Page:Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States — Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives.pdf/164

 gross abuse of power. Most immediately, this abuse involved ordering the defiance of Congressional subpoenas. That stands as "an affront to the mechanism for curbing abuses of power that the Framers carefully crafted for our protection."

More fundamentally, President Trump's direction to defy House subpoenas constituted an assault on the Impeachment Clause itself—and thus on our Constitution's final answer to corrupt Presidents. As explained above, the "sole Power of Impeachment" authorizes the House to review information that resides within the very branch of government it is empowered to scrutinize. By engaging in substantial obstruction of a House impeachment inquiry, the President could effectively seek to control a check on his own abuses. That is exactly what happened here.

In President Nixon's case, this Committee concluded that "[u]nless the defiance of the [House] subpoenas ... is considered grounds for impeachment, it is difficult to conceive of any President acknowledging that he is obligated to supply the relevant evidence necessary for Congress to exercise its constitutional responsibility in an impeachment proceeding." The same lesson applies now, but with exponentially greater force. President Nixon authorized other officials and agencies to honor their legal obligations. He also turned over many of his own documents, failing only to respond fully to eight subpoenas. President Trump, in contrast, directed his entire Administration—every agency, office, and official in the Executive Branch—not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, including by disobeying duly authorized subpoenas. If this does not qualify as impeachable obstruction of Congress, then nothing does, and the House will have sent a dangerous invitation to future Presidents to defy impeachment inquiries.

2.President Trump's Obstruction of Congress Lacked Lawful Cause or Excuse and Involved Recognizably Wrongful Conduct

President Trump and his lawyers have offered various arguments to justify the President's complete defiance of the House impeachment inquiry. Those arguments are indefensible as a matter of law and come nowhere close to excusing the President's unprecedented obstruction of Congress. They amount to a claim that the President has the power to dictate the terms on which he is investigated for "high Crimes and Misdemeanors"—a claim that is fundamentally at odds with the Constitution. The President's excuses consist mainly of complaints about the procedures adopted by the House and its Committees. For example, the President asserts that the full House needed to vote to authorize the impeachment inquiry at an earlier date; that the Investigating Committees were requiredto afford him a broad array of rights to intervene and participate in their proceedings as they engaged in fact finding; that the Investigating Committees were forbidden to conduct portions of their fact