A former federal prosecutor predicted in a column for Politico that the White House will continue to lose in court showdowns over House subpoenas.
In the Sunday column, Renato Mariotti, who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, noted that in a ruling last week rejecting President Trump’s challenge to a House Oversight Committee subpoena of financial records, Judge Amit Mehta overruled Trump’s claim that Congress could not request such material because it would be “law enforcement” rather than “legislation.”
{mosads}Arguing against Congress’s investigative authority, Mariotti wrote, is “doomed to fail.” He also cited a Wednesday ruling by Judge Edgardo Ramos relating to Trump’s financial records in which Ramos found that it was “not the role of the judicial branch to question [Congress’s] motives.”
“If Trump continues down this path — over former White House counsel Don McGahn’s refusal to appear before the House Judiciary, for example — expect to see more swift rulings swatting down his legal arguments in the coming weeks and months,” Mariotti wrote. “No court is going to rule that the executive branch can categorically refuse to produce evidence and witnesses from a criminal investigation of the president of the United States to the House of Representatives.”
Trump’s legal strategy, Mariotti wrote, “is not only generating adverse results quickly, but it could very well convince a court that he is acting in bad faith.”
If the legal battles continue in this vein, he wrote, the courts could enforce subpoenas in a way Congress itself is not logistically positioned to do, which could accelerate investigations or even impeachment inquiries.