WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Friday took their first concrete steps in the impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump, issuing subpoenas demanding documents from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and scheduling legal depositions for other State Department officials.
At the end of a stormy week of revelation and recrimination, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi framed the impeachment inquiry as a somber moment for a divided nation.
“This is no cause for any joy,” she said on MSNBC.
At the White House, a senior administration official confirmed Friday a key detail from the unidentified CIA whistle-blower who accused Trump of abusing the power of his office. Trump, for his part, insisted anew that his actions and words have been “perfect” and the whistle-blower’s complaint might well be the work of “a partisan operative.”
The White House acknowledged that a record of the Trump phone call that is now at the center of the impeachment inquiry was sealed away in a highly classified system at the direction of Trump’s National Security Council lawyers.
Separately, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the whistle-blower “has protection under the law,” something Trump himself appeared to question earlier in the day. He suggested then that his accuser “isn’t a whistle-blower at all.”
Still at issue is why the rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president was put on “lock down,” in the words of the whistle-blower. The CIA officer said that diverting the record in an unusual way was evidence that “White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired” in the conversation.
The whistle-blower complaint alleges Trump used his office to “solicit interference from a foreign country” to help himself in next year’s presidential election. In the phone call, days after ordering a freeze to some military assistance for Ukraine, Trump prodded new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to dig for potentially damaging material on Democratic rival Joe Biden and volunteered the assistance of his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Attorney General William Barr.
Pelosi refused to set a deadline for the probe but promised to act “expeditiously.” The House intelligence committee could draw members back to Washington next week.
Pelosi said she was praying for the president, adding, “I would say to Democrats and Republicans: We have to put country before party.”
At the White House, it was a senior administration official who acknowledged that the rough transcript of Trump’s conversation with Ukraine’s Zelenskiy was moved to a highly classified system maintained by the National Security Council. The official was granted anonymity Friday to discuss sensitive matters.
White House attorneys were made aware of concerns about Trump’s comments on the call even before the whistle-blower sent his allegations to the intelligence community’s inspector general. Those allegations, made in mid-August, were released Thursday under heavy pressure from House Democrats.
One former official said memos of Trump calls with foreign leaders had to be severely restricted after leaks in 2017. Calls with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Russia’s Vladimir Putin were among those whose distribution were kept to a minimum. The official cautioned that administrations discuss sensitive matters with both nations, and that the treatment shouldn’t imply anything untoward on the call. Even some calls with U.S. allies are also restricted because of discussions of classified topics. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the process.
On the Ukraine matter, Trump was keeping up his full-bore attack on the whistle-blower and the unnamed “White House officials” cited in the complaint, drawing a warning from Pelosi against retaliation.
Late Thursday, Trump denounced people who might have talked to the whistle-blower as “close to a spy” and suggested they engaged in treason, an act punishable by death. Then on Friday, he said the person was “sounding more and more like the so-called whistle-blower isn’t a whistle-blower at all.”
He also alleged without evidence that information in the complaint was “proved to be so inaccurate.”
Pelosi told MSNBC, “I’m concerned about some of the president’s comments about the whistle-blower.”
She said the House panels conducting the impeachment probe will make sure there’s no retaliation against people who provided information in the case. On Thursday, House Democratic chairmen called Trump’s comments “witness intimidation” and suggested efforts by him to interfere with the potential witness could be unlawful.
Trump’s Friday comment questioning the whistle-blower’s status seemed to foreshadow a possible effort to argue that legal protection laws don’t apply to the person, opening a new front in the president’s defense, but Conway’s statement seemed to make that less likely.
The intelligence community’s inspector general found the whistle-blower’s complaint “credible” despite finding indications of the person’s support for a different political candidate.
Legal experts said that by following proper procedures and filing a complaint with the government rather than disclosing the information to the media, the person is without question regarded as a whistle-blower and entitled to protections against being fired or criminally prosecuted.
“This person clearly followed the exact path he was supposed to follow,” said Debra D’Agostino, a lawyer who represents whistle-blowers. “There is no basis for not calling this person a whistle-blower.”
Lawyers say it also doesn’t matter for the purposes of being treated as a whistle-blower if all of the allegations are borne out as entirely true, or even if political motives or partisanship did factor into the decision to come forward.
Giuliani, already in the spotlight, was scheduled to appear at a Kremlin-backed conference in Armenia on Tuesday, but he said Friday he would not attend. The agenda showed him speaking during a session on digital financial technologies. Russian President Vladimir Putin also was scheduled to participate in the conference.
Republicans were straining under the uncertainty of being swept up in the most serious test yet of their alliance with the Trump White House.
“We owe people to take it seriously,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a onetime Trump rival who is now a member of the Senate intelligence committee.
“Right now, I have more questions than answers,” he said. “The complaint raises serious allegations, and we need to determine whether they’re credible or not.”
A swift resolution to the impeachment inquiry might not be easy. The intelligence committee is diving in just as lawmakers leave Washington for a two-week recess, with the panel expected to work while away. One person familiar with the committee’s schedule said members might return at the end of next week.
Findings will eventually need to be turned over to Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s Judiciary Committee, which is compiling the work of five other panels into what is expected to be articles of impeachment. The panel will need to find consensus.
Meanwhile, Trump’s reelection campaign took to accusing Democrats of trying to “steal” the 2020 election in a new ad airing in a $10 million television and digital buy next week.
The ad also attacks Biden, highlighting his efforts as vice president to make U.S. aid to Ukraine contingent on that country firing a prosecutor believed to be corrupt. The ad claims the fired prosecutor was investigating the former vice president’s son.
In fact, the prosecutor failed to pursue any major anti-corruption investigations, leaving Ukraine’s international donors deeply frustrated. In pressing for the prosecutor’s ouster, Biden was representing the official position of the U.S. government, which was shared by other Western allies and many in Ukraine.
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US official: Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine has resigned
WASHINGTON — Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO caught in the middle of a whistle-blower complaint over the President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, resigned Friday from his post as special envoy to the Eastern European nation, according to a U.S. official.
The official said Volker told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday of his decision to leave the job, following disclosures that he connected Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani with Ukrainian officials to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his family over allegedly corrupt business dealings.
Giuliani said he was in frequent contact with Volker about his efforts. The State Department had no immediate comment about his resignation and said only that Volker put Giuliani in touch with an aide to Ukraine’s president.
Pompeo said Thursday that as far as he knew, all State Department employees acted appropriately in dealing with Ukraine.
Volker was brought into the Trump administration by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to serve as envoy for Ukraine. He worked in a volunteer capacity and retained his job as chief of the John McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University. Arizona State’s student newspaper was the first to report his resignation.
