White House refuses to participate in impeachment hearing scheduled for Wednesday

The White House has refused to take part in the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing scheduled for Wednesday.

The White House has refused to take part in the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing scheduled for Wednesday. "We cannot fairly be expected to participate in a hearing while the witnesses are yet to be named and while it remains unclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the President a fair process through additional hearings. More importantly, an invitation to an academic discussion with law professors does not begin to provide the President with an semblance of a fair process. Accordingly, under the current circumstances, we do not intend to participate in your Wednesday hearing," CNN quoted Pat Cippollone, White House counsel to the President, as saying in a letter to Chairman Jerrold Nadler.

Cippollone also alleged that the hearing has been deliberately scheduled at a time when US President Donald Trump will be in London for NATO meetings. He also said that White House would respond separately to the Friday deadline about their participation in future hearings.

The US House Judiciary Committee in a letter on Friday asked President Donald Trump to notify it within a week if he intends to be represented at the next stage of the impeachment proceedings. "Please provide the Committee with the notice of whether your counsel intends to participate, specifying which of the privileges your counsel seeks to exercise, no later than 5:00 pm on December 6, 2019," the committee's chairman Jerrold Nadler had written to Trump.

Trump has hitherto refused to cooperate with the probe initiated by the House Democrats who seek to prove that he abused his powers by pressuring Ukraine into investigating his political rivals -- former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The US President has repeatedly said that he did not engage in a quid pro quo and characterised the impeachment bid as another political witch hunt by the Democrats to reverse the results of the 2016 presidential polls. (ANI)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)