White House Denies House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler’s Document Request ‘political theater pre-ordained to reach a preconceived and false result’

CAP

By Joshua Caplan

The White House said Wednesday that it is rebuffing the House Judiciary Committee’s request to hand over documents regarding topics broadly focused on 2016 Trump presidential campaign figures.

“The White House will not participate in the Committee’s ‘investigation’ that brushes aside the conclusions of the Department of Justice after a two-year-long effort in favor of political theater pre-ordained to reach a preconceived and false result,” a letter sent by White House counsel Pat Cipollone reads, according to ABC News.

Democrats launched a sweeping probe of President Trump in March, an aggressive investigation targeting eighty-one individuals and entities requesting records as part of their investigation ”into the alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption, and other abuses of power by President Trump, his associates, and members of his Administration.”

Cipollone wrote that Nadler’s investigation is “duplicative” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into now-debunked collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and requested that the committee seek a more “narrow” scope.

“Congressional investigations are intended to obtain information to aid in evaluating potential legislation, not to harass political opponents or to pursue an unauthorized “do-over” of exhaustive law enforcement investigations conducted by the Department of Justice,” argued the White House general counsel.

Former Trump campaign chief Stephen K. Bannon and the National Rifle Association (NRA) are among several figures and groups that have provided documents or responses to the panel.

President Trump has previously denounced the probe, tweeting that Nadler and other Democrats “have gone stone cold CRAZY. 81 letter sent to innocent people to harass them. They won’t get ANYTHING done for our Country!”

Nadler has said that the document requests, with responses to most that were due by March 18, are a way to “begin building the public record.”

“Over the last several years, President Trump has evaded accountability for his near-daily attacks on our basic legal, ethical, and constitutional rules and norms,” the New York Democrat said upon launching the probe. “Investigating these threats to the rule of law is an obligation of Congress and a core function of the House Judiciary Committee.”

Separate congressional probes are already ongoing, including an effort announced by three other House Democrat chairmen to obtain information about private conversations between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In a letter to the White House and State Department, the House intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight and Reform panels sent broad requests for details about President Trump and Putin’s private meetings by phone and in person. In addition to document requests, the committees are asking to interview interpreters who sat in on meetings, including a one-on-one session in Helsinki, Finland, last summer.

The State Department pledged to “work cooperatively with the committees.”

The AP contributed to this report. 

Biden: ‘Not a Single Bit of Evidence’ Son Asked Me to Help Him in Ukraine

CAP

By Charlie Spiering

Former Vice President Joe Biden denied Monday that his son Hunter Biden asked him for a favor in Ukraine while serving on the energy board of a Ukrainian energy company.

“We never once discussed it when he was there,” Biden told the Associated Press. “There’s not a single bit of evidence that’s been shown in any reporting that’s been done that he ever talked about it with me or asked any government official for a favor.”

When he was vice president, Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine if officials did not fire the country’s top prosecutor, who was pursuing a corruption investigation of an energy company while his son Hunter was serving on the board.

The connection was revealed in author Peter Schweizer’s best-selling book Secret Empires,and the reporting was confirmed in the New York Times.

Hunter Biden was paid as much as $50,000 per month while serving on the board, as his father led the Obama administration’s policy with Ukraine.

Biden’s “not a single bit of evidence” defense echoes former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s repeated assertion that there was no evidence of improper paybacks after she approved the Uranium One deal — despite receiving $145 million in pledges and donations for the Clinton Foundation.

Biden’s Ukraine connection made recent headlines after President Donald Trump’s personal attorney suggested he would travel to Ukraine to investigate the issue before ultimately deciding against it.

Biden criticized Giuliani for even considering the idea.

“I can’t remember any lawyer representing the president, conferring with the president, deciding to go overseas, where a government relies on U.S. largesse to try to get them to do something that everybody knows never happened,” Biden said during an interview with WMUR.

In the same interview, he also pointed to the reporting surrounding the conflict of interest.

“All the reports indicated that not a single, solitary thing was inappropriate about what my son did. He never talked to me. He never talked to anybody in the administration,” Biden said.

In his interview with the Associated Press, Biden defended his son’s role on the board.

“I have great confidence in my son,” he said. “He’s a man of great integrity.”

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