Democratic leaders want to lean heavily on the Government Accountability Office’s rebuke of the Trump White House in making their impeachment case to the Senate, a report said Tuesday — despite the watchdog’s long history of dinging administrations before Trump’s.
“This is a big part of our case,” a Democratic leadership aide told Axios on condition of anonymity. “It shows the extent to [which] the president went to advance his scheme; he went so far as to break the law.”
The aide was referring to a report issued last week by the GAO — a nonpartisan agency that handles audits and various investigations for Congress — stating that the Trump administration indeed broke the law when it froze $391 million in military aid meant for Ukraine.
“It’s an important piece of evidence and only adds to the mountain and body of evidence that we already have,” the source told Axios.
A source with Trump’s legal team, however, told the outlet that they don’t view the report as being fair game in the trial set to kick off Tuesday afternoon, as Trump formally faces allegations of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
“We’re going to trial on a specific set of charges, spelled out in the charging document,” said that insider. “The charging document doesn’t include anything about that GAO report. So in our view, that’s not properly part of the accusation that’s been brought to the Senate.”
It’s also hardly uncommon for the GAO to ding a sitting president, with the organization critiquing administrations on both sides of the aisle for decades.
During the Ronald Reagan years, the GAO panned the Republican president’s administration for using “covert propaganda activities” to tilt public opinion in favor of its backing of rebels fighting the socialist regime in Nicaragua.
Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration was hit by the GAO for haphazard bookkeeping that led to dozens of staffers banking unearned wages to the tune of thousands of dollars.
Republican George W. Bush’s White House ran afoul of the law by allowing private health insurance companies to restrict patients’ coverage options during a trial program with Medicare, the GAO ruled in 2004.
The Bush administration was slapped again in 2008 by the GAO for undermining the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to evaluate the danger of toxic chemicals by giving undue sway to outside bodies including the Pentagon and NASA.
And in 2014, the GAO ruled that the Obama White House’s swap of five Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay for the release of US Army deserter Bowe Berghdal was illegal because Congress wasn’t given sufficient notice of the plan.
In the waning days of the Obama administration in 2016, the GAO ruled that the White House took a “passive” approach to sniffing out potential insurance fraud in the rollout of ObamaCare.
With Post wires