Trump spoils for ‘impeachment row’ to fuel 2020 bid

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump’s advisers are pushing him to defy congressional investigations in hopes of luring Democrats into escalating a fight that they say will turn voters against the party in the 2020 elections.
The advisers are counting on news coverage of the battle with Congress — including Democrats’ raising the possibility of impeachment — distracting attention from candidates vying to replace Trump, and are portraying the president as a victim of partisan gamesmanship.
Democrats are playing into their script. The House Judiciary Committee is set to vote on holding Attorney General William Barr in contempt for missing a subpoena deadline to turn over an unredacted version of Mueller’s report.
Trump advisers also see an upside from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s warning that the administration’s defiance of subpoenas could lead to impeachment proceedings.
“It won’t turn out well for them,” said Trump’s campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. “The fact that Democrats want to continue the witch hunt shows that they have no interest in legislating and only care about politics.”
The Justice Department told House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler that Barr would ask Trump to invoke executive privilege to prevent the unredacted report from being shared with the panel.
“I hereby request that the committee hold the subpoena in abeyance and delay any vote on whether to recommend a citation of noncompliance with the subpoena, pending the presidents determination of this question,” Stephen Boyd, assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, wrote to Nadler.
The administration further advanced its strategy by telling former White House Counsel Don McGahn not to comply with a subpoena from House Democrats to turn over documents. Trump tweeted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller shouldn’t testify to Congress, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin refused a requests to turn over Trump’s tax returns.
At one of his recent political rallies, Trump attacked Nadler over his quest for documents related to his businesses. “These people are sick,” he told a crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The effort to turn Trump’s potential liabilities into a 2020 election advantage carries risks. The president’s refusal to turn over documents could lead voters to conclude he has something to hide and focus attention on the Mueller investigation, which painted an unflattering picture of Trump even if it didn’t result in a criminal indictment. That could turn off moderate and independent voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania.
Pelosi said at an event at Cornell University that Trump’s strategy poses a dilemma for Democrats. “Trump is goading us to impeach him, that’s what he’s doing every single day,” she said. “We can’t impeach him for political reasons, but we can’t not impeach him for political reasons.” But she added: “The facts and the law, and that will take us to the place that we need to be.”
Not everyone in her party agrees. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is running for president, called for impeachment proceedings to begin and said politics shouldn’t be a factor.
“If any other human being in this country had done what’s documented in the Mueller report, they would be arrested and put in jail,” Warren said on the Senate floor, before reading out extended excerpts of Mueller’s report.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “doesn’t want us to consider the mountain of evidence against the president. That is wrong.”