House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler has finally had enough, and is going forward with impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, among other things.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said Friday that negotiations with former White House counsel Don McGahn over an outstanding subpoena for his testimony, but if the outstanding issues are not resolved soon, the committee plans to go to court to seek enforcement of the subpoena early next week.
Nadler told reporters at the Capitol that the committee would also be filing an application for the grand jury material underlying former special counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
"The Department of Justice policies will not allow prosecution of a siting president," Nadler said. "The House is the only institution that can now hold President Trump accountable for these actions. To do so, the House must have access to all the relevant facts."
He added, "We will continue to seek testimony from key fact witnesses," and he added that "our work will continue into the August recess."
McGahn, who was prominently featured in the Mueller report, told the special counsel's team during hours of interviews that the president had ordered him to fire Mueller, and he refused. He has already defied a subpoena by the House panel, declining to testify when the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel claimed executive privilege.
Asked about the growing calls among the Democratic caucus to file articles of impeachment for Mr. Trump, Nadler did not rule out the possibility.
"We may decide to recommend articles of impeachment at some point. We may not," he said. Several of Nadler's colleagues referred to their next step in their inquiry as an "impeachment investigation" into the administration.
This is the Pelosi plan: get the information necessary to impeach Donald Trump into the hands of House Democrats. Whether or not SCOTUS will agree, or whether or not this will be tied up in the courts until a Trump second term, we don't know.
But the dice have been rolled. This path, by the way, is exactly what Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent recommended this morning.
Fortunately, there is an answer to this problem: The House Judiciary Committee can launch an impeachment inquiry independently, without any vote by the full House.
In an interview, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, suggested to me that it’s only a matter of time until the committee formally considers drafting articles of impeachment on its own.
“Somebody has to write articles of impeachment to focus this investigative and analytical process,” Raskin told me. “If not the Judiciary Committee, who is going to do it? This is our job.”
Raskin suggested that this is where the process is inevitably heading already.
“The Constitution leaves it up to Congress how to structure impeachment proceedings,” Raskin told me. “There are many different ways to get there. It can arise from floor action. It can arise within the Judiciary Committee itself.”
“I’m convinced that articles of impeachment are going to originate from the House Judiciary Committee,” Raskin said. “The question is just when.”
The timeline on the inquiry part of impeachment has been answered, and that is now.
No wonder then that Trump is now specifically calling for investigations into President Obama and Hillary Clinton.
President Trump on Friday lashed out at Democrats over their ongoing investigations into his administration, suggesting there should instead be probes into former President Obama's book deal and other activities under his predecessor.
"They want to investigate, they want to go fishing and I watched Bob Mueller and they have nothing," Trump said of Democrats during an Oval Office gathering to announce an agreement with Guatemala.
"It’s a disgrace," he continued. "We want to find out what happened the last Democrat president. Let’s look into Obama the way they’ve looked into me. From day one they’ve looked into everything we’ve done."
"They could look into the book deal that President Obama made. Let’s subpoena all of his records," Trump continued. "Let’s subpoena all of the records having to do with Hillary Clinton and all of the nonsense that went on with Clinton and her foundation and everything else."
It's about damned time, Democrats. Trump is terrified and is already lashing out in response to Democrats being serious. He will start putting you in jail in order to save himself if you don't stop him...
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