On March 4, Democrats launched a sweeping probe into President Donald Trump and dozens of his associates with a request for documents to assist in any investigations. At the time, the White House said that it would respond at an appropriate time, but with the deadline coming and going on Monday, the document request is going unanswered, according to CNN .
The House Judiciary Committee requested documents from 81 officials to help determine whether or not the president has abused his power while in office, as The Inquisitr previously reported. The documents requested include details on the firing of FBI Director James Comey, discussions around firing Robert Mueller and hush money payments Trump was alleged to have made to women with whom he had an affair.
So far, eight of those individuals have provided a response, with one more person sending the documents, but they haven’t been received yet. A few other individuals have referred the committee to the White House, including former White House counsel Don McGahn and former deputy counsel Annie Donaldson. The White House hasn’t responded at all yet.
Trump’s White House has been reluctant to provide requested information in the past on numerous occasions. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler sent a request to the White House over Trump’s national emergency declaration to use government funds to build the southern border wall. The February 22 deadline came and went without a response from the president. According to Politico , all told, Democrats have made 17 document or witness requests over the past two months. None of those have been answered with the requested information.
This means that Congressional Democrats are going to have to fight for the information that they want. This could mean lengthy court battles that could take years.
Trump’s team of outside attorneys informed Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and his committee that they would not be handing over any documents https://t.co/pkYRWIY2vp
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 18, 2019
David Bossie, a Trump advisor, says that the president is taking the correct approach in answering Democrats’ demands.
“The White House is taking the exact right tactic to ignore the requests and see what comes of it,” he said. “I wouldn’t respect [the Democrats’] process.”
Nadler calls the president’s lack of response “stonewalling” while being interviewed on MSNBC .
“The White House and the executive branch generally has been stonewalling the Judiciary Committee…” Nadler said. “They’ve been doing everything they can to have witnesses say ‘I won’t talk to you about conversations with the president, I won’t talk to you about this, I won’t talk to you about that,’ without asserting executive privilege. And they have no right to do that.”
