Mulvaney asks to join lawsuit over conflicting demands for impeachment testimony
Last edited Sat Nov 9, 2019, 11:35 AM - Edit history (1)
Source: Washington Post
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Friday asked to join a federal lawsuit seeking a judicial ruling on whether Congress can compel President Trump’s senior advisers to testify in the impeachment inquiry. The lawsuit was originally filed late last month by Charles Kupperman, a former top national security aide to Trump, who said he faced conflicting orders from House Democrats and the White House over whether he must participate in the investigation and needed the court to tell him what his constitutional duty was. Attorneys for Mulvaney said the acting chief of staff was facing the same dilemma.
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Mulvaney earlier this week and threatened to hold him in contempt if he refused to comply. In response, White House counsel Pat Cipollone instructed him not to testify, saying Mulvaney, who skipped his scheduled deposition Friday morning, was protected by “constitutional immunity” that extended to all of Trump’s current and former senior advisers. The questions raised in the case “go to the heart of our representative government and its promise to secure individual liberty by dividing the awesome power of government amongst itself,” Mulvaney’s attorneys, Christopher Muha and William Pittard, wrote in the filing.
Mr. Mulvaney, like Mr. Kupperman, finds himself caught in that division, trapped between the commands of two of its co-equal branches — with one of those branches threatening him with contempt,” they wrote. “He turns to this Court for aid.” Mulvaney’s request, if granted, would add further weight to a lawsuit that could have far-reaching effects on the House’s inquiry into the president’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rivals.
Democrats are keen on hearing from Mulvaney, who has emerged as a central player in consequential decisions involving Ukraine. Mulvaney effectively admitted in a news conference last month that the administration withheld U.S. military aid to Ukraine to muscle the country’s leaders into launching investigations that could help Trump politically. He later tried to walk back the remarks, but Democrats consider them to be a key piece of evidence in their impeachment case.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/09/mulvaney-asks-join-lawsuit-over-conflicting-demands-impeachment-testimony/
ETA - CNN has a copy of the court filing here (viewer) - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6544134-Mulvaney.html#document/p1
= new reply since forum marked as read
particularly after he insisted on national TV that there was a "quid pro quo" and that everyone does that. 
The Rats are starting to form their own "ship."
