Trump’s Immunity Claim for McGahn Greeted Skeptically by Judge
Trump’s Immunity Claim for McGahn Greeted Skeptically by Judge
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump’s claim that former White House counsel Don McGahn can’t be questioned by the House Judiciary Committee was met with skepticism from a Washington federal court judge deciding whether to compel the lawyer’s testimony.
“We don’t live in a world in which your status as a former executive branch official shields you from giving information,” U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said at a hearing Thursday.
House Democrats sued to force McGahn’s testimony earlier this year after he failed to comply with a subpoena that required him to appear before the judiciary committee on May 21. The subpoena was issued just days after the Justice Department made public Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
McGahn was a key figure in the Trump White House when former FBI director James Comey was fired, and as the president tried to dissuade then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation. The special counsel’s pointed refusal to clear Trump of obstruction sparked the legislators’ interest in McGahn, prompting the inter-branch showdown.
The Washington hearing came just hours after the House of Representatives formally voted to pursue the impeachment inquiry launched by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sept. 24. As lawyers argued over McGahn’s testimony, another federal judge in the same courthouse was dealing with a similar issue relating to the testimony of former Deputy National Security Adviser Charles Kupperman.
He had asked Judge Richard Leon to rule whether he must obey a House subpoena to testify, or White House orders not to. Leon scheduled a hearing for Dec. 10.
“We know for a fact that absolute immunity is not the rule,” House General Counsel Douglas Letter told Jackson during the McGahn hearing.
The White House lawyer can avoid answering specific questions when the president’s executive privilege is invoked but Trump can’t issue a blanket assertion that McGahn can’t be questioned at all, Letter and his co-counsel Megan Barbero argued.
Justice Department lawyer James Burnham said the House is only interested in conversations McGahn had with the president, which appeared in Mueller’s report.
“The president gets to shield himself under your theory of the case,” Jackson told the Justice Department lawyer.
Jackson pressed the Justice Department’s lawyer on McGahn’s status as a former administration official, noting he stepped down a year ago. She asked whether Trump could assert the privilege to stop others from speaking publicly forever.
Burnham said he didn’t believe being a former member of the administration should matter, telling the judge “it doesn’t make sense” that the president would lose the power to assert immunity once somebody left the administration.
“It seems odd to me that it survives your exit,” Jackson said.
Jackson, a 2013 nominee of President Barack Obama, said she’d rule as soon as possible.
The case is Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn, 19-cv-2379, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
To contact the reporters on this story: Andrew Harris in Washington at aharris16@bloomberg.net;Gerald Porter Jr. in Washington at gporter30@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider, Peter Blumberg
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.