The White House stirred new accusations of obstructing congressional oversight and obscuring access to the facts on Tuesday after President Donald Trump blocked U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland from giving highly-anticipated testimony to three House committees as part of the impeachment inquiry recently opened by Democrats in the House.
Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, had been expected to speak with the House Oversight, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence Committees about his role in Trump’s pressure campaign targeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for help in taking down Trump’s political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was among the critics who wondered what the administration is hiding.
Others on social media, including President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean, suggested Trump’s refusal to allow Sondland to speak amounted to an admission of guilt.
Progressive campaigners urged House Democrats to treat the White House’s decision to block Sondland from speaking as an obstruction of justice and another reason to draft articles of impeachment against the president. The impeachment inquiry now has the support of 58 percent of Americans, according to a new Washington Post-Schar School poll out Tuesday.
“Donald Trump is obstructing justice by blocking Gordon Sondland from speaking to Congress—which is yet another impeachable offense. Americans support the impeachment inquiry and want to see Trump held accountable for his many crimes,” said CREDO Action campaign manager Thaís Marques in a statement. “House Democrats need to move immediately to put forward articles of impeachment with a broad scope to encompass all of Trump’s offenses.”
“The House is on track to effectively lose its subpoena power if it doesn’t take punitive action against this behavior,” tweeted New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, while CREW executive director Noah Bookbinder suggested the White House’s actions on Tuesday could “become a separate basis for the impeachment inquiry.”
The chairmen of the three committees—Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.)—announced Tuesday afternoon that they would issue a subpoena for Sondland, who had volunteered to speak to them preeviously.
Schiff called Sondland’s planned testimony and electronic messages he was scheduled to turn over—whose release the State Department has now blocked—”deeply relevant to the investigation and the impeachment inquiry.”
“We will consider this act today…to be further acts of obstruction of a co-equal branch of government,” Schiff told reporters, adding that the White House has now offered “additional strong evidence of obstruction of the constitutional functions of Congress.”
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