, said the last time he testified before the House Judiciary Committee was July 11, 1974, nearly 45 years ago. Seven of the committee’s 41 members were born after his testimony.

At the White House, Trump dismissed Dean and any notion of impeachment.

“John Dean’s been a loser for many years,” the president told reporters, adding: “You can’t impeach somebody when there’s never been a thing done wrong. When you look at past impeachments, whether it was President Clinton, or I guess President Nixon never got there -- he left. I don’t leave. Big difference.”

The criticism underscores the problem Democrats face in trying to draw attention to Mueller’s findings, particularly because Trump has blocked former White House aides from testifying. Mueller himself has also refused so far to agree to a date to testify publicly, privately expressing worries about being used politically by partisans on both sides.

Democrats have struggled to create blockbuster moments like the one where Dean turned on his former boss and helped bring down a president. Trump’s former White House counsel Donald McGahn, in fact, has refused to testify because the White House told him not to.

Democrats convened the hearing two hours after the panel announced it reached a deal with the Justice Department to obtain “key evidence” related to Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice.

Under the agreement, the panel will have access to interview notes, first-hand accounts and other evidence, according to Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who announced that he would not move to hold Attorney General William P. Barr in criminal contempt of Congress.

The House on Tuesday, however, will vote to authorize the panel to take Barr to civil court to enforce a subpoena for the underlying documents should the documents prove insufficient to investigations.

The 448-page, redacted Mueller report was released on April 18.

Earlier in the day, Trump lashed out at Dean, calling him a “sleazebag” ahead of his appearance at a House hearing.

In tweets, Trump also took aim at House Democrats for continuing to focus on the report by Mueller that details findings of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as well as possible episodes of obstruction of the probe by Trump.

In tweets Sunday night that he retweeted early Monday, Trump claimed that Democrats were “devastated” by Mueller’s findings.

“The Mueller Report was a disaster for them,” Trump wrote. “But they want a Redo, or Do Over. They are even bringing in @CNN sleazebag attorney John Dean. Sorry, no Do Overs — Go back to work!”

Monday’s hearing, convened by Nadler, is billed as: “Lessons from the Mueller Report: Presidential Obstruction and Other Crimes.” Besides Dean, two former U.S. attorneys and a legal scholar are scheduled to appear.

Appearing Monday morning on CNN, Dean said he would draw comparisons in his testimony between actions documented in the Mueller report and the Watergate scandal.

“I’m clearly not a fact witness, but I hope I can give them some context and show them how strikingly like Watergate what we’re seeing now . . . is,” Dean said.

He said he was not bothered by Trump’s tweets.

“He’s called me nasty names before,” Dean said. “It doesn’t bother me in the slightest.”

A growing number of Democrats have called for launching an impeachment inquiry against Trump, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has continued to counsel a more deliberate course.

In public remarks May 29, Mueller said his office could not consider whether to charge Trump with a crime because of a long-standing Justice Department opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Mueller, who resigned as special counsel the same day, repeated a line in his report explaining that his team would have exonerated Trump of obstruction if it could have.

That remark emboldened Democrats who would like to see impeachment proceedings launched, despite a determination by Attorney General William P. Barr that Trump’s actions did not warrant obstruction charges.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway also took aim at Dean on Monday during an interview on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”

“They’re picking their lawyers from TV now,” she said of the House Democrats, adding that Dean had spoken out against Trump’s nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.

“He’s not a credible person,” Conway said of Dean.

House Republicans had already started trying to discredit Dean as a witness before Trump’s tweets. For his role in the Watergate scandal, Dean pleaded guilty to obstructing justice and later was disbarred and served four months in federal prison.

“So let me get this straight,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a Trump ally, wrote in a tweet last week. “The DOJ determined that President Trump did not obstruct Justice. But to make the case that he did, @RepJerryNadler is bringing in John Dean, who was actually found guilty of obstructing justice and was disbarred as a result!”

Trump also took aim at Mueller on Monday, tweeting a video clip in which a Fox News host and his guest spoke disparagingly of the special counsel’s report.

The clip is from an episode last month of “Life, Liberty and Levin.” In it, host Mark Levin offers his assessment of the report to John C. Eastman, a law professor.

“So the report is really a bunch of crap, isn’t it?” Levin says.

“Well it is,” Eastman replies.

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John Dean’s compelling case for parallels between Trump and Watergate

The star witness of Watergate took a turn as the star witness for House Democrats’ inquiries into President Trump on Monday. And in doing so, he laid out a compelling series of parallels between the two situations.

Former White House counsel John Dean acknowledged at the start of Monday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing that he wasn’t there as a “fact witness.” Instead, he noted in his opening statement several ways in which he sees the report of former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III echoing Watergate.

Dean didn’t run through each of those verbally during his testimony, but his written statement lays his case out in detail.

The most obvious parallel Dean noted involved himself: It concerns the role of the White House counsel. Just as he was the most significant witness against Richard M. Nixon, former White House counsel Donald McGahn has emerged as the most significant witness in the Mueller investigation. McGahn didn’t technically flip on Trump, as Dean did when he pleaded guilty in Watergate, but as Dean pointed out, “McGahn is the only witness that the special counsel expressly labels as reliable, calling McGahn ‘a credible witness with no motive to lie or exaggerate given the position he held in the White House.' "

Dean noted that the Mueller report was spurred by Russian hacks targeting the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, just as Watergate began with a botched burglary of the DNC. The burglars also had similar plans, he pointed out, for the campaign of Nixon’s 1972 Democratic opponent, George McGovern.

Dean noted that the Mueller report didn’t find that Trump participated in that underlying crime, just as there is no evidence that he knows of “that Nixon was involved with or had advance knowledge of the Watergate break-in and bugging.”

Dean likened Nixon telling chief of staff H.R. Haldeman to get the FBI and CIA to end their investigations for national security reasons to Trump trying to get then-FBI Director James B. Comey to take it easy on Michael Flynn. Trump remarked to Chris Christie, “Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over.”

“The words Nixon used were strikingly like those uttered by President Trump,” Dean said. “Nixon said, 'And, ah, because these people are playing for keeps … they should call the FBI and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period. And that destroys the case.”

Dean also lent his endorsement to one of the most popular parallels of the entire investigation: between the “Saturday Night Massacre” and Comey’s firing in May 2017. “In short, the firing of FBI Director Comey, like Nixon’s effort to curtail the Watergate investigation,” Dean said, “resulted in the appointment of Special Counsel Mueller.”

Dean also compared Trump’s repeated efforts to get McGahn to change his story about Trump trying to fire Mueller to Nixon’s effort to get Dean to claim he had investigated the Watergate break-in and found nothing.

“Nixon first announced on August 29, 1973, that I had investigated the situation under his direction and found ‘nobody presently employed at the White House had anything to do with the bizarre incident at the Watergate,’ ” Dean said. “Since I had conducted no such investigation, I resisted months of repeated efforts to get me to write a bogus report.”

Similarly, Dean noted Trump’s role in drafting the misleading initial explanation of Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Clinton. Dean compared it to the initial news release claiming no connection between the Watergate burglars and the White House. “The press statement was false,” Dean said. “As Nixon’s secret tape recordings reveal, President Nixon knew the statement was false.”

Finally, Dean compared Trump’s dangling of pardons — both implied and express — to E. Howard Hunt’s lawyer seeking assurances from Nixon’s counsel that Hunt, who helped carry out the Watergate burglary, wouldn’t go to prison. Dean included two instances in which Nixon acknowledged knowing that the promise was improper. “I was wrong to offer clemency to Hunt, wasn’t I?” Nixon asked Dean at one point, to which Dean responded: “Yes, Mr. President, that would be an obstruction of justice.”

Dean is hardly the first person to draw these parallels between the Mueller report and Watergate, but he is one of the most authoritative. And his opening statement was a detailed recounting of just how much this situation is like deja vu for him.

That doesn’t mean the two scenarios are completely analogous, though. A key difference is that Nixon was on tape for much of his scheming, while Trump’s motive is the X Factor in his potential obstruction of justice. Trump denied Mueller’s request for an interview, meaning that we’re left to evaluate his frame of mind based upon his contemporaneous public comments.

But Dean made clear Monday that he hopes there’s one last parallel between the two.

“In many ways, the Mueller report is to President Trump what the so-called Watergate ‘road map’ … was to President Richard Nixon,” Dean said. “Stated a bit differently, Special Counsel Mueller has provided this committee a road map.”

The question is what that “road map” leads to — and whether that’s another threatened impeachment.

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Stepping up Trump clash, House votes to enforce Barr and McGahn subpoenas

The House took its strongest step yet in the standoff with President Trump over congressional oversight, voting Tuesday to seek court enforcement of subpoenas for Attorney General William P. Barr and former White House counsel Donald McGahn.

On a party-line vote of 229 to 191, the House passed a resolution that would empower the House Judiciary Committee to go to court against Barr and McGahn over noncompliance with requests for documents and testimony.

The vote keeps Democrats squarely on a meticulous investigative track favored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other top leaders — and away from the formal impeachment inquiry that some 60 rank-and-file Democrats and several 2020 presidential candidates have been seeking.

Still, the House vote reflects the frustration among Democrats with Trump’s unwillingness to cooperate with congressional investigators who argue they have a constitutional right to examine the executive branch.

“We are here today because the times have found us,” said Pelosi, quoting one of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, in remarks on the House floor. “While we do not place ourselves in the same category of greatness as our founders, we do recognize the urgency of the threat to our nation we face today.”

In fact, shortly before the House vote, a new clash erupted between the administration and Congress. Barr said he will ask Trump to assert executive privilege to shield documents on the administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census if the House Oversight Committee moves ahead Wednesday on holding Barr in contempt.

The Justice Department letter revealing the threat came on the eve of an expected Oversight Committee vote to hold Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for failing to turn over documents lawmakers had subpoenaed and stopping a witness from testifying without a Justice Department lawyer.

Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote that the decision to schedule the vote was “premature” and accused lawmakers of refusing to negotiate with the department to get at least some of what they wanted.

The vote and moves by the congressional committees have hardened the divide between the two parties.

House Republicans lambasted the House vote as a distraction from bigger issues facing the country, including the southern border crisis. Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) borrowed one of Trump’s favorite descriptions, calling the vote “presidential harassment.”

“When you go around the country, you don’t hear people saying they want to continue going down this rathole of witch hunts and impeachments,” he told reporters. “They’re on this witch hunt, this search to fund something, as opposed to focusing on the problems of this country.”

Democrats have already gone to federal judges in Washington and New York to seek enforcement of subpoenas targeting Trump’s financial records that are in the possession of private companies. They have scored initial wins in trial courts, but appeals are likely to play out over the coming months — a sluggish timeline that has fueled the push for impeachment.

The vote stops short of a criminal contempt citation, a more serious sanction, and it comes a day after the Justice Department agreed to begin providing materials gathered by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during his nearly two-year probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Still, Democrats cast the vote as their most serious move yet in a campaign to hold Trump accountable for his actions to derail Mueller’s investigation.

“Who does this president think he is?” asked Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee. “He carries on like a dictator or a crime boss, publicly saying things like, ‘We’re fighting all subpoenas’ and ‘I don’t want people testifying.’ In the United States of America, no one is above the law.”

House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said: “This is a dark time. This Congress is being tested — in this case, not by a foreign adversary but by our own president.” He added that Trump’s blanket policy of not complying with congressional subpoenas makes President Richard M. Nixon “look like an Eagle Scout.”

Speaking at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s Fiscal Summit on Tuesday, Pelosi said “not even close” to a majority of House Democrats favor launching impeachment proceedings against Trump, and would not say whether she would allow an inquiry to proceed if most Democrats favored one.

“Why are we speculating on hypotheticals?” Pelosi asked. She also argued that Trump’s attacks on her — he called her a “a nasty, vindictive, horrible person” last week — have only bolstered her political standing.

“My stock goes up every time he attacks me,” said Pelosi.

Heading to Iowa, Trump told reporters that Pelosi “is a mess” and criticized Democrats’ investigations.

“All they do is waste time where there is no obstruction, no collusion. And in the meantime, we can’t get anything done,” said the president. “We need them to work on illegal immigration, on drug prices, on infrastructure.”

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a Judiciary Committee member, said the aggressive tactics helped force the Justice Department to make at least some of Mueller’s material available to Congress after a months-long standoff.

“They’ve begun to recognize that we are going to function like a separate and coequal branch of government,” he said, contrasting Democrats’ posture with that of the prior Republican majority: “They consistently bent the knee to Donald Trump. That is something we will refuse to do. And we are going to make it clear that no one is above the law, one way or the other.”

Barr’s agreement to make some of Mueller’s materials available has at least temporarily forestalled any enforcement action. The Justice Department’s understanding when it reached a deal with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) was that while the committee would proceed with Tuesday’s resolution vote giving the committee authorization to sue, it would not actually file a suit if the Justice Department held up its end of the bargain, according to a U.S. official. The department never viewed the resolution as holding the attorney general in contempt, the official said.

Nadler confirmed in floor remarks Tuesday that enforcement of the Barr subpoena would be held “in abeyance for now.” But he said the House would take action to secure testimony from other former and current Trump officials.

“This unprecedented stonewalling by the administration is completely unacceptable,” he said.

The Judiciary panel could move swiftly to ask a judge to order testimony from McGahn, who was a key witness in Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice during the probe. The committee could also petition a federal judge to release protected grand-jury materials gathered in the probe, which underpin many of the key sections that Justice Department officials redacted from Mueller’s report.

McGahn so far has declined to testify pursuant to a White House legal opinion holding that close presidential advisers cannot be compelled to testify. “Mr. McGahn remains obligated to maintain the status quo and will respect the president’s instruction,” his attorney, William A. Burck, told the committee last month.

Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.), a Judiciary Committee member, said it will be up to Nadler to determine how to proceed against McGahn but predicted little hesi­ta­tion.

“I think he’s made it clear that he is very committed to getting Mr. McGahn before the committee as quickly as possible,” Cicilline said.

Tuesday’s vote also does nothing to bring Mueller himself before the House for testimony, whether public or private. Many Democrats say that a high-profile hearing starring the former FBI director is the best opportunity they have to refocus public attention on Trump’s alleged misdeeds — and build the case for impeachment.

“I hope we don’t have to subpoena him. But if we do, we will,” Nadler told reporters.

A Judiciary Committee hearing Monday featuring former Nixon counsel John W. Dean III and legal experts, for instance, did little to change sentiments on Capitol Hill, and it did not appear to generate any nationally relevant moments that could make a broader impact on public opinion.

“The most important thing from my perspective remains public testimony from Bob Mueller,” Jeffries said after that hearing.

The panel is also seeking the testimony of two other Trump aides, former communications director Hope Hicks and Annie Donaldson, a top aide to McGahn. Those subpoenas were not targeted for enforcement in the resolution passed Tuesday, but it permits the committee to seek authorization from the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, a special panel of top House leaders controlled by Democrats — sidestepping the need for future floor votes.

The chairman of nearly any House committee, in fact, now has the ability to seek authorization from the group to “initiate or intervene in any judicial proceeding before a federal court” to enforce any duly issued subpoena.

The vote “lends credence to a narrative that ‘We are in a process, now let that process play out,’ ” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of an Oversight subcommittee. Pelosi “will be able cite some evidence that it is working. I don’t know that that is an overwhelmingly convincing case because critics can point to where it is not working or where it will take way too long.”

But Connolly said it was important that the resolution streamlined the process for enforcing future subpoenas: “There’s real power now behind committee chairmen issuing a subpoena.”

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Donald Trump Jr. to appear for second Senate Intelligence Committee interview Wednesday

Donald Trump Jr. will return to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for a second closed-door interview with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to people familiar with the plans, as part of a deal he struck with leaders last month after the panel issued a subpoena for his testimony.

Under the terms of that deal, the president’s oldest son is expected to spend about four hours with the committee answering a limited number of questions, according to people familiar with the terms — including queries about a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer promising incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.

Trump Jr.’s participation in that meeting has made him a focus of several probes, including special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Congressional Democrats believe that Trump Jr. may have lied to them during previous testimony about the meeting and whether he told his father about it — suspicions that were heightened after the publication of Mueller’s report.

The report documented former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s recollection of a phone call between the then-candidate and his son, in which Trump Jr. told his father about a meeting to collect “adverse information” on Clinton. Cohen is serving a three-year jail term for lying to Congress and financial crimes.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has expressed a reticence to explore perjury charges for Trump Jr., reasoning that if Mueller had access to the transcript of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s first interview with Trump Jr., he likely would have indicted him if there were reason to do so.

But the risk that others might accuse the president’s son of lying nonetheless complicated Burr’s efforts to bring Trump Jr. in for additional testimony. After it was revealed last month that the Senate Intelligence Committee had subpoenaed his testimony, several of President Trump’s congressional Republican allies took the unprecedented step of openly urging Trump Jr. to flout the committee’s summons or invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and refuse to answer the panel’s questions.

In the end, the deal Trump Jr. struck with the panel requires him to field questions on six broad topics, reduced from a list of 10. In addition to the Trump Tower meeting, the president’s son is expected to tell senators what he knew about the president’s plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and how long into Trump’s campaign those efforts continued.

Trump Jr.’s Wednesday interview on Capitol Hill was first reported by CNN.

Trump Jr. is one of several witnesses that the Senate Intelligence Committee is bringing back to its chambers for a second interview aimed at giving members an opportunity to engage with key figures in the investigation before they will be asked to sign off on the panel’s final report. Its long-running investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 presidential elections has been largely staff-run and is widely considered to be the most bipartisan probe into the matter in Congress.

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Former White House aide Hicks agrees to testify to House panel investigating Trump

Hope Hicks, a top aide to President Trump during his 2016 campaign and his first year in the White House, has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee next Wednesday, according to people familiar with the matter.

Hicks will be the first former Trump aide to go before the committee investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. But Hicks might not answer many of the panel’s questions, citing the president’s assertion of executive privilege on events that occurred inside the White House.

Earlier this month, the White House instructed Hicks not to cooperate with a congressional subpoena for documents related to her White House service.

Robert Trout, a lawyer for Hicks, declined to comment.

The testimony will occur behind closed doors, said the individuals, but a transcript will be released to the public. A member of the White House Counsel’s Office will be present for the testimony as part of the deal between Hicks and the committee, according to an individual familiar with the planning who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely describe the arrangements.

The testimony marks a significant breakthrough for the committee. It has struggled to secure witnesses and evidence amid a fight with the White House and took the unusual step earlier this week of bringing in John W. Dean III, a lawyer from Richard Nixon’s White House, to talk about obstruction. The committee also wants to hear from Donald McGahn, the former White House counsel at the center of the Mueller report on Russian interference, and Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, among others. But Trump has said he does not want any of his advisers to cooperate, calling the probe a “do-over of Mueller’s probe.

 Hicks was one of five aides formally subpoenaed by the committee — which is probing the obstruction question, among other issues. Mueller’s report said there was insufficient evidence to show a conspiracy between Russia and any Trump associates and decided not to reach a conclusion about whether the president committed obstruction, based on long-standing Department of Justice policy.

Hicks began working for Trump before he announced his candidacy and has been a trusted confidante for three years, shaping his image, managing his moods and counseling him on nearly all matters, from the substantive to the trivial. She was well-liked in Trump’s West Wing and held inordinate power due to her close relationships with the family, even as she acknowledged to colleagues that she was not a policy guru. She often spent hours in the Oval Office every day, and the president affectionately called her “Hopey.”

She was present for many of the most contentious episodes during both the campaign and in the White House before she left the West Wing in February 2018, and she has kept in occasional touch with the president and some of his closest advisers.

Hicks told others in the White House that she hated Washington and was looking forward to another chapter of her life. She now works at Fox News in Los Angeles as a public relations executive.

Hicks was interviewed by Mueller and the House Intelligence Committee, and her departure from the White House came within 48 hours of her telling the committee that she had told “white lies” for Trump.

In a letter sent to the committee last week regarding documents, Trout drew a distinction between records the committee requested that pertained to the campaign, when Hicks served as a senior adviser, and documents related to her White House service. He agreed to turn over documents regarding her campaign activities. But he indicated that White House sign-off was needed for documents related to her time in the White House.

Uh oh.

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Rick Gates and Michael Flynn subpoenaed by House intel panel

The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday issued subpoenas to two former Trump officials who pleaded guilty and cooperated in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

The intelligence panel said it had subpoenaed former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The pair pleaded guilty in the special counsel's probe before cooperating with the investigation, and their testimony is cited in Mueller's report.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff's decision to subpoena the Mueller witnesses signifies a new facet in the House Democrats' investigations into President Donald Trump, as it's the first subpoenas issued to targets of the Mueller probe.

The House Judiciary and Intelligence committees are operating on dual tracks in their examinations of the Mueller investigation: House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler has issued subpoenas to former White House officials who figured prominently in the special counsel's obstruction investigation, while Schiff has now subpoenaed officials cited in the special counsel's investigation into Russian election interference.

"As part of our oversight work, the House Intelligence Committee is continuing to examine the deep counterintelligence concerns raised in Special Counsel Mueller's report, and that requires speaking directly with the fact witnesses," Schiff, a Democrat from California, said in a statement. "Both Michael Flynn and Rick Gates were critical witnesses for Special Counsel Mueller's investigation, but so far have refused to cooperate fully with Congress."
The subpoenas to Flynn and Gates request they provide documents later this month and appear before the panel on July 10.

The House Intelligence Committee has interviewed former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen as part of its sweeping probe that Schiff kicked off earlier this year, which is examining Russian election interference as well as Trump's finances and possible foreign influence.

Schiff had put off other interviews, including with Trump business associate Felix Sater, while the committee focused on obtaining the Mueller report. But Thursday's subpoenas are a sign that the committee is returning to its interviews as Democrats seek to highlight and publicize what was uncovered in the Mueller investigation.

In the Judiciary Committee's investigation, the White House has directed those subpoenaed not to provide documents regarding their time in the Trump administration. The White House directed former White House counsel Don McGahn not to testify under subpoena, while former White House communications director Hope Hicks is appearing later this month behind closed doors but may not answer some questions because of claims of executive privilege.

It's unclear how Flynn and Gates will respond to Schiff's subpoenas. Both are still under cooperating agreements with the Justice Department and have yet to be sentenced after their guilty pleas. Flynn retained a new lawyer this week who has promoted conspiracy theories about Mueller's team.

The letter to Flynn includes a note about his cooperation with the Justice Department, which prompted the special counsel to recommend little to no jail time, arguing that the cooperation should include Congress.

"While the committee understands that your cooperation agreement with the Department of Justice only requires you to testify for the department, the committee is disappointed that you do not view your cooperation more broadly as an obligation to assist the United States of America, not merely the Department of Justice," Schiff wrote.

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