WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday invited President Trump’s legal team to participate in its first public impeachment hearing next week, when lawmakers plan to convene a panel of constitutional scholars to inform their debate over whether the president’s actions warrant his removal from office.
The Judiciary Committee announced it had scheduled the hearing, “The Impeachment Inquiry Into President Donald J. Trump: Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment,” for Dec. 4 without specifying witnesses. But Democratic officials, speaking on condition of anonymity before the witness list was finalized, said it would feature prominent legal experts who could testify about constitutional precedent and the history of impeachment.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the Judiciary Committee chairman, wrote a letter to the president Tuesday afternoon notifying him of the hearing and offering his lawyers a chance to question the witnesses. The actions signaled that Democrats are moving quickly to begin a new phase of the impeachment inquiry, shifting from a complex investigation of Mr. Trump’s actions into a consequential debate over whether they warrant the use of the House’s powers under the Constitution to try to remove a sitting president.
The process will be based in large part on the factual record of a pressure campaign on Ukraine by the president and his allies that the House Intelligence Committee is assembling into a report it is likely to submit to the Judiciary Committee next week. The hearings will unfold against a backdrop of intense political polarization and bitter partisan feuding, less than a year before Mr. Trump faces re-election.
Mr. Nadler asked the White House to inform him by Sunday if the president or his lawyer wants to participate in the initial hearing, and reminded Mr. Trump that House rules empower him as chairman to curtail that involvement if “you continue to refuse to make witnesses and documents available” related to the inquiry.
“I remain committed to ensuring a fair and informative process,” Mr. Nadler wrote. “To that end, I remind you that the participation of the president or his counsel has been described by the committee in past inquiries as ‘not a right but a privilege or a courtesy which is being extended to the president’s counsel.’ I am hopeful that you and your counsel will opt to participate in the committee’s hearing, consistent with the rules of decorum and with the solemn nature of the work before us.”
The White House did not immediately respond to the letter or a request for comment. Mr. Trump’s allies have complained bitterly for weeks that the president’s legal team did not have a seat at the table during the Intelligence Committee’s investigation, but they have also sought to avoid any action that could be seen as giving it legitimacy.
The first Judiciary Committee hearing will probably take place just as the intelligence panel sends its written report summarizing the findings of its two-month investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to enlist Ukraine in discrediting his political rivals. In the coming days, Democrats could schedule another hearing for the Intelligence Committee to formally present its work to the judiciary panel.
The Judiciary Committee is expected to use that report and possibly other, earlier evidence of possible misconduct by the president detailed in the Mueller investigation to draft articles of impeachment in the coming weeks.
That schedule would put the House on track to potentially vote on articles of impeachment before lawmakers leave Washington for Christmas, setting up a trial in the Senate early next year. The Judiciary Committee convened a similar panel of expert witnesses in 1998 when it began debate over whether to impeach President Bill Clinton.
“I think you want to know: What are you doing here? What are the standards? What are the rules?” Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, a senior Democrat on the panel, said of the first hearing.
The letter from Mr. Nadler initiated what is likely to be a high-stakes legal and political dispute between the two sides over what rights the president and his legal team should be afforded.
In modern times, the Judiciary Committee has allowed presidents facing similar proceedings an active role, inviting them to recommend witnesses for testimony, conduct cross-examinations and present a defense through their lawyers. The Judiciary Committee chairman and a majority of the committee always had final say over the president’s requests.
But Washington today finds itself in a vastly different situation than it did in the case of Mr. Clinton and President Richard M. Nixon. Whereas those leaders grudgingly engaged with Congress — at least to some extent — as it built impeachment cases against them, Mr. Trump’s White House has thus far responded only by declaring the House’s inquiry illegitimate and refusing to cooperate. The president himself has gone further, savaging the Democrats leading the inquiry, peddling falsehoods about his own actions and attacking impeachment witnesses, many of whom still work for his administration.
That has left Democrats uncertain on how to approach Mr. Trump’s role in the process. If the president is unwilling to engage with the allegations under debate or recommends that the committee call witnesses related to two unproven theories about Democrats that he pressed Ukraine to investigate, they are wary of offering him a prominent platform to broadcast what they believe amounts to counterprogramming, according to officials working on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe their strategy.
But if they deny Mr. Trump his say, they fear, the process could lose legitimacy in the eyes of voters and Republicans in the Senate who would ultimately decide whether to convict Mr. Trump if the House impeaches him.
Democrats have included in the House rules governing the inquiry a provision that allows Mr. Nadler to deny the White House a role if he determines the president is unlawfully defying Congress’s requests. A key question will be whether Mr. Nadler, in consultation with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, chooses to exercise that provision.
For now, Mr. Nadler has extended an open hand for the president and his team.
“At base, the president has a choice to make: He can take this opportunity to be represented in the impeachment hearings, or he can stop complaining about the process,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement. “I hope that he chooses to participate in the inquiry, directly or through counsel, as other presidents have done before him.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Trump framed his decision to block key aides from testifying before Congress as a matter of preserving the powers of his office. He said he would otherwise be happy to let figures like John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser; Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff; and Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel, testify before the impeachment inquiry, implying without explanation that they could help his case.
“I am fighting for future Presidents and the Office of the President,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Other than that, I would actually like people to testify.”
Mr. Trump was reacting to a federal court ruling on Monday holding that Mr. McGahn and other top presidential aides like him were not absolutely immune from congressional testimony as the White House has asserted. The Justice Department appealed that ruling on Tuesday, meaning that neither Mr. McGahn nor others named by Mr. Trump are likely to appear on Capitol Hill any time soon.
Democrats leading the inquiry have made clear that regardless of court rulings, they intend to hold Mr. Trump’s noncooperation orders against him. The Intelligence Committee plans to catalog efforts by the White House to obstruct its requests for testimony and documents for use in a possible article of impeachment charging Mr. Trump with undermining a valid inquiry of Congress.
And Democrats have indicated they will draw an “adverse inference” in cases in which witnesses do not appear, assuming that the White House is shielding their testimony because it would have corroborated the case against Mr. Trump.
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