On Tuesday, the Department of Defense officially refused to provide documents requested by a congressional subpoena as part of the impeachment inquiry—and the excuse it used was lifted directly from the talking points of the Trump-authored “legal letter” from the White House.
The letter from Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert Hood says that the DOD will make sure to keep all the requested documents, but can’t turn them over because of “a number of legal and practical concerns.” At the top of that list is a statement that, even though the letter was sent by the chairmen of the committees in the impeachment inquiry, “the House has not authorized your committee to make such an inquiry” and “none of your committees has identified any House rule or resolution authorizing you to conduct such an inquiry.” In other words, Hood is upholding the idea that only a vote of the full House can authorize an inquiry—a position that has no basis in either the law or past practice.
This might seem like a shocking position for the Defense Department to take, but Hood isn’t some military official who came up through the ranks. He’s a Trump appointee who landed in the DOD role straight from being a vice president at a defense contractor. Before that, he was a lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, after getting his start as an assistant to Newt Gingrich. Robert Hood is as deeply partisan as possible, and now he’s an attorney holding up an impeachment inquiry on the basis of a “legal opinion” that’s nothing more than a fantasy of Donald Trump’s.
But don’t get the impression that satisfying Trump’s nonsense request for a full House vote would get Hood to turn over the subpoenaed documents. Because Trump’s man in the DOD legal office goes on to say that most of what the committee has asked for would be “confidential Executive Branch communications,” once again invoking executive privilege … without a claim of executive privilege.
Finally, to make everything perfectly clear, Hood states that “the Department” objects to the idea that failure to comply with the subpoena constitutes obstruction of Congress, saying that the DOD has the right to object to any subpoena. So that’s no, and also no, and, finally, hell no.