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White House Invited to Participate in Impeachment Hearing Next Week
White House Budget Official Said Two Aides Resigned Amid Ukraine Aid Freeze Concerns
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday invited President Trump’s legal team to participate in its first public impeachment hearing next week, when lawmakers plan to convene a panel of constitutional scholars to inform their debate over whether the president’s actions warrant his removal from office.
WASHINGTON — Two officials at the White House budget office resigned this year after expressing concerns about President Trump’s decision to hold up congressionally approved security assistance to Ukraine, a third aide at the office told impeachment investigators, revealing dissent within a key agency about Mr. Trump’s insistence on freezing the money.
The Judiciary Committee announced it had scheduled the hearing, “The Impeachment Inquiry Into President Donald J. Trump: Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment,” for Dec. 4 without specifying witnesses. But Democratic officials, speaking on condition of anonymity before the witness list was finalized, said it would feature prominent legal experts who could testify about constitutional precedent and the history of impeachment.
Mark Sandy, an official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, told the House Intelligence Committee in a private interview this month that one official who “expressed some frustrations about not understanding the reason for the hold” resigned in September at least in part because of those concerns.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the Judiciary Committee chairman, wrote a letter to the president Tuesday afternoon notifying him of the hearing and offering his lawyers a chance to question the witnesses. The actions signaled that Democrats are moving quickly to begin a new phase of the impeachment inquiry, shifting from a complex investigation of Mr. Trump’s actions into a consequential debate over whether they warrant the use of the House’s powers under the Constitution to try to remove a sitting president.
A second co-worker, an official in the legal division of the office, also resigned after offering a “dissenting opinion” about whether it was legal to hold up the aid, according to a transcript of Mr. Sandy’s testimony released on Tuesday.
The process will be based in large part on the factual record of a pressure campaign on Ukraine by the president and his allies that the House Intelligence Committee is assembling into a report it is likely to submit to the Judiciary Committee next week. The hearings will unfold against a backdrop of intense political polarization and bitter partisan feuding, less than a year before Mr. Trump faces re-election.
He did not identify either official, and it was unclear how senior they were or how directly their resignations were tied to their concerns over the withholding of the aid. But Mr. Sandy’s account of their departures — after weeks of unanswered questions inside the budget office about why Mr. Trump had directed the congressionally approved military funding to be frozen — underscores the depth of the pushback inside the agency about a decision that many officials believed was legally questionable and potentially dangerous for Ukraine.
Mr. Nadler asked the White House to inform him by Sunday if the president or his lawyer wants to participate in the initial hearing, and reminded Mr. Trump that House rules empower him as chairman to curtail that involvement if “you continue to refuse to make witnesses and documents available” related to the inquiry.
The issue is at the core of the impeachment inquiry, in which Democrats have charged that Mr. Trump abused his power to enlist Ukraine in smearing his political rivals, in part by withholding a nearly $400 million package of security aid the country desperately needed while insisting that its leaders announce investigations of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.
“I remain committed to ensuring a fair and informative process,” Mr. Nadler wrote. “To that end, I remind you that the participation of the president or his counsel has been described by the committee in past inquiries as ‘not a right but a privilege or a courtesy which is being extended to the president’s counsel.’ I am hopeful that you and your counsel will opt to participate in the committee’s hearing, consistent with the rules of decorum and with the solemn nature of the work before us.”
Mr. Trump has insisted he never pressured Ukraine for the investigations or made the aid contingent upon them, and was instead withholding the money out of concern over corruption in Ukraine and a desire to have other countries pay their fair share. But several diplomats and national security officials have testified that the move generated discord at the State Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council, where top officials were mystified about the decision and worried about its security implications for Ukraine, as well as the legal implications of denying money allocated by Congress.
The White House did not immediately respond to the letter or a request for comment. Mr. Trump’s allies have complained bitterly for weeks that the president’s legal team did not have a seat at the table during the Intelligence Committee’s investigation, but they have also sought to avoid any action that could be seen as giving it legitimacy.
Mr. Sandy testified that he was informed that the aid freeze came directly from Mr. Trump, who he was told began inquiring about the assistance package on June 19, after seeing a media report. Mr. Sandy learned of Mr. Trump’s decision to put a hold on the aid through a July 12 email from Robert Blair, a top aide to Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff.
The first Judiciary Committee hearing will probably take place just as the intelligence panel sends its written report summarizing the findings of its two-month investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to enlist Ukraine in discrediting his political rivals. In the coming days, Democrats could schedule another hearing for the Intelligence Committee to formally present its work to the judiciary panel.
That email, which Mr. Sandy received nearly a week before other administration officials have said they learned that the aid had been frozen, indicated that “the president is directing a hold on military support funding for Ukraine,” he told impeachment investigators.
The Judiciary Committee is expected to use that report and possibly other, earlier evidence of possible misconduct by the president detailed in the Mueller investigation to draft articles of impeachment in the coming weeks.
In an indication of the level of frustration about the situation inside the budget office, Mr. Sandy said that he and others repeatedly asked his superiors for a rationale for why the security assistance had been frozen, but were never given one.
That schedule would put the House on track to potentially vote on articles of impeachment before lawmakers leave Washington for Christmas, setting up a trial in the Senate early next year. The Judiciary Committee convened a similar panel of expert witnesses in 1998 when it began debate over whether to impeach President Bill Clinton.
“It was an open question over the course of late July and pretty much all of August, as I recall,” Mr. Sandy said. He said he spoke with the co-worker who left in September after his departure and concluded that the resignation was in part because no answer to that question ever came.
“I think you want to know: What are you doing here? What are the standards? What are the rules?” Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, a senior Democrat on the panel, said of the first hearing.
Mr. Sandy is the only official at the budget office to testify in the impeachment inquiry. Several others, including Russell T. Vought, the acting director of the office, have refused to appear.
The letter from Mr. Nadler initiated what is likely to be a high-stakes legal and political dispute between the two sides over what rights the president and his legal team should be afforded.
This is a breaking story. Please check back for updates.
In modern times, the Judiciary Committee has allowed presidents facing similar proceedings an active role, inviting them to recommend witnesses for testimony, conduct cross-examinations and present a defense through their lawyers. The Judiciary Committee chairman and a majority of the committee always had final say over the president’s requests.
But Washington today finds itself in a vastly different situation than it did in the case of Mr. Clinton and President Richard M. Nixon. Whereas those leaders grudgingly engaged with Congress — at least to some extent — as it built impeachment cases against them, Mr. Trump’s White House has thus far responded only by declaring the House’s inquiry illegitimate and refusing to cooperate. The president himself has gone further, savaging the Democrats leading the inquiry, peddling falsehoods about his own actions and attacking impeachment witnesses, many of whom still work for his administration.
That has left Democrats uncertain on how to approach Mr. Trump’s role in the process. If the president is unwilling to engage with the allegations under debate or recommends that the committee call witnesses related to two unproven theories about Democrats that he pressed Ukraine to investigate, they are wary of offering him a prominent platform to broadcast what they believe amounts to counterprogramming, according to officials working on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe their strategy.
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.
But if they deny Mr. Trump his say, they fear, the process could lose legitimacy in the eyes of voters and Republicans in the Senate who would ultimately decide whether to convict Mr. Trump if the House impeaches him.
Democrats have included in the House rules governing the inquiry a provision that allows Mr. Nadler to deny the White House a role if he determines the president is unlawfully defying Congress’s requests. A key question will be whether Mr. Nadler, in consultation with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, chooses to exercise that provision.
For now, Mr. Nadler has extended an open hand for the president and his team.
“At base, the president has a choice to make: He can take this opportunity to be represented in the impeachment hearings, or he can stop complaining about the process,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement. “I hope that he chooses to participate in the inquiry, directly or through counsel, as other presidents have done before him.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Trump framed his decision to block key aides from testifying before Congress as a matter of preserving the powers of his office. He said he would otherwise be happy to let figures like John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser; Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff; and Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel, testify before the impeachment inquiry, implying without explanation that they could help his case.
“I am fighting for future Presidents and the Office of the President,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Other than that, I would actually like people to testify.”
Mr. Trump was reacting to a federal court ruling on Monday holding that Mr. McGahn and other top presidential aides like him were not absolutely immune from congressional testimony as the White House has asserted. The Justice Department appealed that ruling on Tuesday, meaning that neither Mr. McGahn nor others named by Mr. Trump are likely to appear on Capitol Hill any time soon.
Democrats leading the inquiry have made clear that regardless of court rulings, they intend to hold Mr. Trump’s noncooperation orders against him. The Intelligence Committee plans to catalog efforts by the White House to obstruct its requests for testimony and documents for use in a possible article of impeachment charging Mr. Trump with undermining a valid inquiry of Congress.
And Democrats have indicated they will draw an “adverse inference” in cases in which witnesses do not appear, assuming that the White House is shielding their testimony because it would have corroborated the case against Mr. Trump.
