WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump abruptly ended a scheduled meeting with Democratic congressional leaders Wednesday, as he criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for accusing him of a cover-up and declared that he could not work with them until they stopped investigating him.
He delivered a statement in the Rose Garden demanding that Democrats "get these phony investigations over with." He said they could not legislate and investigate at the same time. "We're going to go down one track at a time," he said.
Pelosi, D-Calif., arrived at the White House for a session with the president to talk about infrastructure shortly after meeting with House Democrats on Capitol Hill as a growing number of the party's lawmakers say they want to open an impeachment inquiry. They say it's not necessarily aimed at removing the president from office but to bolster their position in court against his blocking their investigations with claims of executive privilege.
With her leadership team, Pelosi, who has resisted pressure to impeach, suggested patience.
"We do believe it's important to follow the facts," Pelosi told reporters afterward. "We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States, and we believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up."
When she and Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the Senate Democratic leader, arrived at the White House, Trump walked into the Cabinet Room, and did not shake anyone's hand or sit in his seat, according to people familiar with the meeting. He said he wanted to advance legislation on infrastructure, trade and other matters, but that Pelosi said something "terrible" by accusing him of a cover-up, according to the people.
After about three minutes, he left the room before anyone else could speak, the people said.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who was there to take part in the meeting, said that after directing his anger toward Pelosi, he "said it was over, that he wasn't going to do infrastructure or anything else until [investigations] were over."
From there, Trump headed to the Rose Garden, where a lectern had been set up with a sign that said "No Collusion, No Obstruction" along with statistics about special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, such as the number of subpoenas issued and witnesses called. White House aides also distributed fliers with the statistics on them.
"Instead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that have just said that I was doing a cover-up," Trump said. "I don't do cover-ups."
"I walked into the room and I told Sen. Schumer, Speaker Pelosi: 'I want to do infrastructure. I want to do it more than you want to do it. I'd be really good at that, that's what I do. But you know what? You can't do it under these circumstances. So get these phony investigations over with,'" he said.
The Democratic leaders returned to Capitol Hill and expressed disappointment, saying they were ready to make a deal with the president on a $2 trillion plan to rebuild the nation's roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure.
"He just took a pass and it just makes me wonder why he did that," Pelosi said. "In any event, I pray for the president of the United States and I pray for the United States of America."
Schumer expressed shock at the outcome. "To watch what happened in the White House would make your jaw drop," he said.
Schumer suggested Trump's reaction was not spontaneous, noting the preprinted sign on the lectern he used afterward to speak with reporters. Instead, he suggested the president staged it because he had not come up with a way to pay for such an enormous spending package.
"Hello! There were investigations going on three weeks ago when we met and he still met with us," Schumer said. "But now that he was forced to actually say how he would pay for it, he had to run away. And he came up with this preplanned excuse."
Mueller's report concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election "in sweeping and systematic fashion."
The report did not find sufficient evidence to file charges of criminal conspiracy with Russia against Trump or anyone associated with his campaign. It did not offer a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice.
Attorney General William Barr later concluded that there was not sufficient evidence for obstruction of justice, but House Democrats are continuing to pursue that issue.
In his appearance in the Rose Garden, Trump once again claimed vindication by the report and accused Democrats of refusing to accept that he did nothing wrong. Trump has vowed to defy all subpoenas for testimony and documents sought by the House on the grounds that it is all a partisan exercise.
Trump emphasized that he and his team provided documents and testimony to Mueller without citing executive privilege even though he said the special counsel was biased against him.
"These people were out to get us, the Republican Party and President Trump, they were out to get us," he said. "So here's the bottom line: There was no collusion, there was no obstruction. We've been doing this since I've been president, and actually the crime was committed on the other side."
He followed up the news conference with a series of tweets. "You can't investigate and legislate simultaneously -- it just doesn't work that way," he wrote. "You can't go down two tracks at the same time."
He added: "Democrat leadership is tearing the United States apart, but I will continue to set records for the American People -- and Nancy, thank you so much for your prayers, I know you truly mean it!"
BARR DEAL
Separately, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the panel will not enforce a subpoena against Barr as planned Wednesday, after the Justice Department agreed to produce the redacted material and underlying information from the special counsel's report.
Schiff announced the deal in a statement Wednesday morning. He warned that the subpoena "will remain in effect and will be enforced should the Department fail to comply with the full document request."
He added that he expects the "initial production" of providing the committee with 12 categories of counterintelligence and foreign intelligence material from Mueller's investigation would "be completed by the end of next week."
In a letter Tuesday to Schiff, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote that "the Department is willing to move forward with efforts to accommodate the Committee's legitimate interests" to view the items it requested. But he argued that the Justice Department would need more time to produce them. Boyd made the counteroffer contingent on the committee's promise "that it will not pursue any vote on an 'enforcement action,' either on May 22, or while such good-faith accommodation measures continue."
"To be clear should the Committee take the precipitous and unnecessary action of recommending a contempt finding or other enforcement action against the attorney general, then the Department will not likely be able to continue to work with the Committee to accommodate its interest in these materials," Boyd wrote.
Both the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees have been making the case to Barr that they should be able to view the full contents of Mueller's report, plus certain underlying materials. Barr has argued that it would be illegal for him to deliver the full redacted materials to the Judiciary Committee as requested, because it would require releasing grand jury information that cannot be disclosed without a court order. He has rejected House Democrats' entreaties to join them in making an appeal to a judge to release those materials.
But Schiff made his case for seeing the same materials on the grounds that the Mueller report deals with counterintelligence matters -- and the Intelligence Committee has a legal right to view materials pertaining to counterintelligence, whether they originated with a grand jury or not. Rep. Devin Nunes, Calif., the committee's top Republican, had joined Schiff in letters to Barr making the case for such access, although he did not sign on to the eventual subpoena that Schiff issued earlier this month.
"The Department has repeatedly acknowledged the Committee's legitimate oversight interest in these materials," Schiff said in a statement Wednesday. "I look forward to, and expect, continued compliance by the Department so we can do our vital oversight work."
Information for this article was contributed by Peter Baker, Katie Rogers and Emily Cochrane of The New York Times; by John Wagner, Rachael Bade, Mike DeBonis, Felicia Sonmez, Erica Werner, Josh Dawsey and Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post; and by Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick, Laurie Kellman, Alan Fram, Matthew Daly, Michael Balsamo, Jonathan Lemire, Eric Tucker and Mark Sherman of The Associated Press.
A Section on 05/23/2019