Trump Administration Given Deadline to Release Ukraine Documents

(Bloomberg) -- A judge imposed a 30-day deadline for the Trump administration to disclose at least some of the U.S. State Department documents related to the Ukraine influence scandal that spurred the impeachment probe by House Democrats.

The head of the Washington-based watchdog group that sued for release of the records hailed the judge’s order Wednesday as “a crack in the administration’s stone wall,” as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has resisted turning over information to Congress.

The group American Oversight first requested the information in May after President Donald Trump’s lawyer and personal envoy, Rudy Giuliani, made and then canceled a trip to Ukraine to persuade that nation to investigate the business activities of Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The House launched its impeachment inquiry last month in response to a whistle-blower complaint about a July 25 telephone call between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

At a hearing Wednesday in Washington, U.S. District Judge Christopher “Casey” Cooper focused on records related to Giuliani as he holds no official government position, potentially putting communications between him and administration officials outside of applicable exceptions to the federal Freedom of Information Act.

The State Department faces House subpoenas too. Justice Department attorney Elizabeth Shapiro told Cooper that those information demands are “on a separate track” from the requests made by American Oversight and other groups.

The case is American Oversight v. U.S. Department of State, 19-cv-1934, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Harris in Washington at aharris16@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg, Joe Schneider

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