House still plodding along

Escalating a battle with US President Donald Trump, the House of Representatives voted 229 to 191 on Tuesday to authorise civil lawsuits against Trump administration officials who refuse to comply with congressional subpoenas.

The resolution specifically targets Attorney General William Barr and former White House Counsel Don McGahn who have both defied congressional subpoenas related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

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The measure gives House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler and the chairs of other House committees the ability to take swift legal action in federal court to enforce subpoenas without first obtaining full House votes.

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The judicial process could take as little time as a couple of weeks or as much as several months and may involve appeals to the DC Circuit Court or the US Supreme Court.

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The House Intelligence Committee will continue looking into the Mueller probe on Wednesday with a hearing on the counterintelligence implications of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

The House Judiciary Committee has also issued subpoenas to Hope Hicks, Trump's former White House director of communications and to Annie Donaldson, who was McGahn's secretary and who provided extensive testimony to Mueller. Both have been told by Trump's White House lawyers not to testify.

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On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee heard from John Dean, a former White House counsel whose testimony helped bring down former President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

Dean told the House panel that Mueller has provided a "roadmap" for investigating Trump, adding that he sees parallels between the circumstances surrounding Trump and those surrounding Nixon in the 1970s.

  alJazeera

Chairman Adam Schiff (Calif.) and other Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday are set to dig into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia detailed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

The public hearing is a somewhat rare event for the committee, which typically deals in sensitive information, and will feature former FBI officials.

Schiff said Tuesday he is interested in receiving expert testimony on whether the contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow could pose a national security threat even though they were not deemed criminal by Mueller.

“If the president was trying to make money in Russia during the campaign and concealing it, that’s a counterintelligence nightmare. If the campaign chairman was trying to make money from Russians and concealing it, that’s a counterintelligence nightmare. If others in the administration have financial entanglements driving U.S. policy, those are counterintelligence problems of the first order,” Schiff told The Hill.

“None of that is really discussed in that fashion in the report, which is basically a report about prosecutorial decisionmaking. So, we want to flesh out the counterintelligence issues,” Schiff said.Republicans have invited their own witness, a former federal prosecutor and Fox News contributor.

They are likely to train their questions on the original counterintelligence investigation, which they allege was improperly started by agents biased against President Trump during the election. A number of Republicans have also argued the FBI improperly relied on information from the infamous Steele dossier in applying for a warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Notably absent from the committee’s hearing will be Mueller.

  The Hill

And after all the posturing, Junior is back in front of the Senate Intel Committee.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to hear for a second time testimony from the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., on Wednesday. Republican Richard Burr, issued a subpoena for Trump Jr.'s testimony following the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's report.

Trump Jr. walked past cameras, escorted by Capitol police shortly after 9:10 am before his appearance. Walking down a Senate hallway, Trump Jr. smiled and said: "nothing to correct" in response to questions from reporters on why he was appearing before the committee on Wednesday and was he there to correct his previous testimony.

Mr. Trump's son testified before the committee once before in 2017. Trump Jr. had reached an agreement to testify before the committee following the subpoena. His appearance on Wednesday will take place behind closed doors.

  CBS

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