House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said on Sunday that his panel will request documents from dozens of entities and individuals close to the White House as part of his panel’s investigation into “obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power.”
“Tomorrow, we will be issuing document requests to over 60 different people and individuals from the White House to the Department of Justice, Donald Trump Jr., Allen Weisselberg, to begin the investigations to present the case to the American people about obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power,” Nadler said on ABC’s “This Week.”
{mosads}Nadler said during the interview that he thinks President Trump obstructed justice.
“It’s very clear that the president obstructed justice,” he said.
“It’s very clear — 1,100 times he referred to [special counsel Robert Mueller’s] investigation as a witch hunt … 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.”
“How about if Robert Mueller comes back and says definitively, we find no collusion by President Trump? Is that a conclusion you’ll accept?” host George Stephanopoulos asked the New York Democrat.
“Well we’d want to see the evidence behind that and see the validity of that and we can agree to disagree. But this investigation goes far beyond collusion. We’ve seen all the democratic norms that we depend on for democratic government attacked by the administration,” Nadler responded.
“We’ve seen attacks on the freedom of the press, the press called the enemy of the people, we’ve seen attacks on the Department of Justice, attacks on the FBI, attacks on — on judges. All of these are very corrosive to liberty and to the proper functioning of government and to our constitutional system,” he added.
“All this has to be looked at and the facts laid out to the American people.”
Nadler also said that the evidence has not been “all sorted out” to “do an impeachment.”
“Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen,” he added.
Nadler said impeachment is a “very high bar,” adding that Democrats “may or may not get there.”
“But what we have to do is protect the rule of law,” he said.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said later on the ABC show that he thinks Nadler “decided to impeach the president the day the president won the election.”
— This report was updated at 10:11 a.m.