- as explained below, emails and other messages between Ambassador Sondland and senior White House officials, including Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff Rob Blair, and then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, among other high-level Trump Administration officials.133
The Committees also have good-faith reason to believe that the White House is in possession of and continues to withhold significantly more documents and records responsive to the subpoena and of direct relevance to the impeachment inquiry.
The Committees have closely tracked public reports that the White House is in possession of other correspondence and records of direct relevance to the impeachment inquiry. On November 24, for instance, a news report revealed that the White House had conducted a confidential, internal records review of the hold on military assistance in response to the Committees' inquiry. The review reportedly "turned up hundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision and a debate over whether the delay was legal."134
Office of the Vice President
On October 4, the Committees sent a letter to Vice President Mike Pence seeking 13 categories of documents in response to reports that he and his staff were directly involved in the matters under investigation. The Committees wrote:
Recently, public reports have raised questions about any role you may have played in conveying or reinforcing the President's stark message to the Ukrainian President. The reports include specific references to a member of your staff who may have participated directly in the July 25, 2019, call, documents you may have obtained or reviewed, including the record of the call, and your September 1, 2019, meeting with the Ukrainian President in Warsaw, during which you reportedly discussed the Administration's hold on U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.135
The Committees asked the Vice President to produce responsive documents by October 15. 136 On that date, Matthew E. Morgan, Counsel to the Vice President, responded to the Committees by refusing to cooperate and reciting many of the same baseless arguments as the White House Counsel. He wrote:
[T]he purported "impeachment inquiry" has been designed and implemented in a manner that calls into question your commitment to fundamental fairness and due process rights. ... Never before in history has the Speaker of the House attempted to launch an "impeachment inquiry" against a President without a majority of the House of Representatives voting to authorize a constitutionally acceptable process.137
To date, the Vice President has not produced a single document sought by the Committees and has not indicated any intent to do so going forward.
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