Schiff Says Trump Stonewalling Would Amount to Obstruction

(Bloomberg) -- The Democrat leading the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump said any efforts by the administration to stymie demands for documents and witnesses would amount to direct evidence of obstruction.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff also accused Trump of making a “blatant” attempt to intimidate the whistle-blower who raised concerns about his conduct and prevent other witnesses from coming forward.

The various House panels investigating Trump are moving with “a real sense of urgency” but are prepared to take the administration to court if necessary to force cooperation, Schiff said at a news conference Wednesday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“We want to make it abundantly clear that any effort by the secretary, by the president, or anyone else, to interfere with the Congress’s ability to call before it relevant witnesses, will be considered obstruction of the lawful functions of Congress,” Schiff told reporters at the Capitol.

Schiff and Pelosi spoke hours before a meeting among House Democrats on next steps in the impeachment inquiry and a hastily scheduled meeting involving multiple House and Senate committees requested by the State Department’s inspector general.

Pompeo Subpoena

The subject of the meeting with the inspector general hasn’t been publicly revealed. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has been subpoenaed to provide documents by Friday to House committees, but it wasn’t clear whether those documents are the subject of Wednesday’s briefing.

That subpoena demands that Pompeo produce, among other things, “a full list of any department officials who participated in, assisted in preparation for, or received a readout of the July 25 call” between Trump and the Ukraine president.

Separately, Schiff and two other House chairmen threatened on Wednesday to subpoena the White House if it fails to produce documents they’re seeking regarding the Ukraine call. The White House has refused to provide documents that were first requested more than three weeks ago, the chairmen said.

“Over the past several weeks, the committees tried several times to obtain voluntary compliance with our requests for documents, but the White House has refused to engage with—or even respond to—the committees,” Schiff, Representatives Elijah Cummings, the chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee, and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, wrote.

Schiff’s panel also is expecting to hear from Trump’s former special Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and the intelligence community’s inspector general in the coming days.

Attacks by Trump

As Schiff and Pelosi were speaking, Trump tweeted attacks on the Democrats and the impeachment inquiry and continued his criticism from the Oval Office during a meeting Wednesday with the president of Finland.

Trump also attacked the whistle-blower from U.S. intelligence who filed a complaint that said some White House officials were alarmed that Trump had abused his power by allegedly pressuring the president of Ukraine to investigate a political rival, Democrat Joe Biden.

Democrats have been negotiating with the whistle-blower’s lawyers for a deposition. Schiff said Trump’s tweets and comments don’t change any of the facts surrounding his conversation with the Ukraine president.

“It is hard to imagine a more corrupt course of conduct” than Trump’s pressuring the Ukraine president to investigate Biden, Schiff said. Republicans who dismiss the call as not rising to the level of an impeachable offense “are going to have to answer, if this conduct doesn’t rise to the level of concern the founders had, what conduct does?”

Samuel Everett Dewey, a lawyer who formerly led investigations for House and Senate committees, said Pompeo and the White House have a clear right to raise legal objections to some of the Democrats’ information requests -- and in some cases seek to have administration lawyers in the room -- based on executive and classified privileges.

“If you are making a legally valid objection -- it’s crazy for him to just declare that’s obstruction,” Dewey said. Instead, he said the process is for the committee to receive the objection and make a ruling on it, typically through a vote.

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