White House escalating showdown with Democratic investigators

House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings is moving toward a vote to hold the former White House personnel security director in contempt after he refused to answer the committee’s questions Tuesday.

Cumming’s statement came after the White House instructed its former personnel security director to not answer questions by the House Oversight Committee Tuesday following allegations that the administration approved security clearances to those who should not have received them.

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“It appears that the president believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight,’ Cummings (D-Md.) said. “It also appears that the White House believes that it may dictate to Congress — an independent and co-equal branch of government — the scope of its investigations and even the rules by which it conducts them. To date, the White House has refused to produce a single piece of paper or a single witness in any of the Committee’s investigations this entire year.”

It’s the latest in a series of aggressive responses from the Trump administration to House Democrats pressing multiple investigative threads, including a lawsuit the White House filed on Monday against a House committee chairman to protect Trump’s financial records.

White House deputy counsel Michael Purpura sent a letter Monday asking the former security director, Carl Kline, not to answer questions because it “unconstitutionally encroaches on fundamental executive branch interests.”

Kline’s attorney, Robert Driscoll, wrote a subsequent letter to the committee that Kline would not answer questions. “With two masters from two equal branches of government, we will follow the instructions of the one that employs him,” Driscoll wrote in the letter to the committee.

The decision came after White House employee Tricia Newbold, a whistleblower told the committee that senior officials ignored national security concerns to approve security clearances for 25 individuals whose applications were initially denied. Newbold described a “systematic” pattern of abuses on the part of Kline.

The White House and Driscoll did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Monday the White House sued Cummings in response to a subpoena the committee issued to an accounting firm that has worked for Trump’s business, the Trump Organization.

“The Democrat Party, with its newfound control of the U.S. House of Representatives, has declared all-out political war against President Donald J. Trump,” Trump’s lawyers declared in a court filing. “Subpoenas are their weapon of choice.”