President Trump’s White House attorneys are preparing to tell a key congressional panel investigating the administration “to go f%$# themselves,” as a person familiar with the deliberations characterized them to The Daily Beast.
According to three sources familiar with the situation, the White House counsel’s office, currently headed by Pat Cipollone, was still, as of Thursday morning, in the process of drafting a letter responding to the House Judiciary Committee’s request for a wide array of documents.
The documents requested by the Democratic-run committee are part of the sweeping and long-telegraphed inquiry into a range of Trump administration and Trump-associate activities earlier this month.
Cipollone’s letter response to the committee is essentially similar to one he sent to the Oversight, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence committees, which Politico reported on Thursday. Those committees, along with the Ways and Means panel, coordinate regularly over their complementary investigations into the administration.
The formal response to House Judiciary, these sources say, is expected to raise executive-privilege concerns and initially withhold any documents that the committee has requested. The response from the Trump White House is already several days overdue, per the Monday deadline set by Democratic lawmakers on the committee.
It’s the latest sign that Trump and his team are gearing up for a protracted war with the Democrats on the committee. Representatives for the committee did not immediately respond to a Daily Beast inquiry.
Beginning an impeachment investigation in order to forestall any ratf%$#ing by an increasingly corrupt and politicized federal judiciar would allows Democrats to thread a political needle.
They would be able to show a base that is clamoring for impeachment that they are willing to move, while reassuring a Democratic Party establishment that has lost anything resembling a set of cojones, that this is just a pretense to allow them to conduct real investigations.
Just do it.