Judge says McGahn must testify.
WASHINGTON >> Former White House counsel Donald McGahn must testify before House impeachment investigators about President Donald Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Mueller inquiry, a judge ruled Monday, saying that senior presidential aides must comply with congressional subpoenas and calling the administration’s arguments to the contrary “fiction.”
The 120-page decision by Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia handed another lower-court victory to House Democrats in their fight to overcome Trump’s stonewalling. The Justice Department, which is representing McGahn in the lawsuit, will appeal, a spokeswoman said.
“Presidents are not kings,” wrote Jackson, adding that current and former White House officials owe their allegiance to the Constitution. “They do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.”
The Justice Department, which is representing McGahn in the lawsuit, will appeal, a spokeswoman said. Still, the ruling by Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, could have broader consequences for the investigation into the Ukraine affair.
Notably, John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, has let it be known that he has significant information about the Ukraine affair at the heart of the impeachment inquiry but is uncertain whether any congressional subpoena for his testimony would be constitutionally valid. He wants a judge to decide.
Jackson’s ruling also came on the same day that another federal judge in Washington held out the possibility that more documents about the Ukraine affair could yet see the light of day, ruling that emails between the White House and the Pentagon about the freezing of military aid to Ukraine should be released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
But even as those rulings suggested that more potential evidence for impeachment investigators might become available as the cases play out, House Democrats said the Intelligence Committee would deliver a report soon after Thanksgiving making the case for impeaching Trump, moving forward rather than waiting for the inevitable appeals to drag on.
Several potential witnesses to what Trump said and did to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations that could benefit him politically — like Bolton and Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney — have declined to testify because the administration instructed them not to, claiming that current or former senior officials are constitutionally immune.