House Democrats sent a warning to Trump administration officials on Oct. 11, cautioning them from preventing impeachment inquiry witnesses summoned by subpoenas from testifying to House committees.
This comes after former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified before Congress in a closed-door meeting.
The three Democratic House chairmen said the House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena to Yovanovitch last night to compel her deposition. They said their subpoena was in response to learning that the State Department had directed Yovanovitch to not appear before Congress on Friday, a direction that she defied.
Yovanovitch, who was recalled from Ukraine to the United States in May, is being questioned by members of the Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight and Reform Committees as part of the chamber’s impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump over his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
An anonymous intelligence community whistleblower filed a complaint about the call, accusing Trump of leveraging his office and withholding U.S. aid to Ukraine to obtain “dirt” on a political opponent—2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
The eight-page letter sent to the three committee chairmen argued that the inquiry runs afoul of congressional norms, and accuses the Democrats of failing to afford the president due process protections and fair treatment.
“You have designed and implemented your inquiry in a manner that violates fundamental fairness and constitutionally mandated due process,” the letter said.
“You have denied the President the right to cross-examine witnesses to call witnesses, to receive transcripts of testimony, to have access to evidence, to have counsel present, and many other basic rights guaranteed to all Americans.
“You have conducted your proceedings in secret. You have violated civil liberties and the separation of powers by threatening Executive Branch officials, claiming that you will seek to punish those who exercise fundamental constitutional rights and prerogatives. All of this violates the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent.”
The State Department issued a statement at the time that called Lutsenko’s claim about the do-not-prosecute “an outright fabrication.” Lutsenko later retracted his accusations about the list.
Yovanovitch took the opportunity to deny the accusations during her testimony on Friday. She said she had not spoken to Hunter Biden and had only spoken to Joe Biden several times over the course of many years in government. She said during that time neither he or the previous administration raised the issue of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma or Hunter Biden.
Meanwhile, Yovanovitch was mentioned in the call between Trump and Zelensky, where Trump described her as “bad news.” Zelensky agreed with Trump during the call, saying, “It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100 percent. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous president and was on his side. She would not accept me as a new president well enough.”
