House committee plans to issue dozens of requests for Trump documents

WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee plans to issue dozens of document requests on Monday to the White House and to President Donald Trump’s closest business associates as part of an obstruction of justice investigation, committee chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler said.

Nadler (D-N.Y.), appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” said the Democratic-majority committee will "be issuing document requests to over 60 different people and individuals from the White House to the Department of Justice, Donald Trump, Jr., [Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer] Allen Weisselberg, to begin the investigations to present the case to the American people about obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power."

Nadler’s interview came shortly before Trump took to Twitter to continue railing against his former longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who testified before three congressional committees last week about his decade of work on behalf of Trump. The president also cast the multiple investigations into his business dealings and 2016 campaign operation as “Presidential harassment.”

“I am an innocent man being persecuted by some very bad, conflicted & corrupt people in a Witch Hunt that is illegal & should never have been allowed to start - And only because I won the Election! Despite this, great success!” Trump tweeted.

The committee’s records requests follow Cohen's public testimony Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee, during which he frequently named Weisselberg as being directly involved with Trump’s hush money payments to two alleged paramours in the weeks before the 2016 election, and other alleged financial misdeeds.

Nadler told “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos he believes “it’s very clear that the president obstructed justice,” citing Trump’s actions related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

"It’s very clear — 1,100 times he referred to the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt,” Nadler said. ”He tried to protect [former national security adviser Michael] Flynn from being investigated by the FBI. He fired [former FBI Director James] Comey in order to stop the Russian thing, as he told NBC News. . . . He’s intimidated witnesses. In public."

Nadler said, however, that the prospect of impeachment was “a long way down the road,” noting that evidence has to be “all sorted out.”

"Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen," Nadler said, adding that there is a “very high bar” to impeach a president, which Democrats “may or may not” reach.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), also appearing on “This Week,” said he thinks “Congressman Nadler decided to impeach the president the day the president won the election.”

McCarthy criticized Democrats for scheduling Cohen’s public testimony when Trump was in Hanoi, Vietnam, last week, meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The meeting ended abruptly without agreement.

“They dislike this president so much they won’t give him the opportunity to denuclearize North Korea, that they would have a hearing on that day,” McCarthy said.