House panel seeks Trump documents from 81 individuals and organizations

A House of Representatives panel led by Democrats sent document requests to 81 individuals and organizations associated with Donald Trump on Monday, in the most aggressive play yet by the newly installed Congress to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the president.

Recipients of requests from the House judiciary committee included the president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump; son-in-law Jared Kushner; Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization; former attorney general Jeff Sessions; former communications director Hope Hicks; the Trump inaugural committee; and former White House lawyer Don McGahn.

Also in receipt of requests were Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct firm at the heart of the Facebook data harvesting scandal and Alexander Nix, who was its chief executive. Rob Goldstone, the British PR executive who set up an infamous meeting between Donald Trump Jr and a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016, was also listed as a recipient. Requests were sent to Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, and the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who remains within the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Recipients were given two weeks to respond, failing which they could be hit by legally binding subpoenas.

“Over the last several years, President Trump has evaded accountability for his near-daily attacks on our basic legal, ethical and constitutional rules and norms,” the House judiciary committee chairman, Jerrold Nadler, said. “We will act quickly to gather this information, assess the evidence, and follow the facts where they lead with full transparency with the American people.”

While Nadler said “impeachment is a long way down the road”, the main allegations under investigation – public corruption, obstruction of justice and abuse of power – could be the foundation for an impeachment case against Trump.

“We do not now have the evidence all sorted out and everything to do an impeachment,” Nadler said in an interview on Sunday on ABC. “Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen.”

Asked on Monday by reporters to respond to the Democrats’ play, Trump suggested he had nothing to hide.

“I cooperate all the time with everybody,” he said. “You know the beautiful thing – no collusion. It’s all a hoax.”

Before sending its document requests, the judiciary committee cleared its plan with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating alleged cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and with prosecutors in New York investigating alleged corruption inside Trump’s inaugural committee and other matters, Nadler said.

In a separate action against Trump, three other House committees requested documents from and interviews with personnel of the White House, executive office of the President and state department, related to communications between Trump and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

“According to media reports, President Trump, on multiple occasions, appears to have taken steps to conceal the details of his communications with President Putin from other administration officials, Congress, and the American people,” chairmen of the intelligence, foreign affairs and oversight committees said in a joint statement.

“These allegations, if true, raise profound national security, counterintelligence and foreign policy concerns, especially in light of Russia’s ongoing active measures campaign to improperly influence American elections.”

A detailed breakdown of the document requests from the judiciary committee indicated the panel would focus on the conduct of Trump and associates after he took office, in addition to Trump campaign activities.

From Kushner, the committee demanded any correspondence relating to topics that ranged from the firing of the former FBI director James Comey to the recusal of Sessions from oversight of the Russia investigation.

Last month the committee announced it had hired two outside lawyers – Norm Eisen, an ethics official under Barack Obama, and Barry Berke, a defense attorney – to help shape its investigation of Trump. Eisen and Berke co-authored a Brookings Institution study laying out grounds for Trump’s possible impeachment called Presidential obstruction of justice: The case of Donald J Trump.

In reply to the accusation by conservative commentators that they had mounted a fishing expedition, Democrats on the judiciary committee said Republican leadership in the last Congress had failed in its oversight role.

“The Republican leadership of the judiciary committee has done everything they can to try to shift attention away from everything the president is doing,” Democrat Ted Deutch told CNN. “We are now going to focus like a laser. That’s why we’re starting with these requests.”

Nadler said: “We have sent these document requests in order to begin building the public record. This is a critical time for our nation, and we have a responsibility to investigate these matters and hold hearings for the public to have all the facts. That is exactly what we intend to do.”

As the 2020 presidential race begins to take shape, Trump is beset by investigations in multiple jurisdictions and by a hostile Congress, with an approval rating mired around 40% – not enough to win re-election, to judge by any historical comparison.

He closed February with a fruitless trip around the world to meet the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, while his former lieutenant Michael Cohen testified on Capitol Hill that Trump ordered him to commit crimes.

Cohen was the recipient of a three-page document request from Nadler’s committee. As in other requests, the committee is seeking information from Cohen on a broad range of topics, from business outings in Russia to “the contents of meetings between President Trump and Vladimir Putin” on three different dates.

At the weekend, Trump delivered a tortuous and manic address at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.

“You know I’m totally off script right now and this is how I got elected, by being off script,” he said. “And if we don’t go off script, our country’s in big trouble, folks, because we have to get it back.”

He also described Democratic-led oversight efforts focusing on his finances as “bullshit”.

(THE GUARDIAN)