{UAH} Trump Blocked Key Impeachment Witnesses.

By Charlie Savage

At the first House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing, Republicans' witness said lawmakers were rushing the process and should instead let court fights over access to witnesses play out.-- 

Much of the evidence the House uncovered in its inquiry was from witnesses who largely were a degree of separation removed from Mr. Trump himself. As a result, they were unable to say whether the president ever directly and explicitly said he was conditioning a meeting and the securing of funding for the specific purpose of coercing Ukraine's president into announcing investigations that would benefit him politically.

In his longer written statement, Mr. Turley named three men who interacted directly with the president and might know more about what Mr. Trump said behind closed doors about Ukraine: Mr. Trump's former national security adviser, John R. Bolton; his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani; and his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.

Mr. Bolton is known to have opposed what Mr. Giuliani was doing for Mr. Trump with Ukraine, met directly with Mr. Trump to discuss the frozen aid to Ukraine in August and has coyly indicated that he knows something important that Congress does not yet know.

"There remain core witnesses and documents that have not been sought through the courts," Mr. Turley wrote, adding that the House "is moving forward based on conjecture, assuming what the evidence would show if there existed the time or inclination to establish it."

But Mr. Turley made only a passing reference in his written statement to the problem that has bedeviled impeachment investigators: The White House has directed top aides to Mr. Trump not to cooperate with the House, while asserting that they are immune from being subpoenaed to testify about their discussions with the president.

Mr. Bolton, for example, has refused to testify unless and until a judge orders him to, and has made clear he will file a lawsuit to put the matter into court if he receives a subpoena rather than deciding for himself whether Congress's claimed power to compel his testimony, or the president's claimed power to block lawmakers from receiving it, should prevail.

The Trump legal team's claim of absolute immunity for top presidential aides has been a losing one in court. A Federal District Court judge already rejected it in a 2008 case involving a congressional subpoena to Harriet Miers, President George W. Bush's former White House counsel. Another trial judge rejected it again late last month, in a case centering on a subpoena to Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump's former White House counsel.

But the legal unraveling of Mr. Trump's argument has been a slow process. The opening stage of the fight over the subpoena to Mr. McGahn consumed nearly a third of the year before the judge completed a 120-page ruling rejecting it. The Justice Department then immediately appealed. It can repeat that process before a three-judge panel, and then again before the full appeals court and then before the Supreme Court.

And even if the Supreme Court ultimately orders such an official to show up for testimony, he could then refuse to discuss conversations with Mr. Trump on the ground that their contents are privileged. That would start a new cycle of litigation.

That means that for the witnesses Mr. Turley identified as having potentially material additional information, the Justice Department would very likely be able to keep the subpoena tied up in court until long after the 2020 election.

But Mr. Turley said that Mr. Trump was "allowed" to go to court and that it would be an abuse of power for Congress to treat that as an impeachable act of obstruction. He pointed to lower-court rulings against the president in subpoena cases like Mr. McGahn's as "an example of what can happen if you actually subpoena witnesses and go to court" — even though those lower-court rulings took months to achieve and were immediately appealed.

Allan

 

--
Disclaimer:Everyone posting to this Forum bears the sole responsibility for any legal consequences of his or her postings, and hence statements and facts must be presented responsibly. Your continued membership signifies that you agree to this disclaimer and pledge to abide by our Rules and Guidelines.To unsubscribe from this group, send email to: ugandans-at-heart+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ugandans at Heart (UAH) Community" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ugandans-at-heart+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ugandans-at-heart/CABfZXG2ZoF-XRGq1FASag%3D%2B5vhDgOnPC0FEZO4f2zXSJQ1aavw%40mail.gmail.com.