
The House Judiciary Committee will ask a federal court on Wednesday to force one of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s star witnesses to testify on Capitol Hill over objections from the White House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in a letter to House Democrats.
The Democrat-led panel is expected to file a lawsuit to enforce a subpoena against former White House Counsel Don McGahn, in a long-awaited effort to secure his testimony and pierce the White House’s blockade against former top advisers testifying about their West Wing tenure.
It’s an effort that could also aid Democrats as they inch closer to impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.White House lawyers, at Trump’s direction and with the help of the Justice Department, have repeatedly intervened to prevent former senior officials from answering lawmakers’ questions and providing documents, broadly asserting that those ex-advisers have “absolute immunity” from discussing matters related to their White House service.
Democrats have vowed to defeat that argument in court, and they have stated that a victory in the McGahn’s case would unlock testimony from a long list of Mueller’s other crucial witnesses. They include McGahn’s top deputy Annie Donaldson and former White House communications director Hope Hicks — both of whom have acquiesced to the White House’s directives.
All three were subpoenaed earlier this year as part of the committee’s wide-ranging investigation into potential obstruction of justice by Trump. McGahn blew off a subpoena in May, depriving the Judiciary Committee of potentially bombshell testimony about Trump’s efforts to thwart the Mueller probe.
Just one of those witnesses, Hicks, has appeared for an in-person interview with the committee.
But White House lawyers objected to hundreds of lawmakers’ questions that centered on her tenure as communications director, allowing her only to address inquiries about her time working on Trump’s presidential campaign.Donaldson, meanwhile, was permitted to answer questions in writing because she lives outside Washington and was pregnant on the date of her subpoena; but she, too, refused to answer questions centering on her tenure as McGahn’s chief of staff, citing the White House’s objections.
Nadler argued that Hicks’ interview and Donaldson’s repeated refusal to answer substantive questions will aid his committee’s lawsuit against McGahn because it illustrates the full extent of the White House’s stonewalling.
“We knew this was going to happen,” Nadler told POLITICO in an interview after Hicks’ closed-door testimony. “The point of it was to dramatize for the court what the implications of this are.”
McGahn’s name appears 529 times in the 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s efforts to impede or constrain the probe.
Mueller’s report chronicles several episodes of potential obstruction of justice by Trump — including some that meet all three elements required for a criminal obstruction charge.
Democrats have said McGahn is perhaps the most important witness because he was involved in what they believe are the most egregious examples of Trump’s efforts to interfere with the Mueller probe or shut it down altogether.
McGahn testified to Mueller’s investigators that Trump directed him to fire the special counsel, and he said the president later asked him to publicly deny the episode and create a false record.
McGahn also provided copious contemporaneous notes to the special counsel’s team, which detailed Trump’s deep frustrations with the Mueller investigation and its seemingly expanding scope. Trump allegedly berated McGahn for even taking notes in the first place.
“What about these notes? Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes,” Trump told McGahn, according to the report, to which McGahn responded that he is a “real lawyer.”
The House has not formally voted to open an impeachment inquiry against the president because Speaker Nancy Pelosi still opposes taking such a step, but last month House Democrats, for the first time, put in writing that they are determining whether to consider articles of impeachment.
That key acknowledgment was included in a court petition filed last Friday in which the Judiciary Committee is seeking permission to view Mueller’s grand-jury evidence, which is kept secret by law. Pelosi signed off on that language, leading many pro-impeachment Democrats to describe the court petition as an inflection point in their efforts to launch formal proceedings.
The House voted in June to empower committee chairs to go to court to enforce subpoenas that have been defied, a procedural move that allowed Democrats to seek court orders upholding subpoenas for McGahn and other individuals ensnared in their myriad investigations targeting the president and his administration.
Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine