NEW YORK - Donald Trump has said he is opposed to current and former White House aides testifying to congressional committees about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference, the Washington Post reported.
In an interview with the newspaper, the US president claimed his administration cooperated with Mueller’s investigation and did not need to comply with congressional committees examining possible obstruction of justice on his part.
“There is no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress where it’s very partisan – obviously very partisan,” Trump told the Post. “I don’t want people testifying to a party, because that is what they’re doing if they do this.”
The remarks pointed to a deepening power struggle between the White House and Congress as shockwaves from the Mueller report continue to reverberate in Washington.
The House oversight committee has been investigating security clearances issued to senior officials, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former White House aide Rob Porter.
There is no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress where it’s very partisan – obviously very partisan
The committee subpoenaed Carl Kline, a former White House personnel security director, following testimony from a whistleblower that dozens of people in the administration were granted security clearances despite “disqualifying issues” in their backgrounds. But on Tuesday Kline, following White House instructions, did not turn up for a scheduled deposition.
Congressman Elijah Cummings, chairman of the committee, said the administration has adopted the “untenable” position that it can ignore requests from Democrats, who assumed the majority in January.
“It appears that the president believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight,” Cummings said in a statement.
Cummings is consulting with other members and staff about scheduling a vote to hold Kline in contempt of Congress. He told the MSNBC channel: “We will hold a vote of our committee shortly to hold him in contempt and then we will check with House counsel ... to see where we go from there.”
The White House has blocked the oversight panel in various investigations. On Monday, Trump and his business organisation sued Cummings to prevent a subpoena that seeks years of the president’s financial records, arguing that it “has no legitimate legislative purpose”.
Cummings said the White House “has refused to produce a single piece of paper or a single witness” in any of the committee’s investigations this year.
A spokesman for the top Republican on the oversight panel, Jim Jordan, said Cummings was choosing confrontation over cooperation. “Chairman Cummings rushed to a subpoena in his insatiable quest to sully the White House,” Russell Dye told the Associated Press.
Officials also said the administration plans to fight a subpoena issued by the House judiciary committee chairman Jerry Nadler for ex-White House counsel Donald McGahn by asserting executive privilege over his testimony, according to the Post. The Mueller report chronicles how McGahn ignored many of Trump’s directions to obstruct justice and fire Mueller.
Hogan Gidley, the White House deputy press secretary, told Fox News’s America’s Newsroom: “What I am concerned about … is that Democrats like Jerry Nadler continue to try to attack this president and attack members of this administration repeatedly.
“He’s not going to learn anything else about Don McGahn or this administration that Bob Mueller didn’t find in two years of wasted time and energy. The only thing he is going to gain quite frankly, are maybe some political allies at the far left who are conspiracy theorists and think somehow it was a sham.”
On yet another front, the White House defied a demand from the ways and means committee chairman, Richard Neal, to turn over six years of Trump’s tax returns by the close of business. In a letter to Neal, the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, asked for more time and said he would give the panel a final decision by 6 May.
Mnuchin is consulting with the justice department “due to the serious constitutional questions raised by this request and the serious consequences that a resolution of those questions could have for taxpayer privacy”, he wrote.
The White House and Congress could be digging in for a long battle all the way to the courts. Speaking at the Time 100 Summit in New York, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “Now we see the administration engaging in stonewalling of the facts coming to the American people.”
