Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was subpoenaed by three Democratic House committee chairmen on Friday to turn over documents related to the Trump administration's dealings with Ukraine, following the initiation of an impeachment inquiry announced by Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi on 26 September, NBC News reported.
A subpoena is an order issued by a government agency, usually a court, to a person or entity to testify as a witness or produce evidence in a legal proceeding under a penalty for failure. Committees in both houses of the US Congress have the authority to issue subpoenas for lawmaking or investigation purposes.
The House Committees of Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight, headed by Eliot Engel, Adam Schiff, and Elijah Cummings respectively, have subpoenaed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for documents related to the chamber’s impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The committee chairmen raised questions about the State Department’s involvement in efforts to get the Ukrainian government to investigate the alleged illegal activity of the Biden family in Ukraine.
The State Department previously missed two deadlines to turn over documents related to Ukraine and conversations involving Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, prompting the issuance of the writ.
Mike Pompeo is now required by the House to produce State Department documents personally or by mail by 4 October. Failure to respond to a subpoena issued by the standing committees in Congress is considered to constitute contempt and could lead to a criminal penalty.
“Your failure or refusal to comply with the subpoena shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry”, the committee chairmen wrote in the letter addressed to Pompeo.
The person issued a subpoena has a right to object to the order, for example when it is seen as irrelevant or improper, or has no evidence to present. Mike Pompeo has not publicly commented on the subpoena yet.
The committee heads also scheduled testimonies from five other State Department officials – including US envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, who has reportedly resigned from his post, and former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
Impeachment Inquiry Initiated
On 24 September the Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi announced the initiation of an impeachment inquiry against Trump following his 25 July phone call with Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky.
A transcript of the conversation, released on 25 September, showed that the two presidents discussed the case of the dismissal of Viktor Shokin, a state prosecutor investigating the Burisma energy company, where Joe Biden's son, Hunter, was serving on the board of directors. Shokin lost his job in 2016 when probing the company’s suspected illegal activities. Current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden later admitted that he had played a role in stopping the prosecution.
Democrats claimed that Donald Trump tried to pressure the Ukrainian president into cooperate on an inquiry against Joe Biden by allegedly attempting to freeze around $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in the days before the Zelensky phone call . The US president has strongly denied the claims, but the impeachment inquiry procedure against him has been launched based on the Democrats’ belief that Trump’s actions constituted a breach of US national security.