President Donald Trump and the White House have instructed numerous administration officials not to comply with subpoenas to testify before the House Intelligence Committee in the impeachment inquiry against the President.
All of the officials who complied with the subpoenas have further confirmed that Trump's pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Trump's political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, was highly irregular and disruptive at best.
Yet Republicans have still been able to discredit most of these witnesses with cries of "hearsay" and "no firsthand knowledge." Trump's refusal to let his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Vice President Mike Pence, and others who repeatedly corresponded with the President during the Ukraine fiasco have kept Trump from being exposed.
But in a tweet from this morning, Trump said he's not forbidding them from testifying for his sake, but for the sake of presidents to come.
Trump says he's protecting future Presidents from being "compromised" by basic, constitutionally-enshrined oversight which he regards as a "Democrat Scam that is going nowhere."
People couldn't help but laugh at Trump's attempt to spin his shirking of accountability.
People saw right through his haphazard excuse for obstructing justice.
Sadly, the President's attempts to avoid oversight and the judicial process aren't specific to the impeachment inquiry. Instead, they're representative of a larger pattern of evasion.
Trump's lawyers, in an effort to keep Trump's tax returns a secret, asserted in court that because the Justice Department won't indict a sitting president, that president is therefore immune from investigation as well. Trump's team literally argued that the President really could shoot someone on 5th Avenue with no repercussions until he's out of office.
Trump's team says he plans to appeal the recent decision from U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that found former White House Counsel Don McGahn must testify before Congress, despite the Trump legal team's argument that former White House aides shouldn't have to comply with subpoenas.
One of Judge Jackson's most memorable quotes from her ruling? "Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings."
