Here is evidence of on of the charges against Trump, obstruction of Congress.
The Trump administration has refused to disclose how key officials at the Department of Defense and the White House Office of Management and Budget reacted to President Trump’s decision to halt military aid to Ukraine.
On Nov. 25, federal district court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the administration to produce records reflecting what these officials said to one another about the legality and appropriateness of Trump’s order. The Center for Public Integrity sought the information in Freedom of Information Act requests filed in late September.
On Thursday afternoon, however, as the House Judiciary Committee was voting on two articles of impeachment against Trump, Public Integrity received 146 pages of documents that had been almost completely redacted by the government. Every substantive exchange between officials at the agencies was blacked out. Public Integrity is planning to file a motion Friday challenging the government’s response.
“We are deeply disappointed that the public won’t have access to this important information at the heart of the impeachment process. But we will continue to fight to ensure that the documents see the light of day,” said Public Integrity’s chief executive officer, Susan Smith Richardson.
Access to the documents was granted by the judge after a brief but fierce court battle.
Although the Defense Department initially proposed to put the Public Integrity request at the end of a year-long queue, the judge said the documents must be provided on an urgent timetable because they were meant “to inform the public on a matter of extreme national concern,” given the continuing investigation by Congress into Trump’s aid halt and its impact. To ensure “informed public participation” in the impeachment proceedings it provoked, “the public needs access to relevant information,” the judge said.
She noted further that since the administration had failed to answer congressional requests for the information at issue, the public was unlikely to get it without Public Integrity’s help. Any hardship placed on the government, she concluded, was “minimal.”
But the two institutions, in their initial production to Public Integrity, removed key passages delineating what the officials said about Trump’s decision, arguing that the information was related to the administration’s “deliberative process” — even though it appears that much of the information withheld may simply be factual rather than deliberative. They also claimed that providing some information would violate the officials’ privacy.
Messages that officials at the White House and Pentagon exchanged shortly after the aid halt became public in late August were, for example, completely blacked out. A detailed description by the Pentagon of how the aid program was meant to be carried out — provided to OMB shortly after a whistleblower filed a complaint alleging the program had been mishandled at the White House — was redacted.
A lengthy email exchange in August between Elaine McCusker, a career employee at the Defense Department who is the deputy comptroller there, Michael Duffey, a political appointee and the associate director at OMB, and OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta — a former legal adviser to Vice President Mike Pence — was also blacked out.
McCusker on Aug. 19 did email Duffey to say “the funds go into the system today to initiate transactions and obligate,” which set off more emails from Duffey and Paoletta. The flurry of messages between them continued into the following day, when McCusker at one point emailed to say, “Seems like we continue to talk [email] past each other a bit. We should probably have a call.”
“Any potentially interesting bits are redacted,” said Margaret Taylor, a former State Department lawyer who was deputy staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2015 through July 2018.
The FOIA response is part of a pattern of behavior by the Trump administration, which has maintained a cloud of secrecy around key aspects of the aid halt.
Although the halt has been the focus of multiple congressional hearings, key details about its origins and legality have remained murky: When did it start, who in the government knew about it, how did they react, and what did they say to one another?
Testimony by mid-level government officials during the hearings into Trump’s potential impeachment has provided only clues, while establishing without question that many inside the government were either confused or upset by Trump’s decision.
Several committees of the House of Representatives subpoenaed relevant documents from OMB and DOD on Oct. 7.
But the White House blocked the release to Congress of any documents from those institutions, and others. One of the two articles of impeachment drafted by House Democrats accusing Trump of abusing his powers specifically cites the administration’s failure to provide “a single document or record” from OMB and DOD in response to subpoenas.
Public Integrity’s efforts to obtain some of the documents began earlier, in late September, when it filed two FOIA requests for copies of emails and other communications between the OMB and DOD about the aid from April to the present, and also copies of messages passed between three top Pentagon officials about the aid, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.
After a short court battle, Public Integrity won a preliminary ruling in late November. The judge ordered that the documents be released on a timetable much more rapid than the government preferred. But it took a vigorous effort to obtain that order.
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/12/trump ... raine-aid/
Of corse they government has given excuses why they can’t deliver as ordered.