The House Foreign Affairs Committee announced Friday that it is taking a step toward contempt for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for refusing to comply with his subpoena for Ukrainian-related documents that the State Department has already passed on to Republican senators.
The announcement did not set a date when, in particular, it would take a measure that despised Pompeo, but said that the paintings on such a solution began.
In a statement, President Eliot Engel accused Pompeo of being willing to “strengthen a Republican-led Senate denigration that opposes the president’s political rivals” and noted that “his speech to the RNC” this week “defied his own directives and the law. . “
Pompeo “has proven alarming by the laws and regulations governing his own conduct and by the team provided through the letter to prevent him from government corruption,” Engel said.
Friday’s announcement came after the State Department sent a letter to the committee Thursday informing it that it would not comply with the subpoena because it was “premature,” while suggesting that the request violated “the doctrine of separation of powers.”
Engel issued a subpoena to Pompeo last month for documents the state had in the senses. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
The two Republican lawmakers investigated long-discredited accusations that Biden abused his authority to pressure the Ukrainian to abandon an investigation into his son.
The Johnson-Grassley investigation has been criticized for allegedly a sieve for Russian contempt. Johnson proved that he had taken data from Andrii Telizhenko, a former staff member at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington who has spent much of the more than 4 years selling damaging stories about Democratic Party politicians.
The senators requested – and won – State Department documents related to the allegations because the same firm refused to provide Engel with the same information.
The director of national intelligence, William Evanina, alluded to the investigation earlier this month, saying that foreign actors were targeting Congress. Evanina appointed a Ukrainian congressman who propagated alleged recordings of Biden and the Ukrainian president since his tenure and said the congressman was acting in the interest of Russian intelligence.
Johnson himself said his investigation would “certainly” cause Trump to win his re-election. He also complained about the slow reaction of some government agencies to their own file requests, the FBI added.
“You think with a Republican president, they’d be more sensitive to the Republican leader of a Senate committee,” Johnson said.
In the Thursday letter to the House committee, the State Department’s congressional liaison Ryan M. Kaldahl denied that the Department was “politicizing its responses to Congressional oversight requests.”
This has been updated.