WASHINGTON -- The White House violated federal law in withholding security assistance to Ukraine, an action at the center of President Donald Trump's impeachment, a federal watchdog agency said Thursday.
The Government Accountability Office said in a report that the Office of Management and Budget broke the law in holding up the aid, which Congress passed less than a year ago, saying "the President is not vested with the power to ignore or amend any such duly enacted law."
"Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law," wrote the agency's general counsel, Thomas Armstrong, in the report. "The withholding was not a programmatic delay."
The Pentagon aid, which was overwhelmingly approved by bipartisan majorities in Congress, was held up last summer on orders from Trump but was released in September after Congress pushed for its release and a whistleblower's complaint about Trump's July call with the Ukrainian leader became public.
The independent agency, which reports to Congress, said the Office of Management and Budget violated the Impoundment Control Act by delaying the security assistance for "policy reasons," rather than technical budgetary needs.
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Capitol Hill Democrats seized on the report as evidence of a lawless White House led by acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who is a key figure in the impeachment investigation of Trump.
"The OMB, the White House, the administration broke -- I'm saying this -- broke the law," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Democrats want Mulvaney, who is still officially the the Office of Management and Budget director, to be subpoenaed as a witness in Trump's impeachment trial. The Senate opened the trial Thursday, with opening arguments set to begin next week.
"Congress makes funding decisions, and the Trump administration's illegal impoundment of these vital national security funds was a brazen assault on the checks and balances inherent to our democracy," said House Appropriations Committee chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y. "Given that this illegal conduct threatened our security and undermined our elections, I feel even more strongly that the House has chosen the right course by impeaching President Trump. No one is above the law."
"The GAO opinion makes clear that the documents we requested in our letter last month are even more needed now because GAO confirmed the president broke the law," Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, said in a statement.
"This bombshell legal opinion from the independent Government Accountability Office demonstrates, without a doubt, that the Trump administration illegally withheld security assistance from Ukraine" said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who requested in December that the Government Accountability Office write the report.
The White House budget office promptly rejected the report's conclusions, saying it had remained within the law.
The White House called the agency's decision an "overreach" and an attempt to insert itself into the "media's controversy of the day."
The White House "complied with the law at every step," Office of Management and Budget acting director Russell Vought wrote on Twitter. He also criticized the Government Accountability Office, saying the agency's "opinion comes from the same people who said we couldn't keep National Parks open during the shutdown" 12 months ago.
"We disagree with GAO's opinion," said Rachel Semmel, a spokeswoman for the budget office. "OMB uses its apportionment authority to ensure taxpayer dollars are properly spent consistent with the president's priorities and with the law."
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The report, on its own, does not result in any action or specific penalty against the White House or Trump.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, called the release of the report as the Senate was taking up impeachment "suspicious timing."
Accountability office officials said the timing of the ruling was coincidental.
"Our legal decisions are issued when we have completed all our legal research and are ready to come to a sound conclusion," Armstrong said in a statement. "There was no coordination of timing with any entity outside of GAO."
Trump was impeached last month by the House, mostly along party lines, on charges of abusing his power for pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democratic rivals, as he was withholding the aid, and for obstructing Congress' ensuing probe. The Senate will decide whether to convict him on either charge, which would result in his removal from office. A two-thirds vote is required for conviction.
The Government Accountability Office finding concludes that the White House budget office "withheld the funds for an unauthorized reason in violation" of the Impoundment Control Act, a federal law that requires the executive branch to spend money that is appropriated by Congress.
The Impoundment Control Law is rigorously adhered to by career officials in agency budget offices, who can face severe trouble for violating it.
American diplomats testified last year during the impeachment inquiry that they understood the aid freeze to be a means of pressuring Ukraine into opening investigations into Trump's political rivals. Trump has denied using the aid as leverage, and the White House has said the freeze was intended to provide time to explore whether Ukraine, with its long history of official corruption, could be trusted with the money.
The Government Accountability Office found that the White House violated the law because it did not notify Congress about the deferral in the spending, and the freeze did not appear to be motivated by a desire to find a more efficient way to spend the money, which might have been allowable, the report said. Instead, the administration was arguing that it had the right to determine the "best use of such funds," ignoring Congress' power to set spending requirements.
"When Congress enacts appropriations, it has provided budget authority that agencies must obligate in a manner consistent with law," said the ruling, which was signed by Armstrong. "The Constitution vests lawmaking power with the Congress."
The accountability office's ruling was focused on the money controlled by the Pentagon, which had informed Congress that Ukraine had met the conditions for receiving it and that it intended to release it. It did not rule on the money controlled by the State Department, but expressed frustration at the administration's unwillingness to respond to questions about it.
"We consider a reluctance to provide a fulsome response to have constitutional significance," Armstrong wrote. The Government Accountability Office's role, he said, was "essential to ensuring respect for and allegiance to Congress' constitutional power of the purse."
Formal determinations by the accountability office that the Impoundment Control Act has been violated have occurred in past administrations.
Several administrations have been slapped by the Government Accountability Office, including that of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In general, those administrations released funds after being cited, making lawsuits unnecessary. Most recently, in December 2018, the accountability office said the Department of Homeland Security illegally withheld $95 million appropriated for the Coast Guard to support national security efforts. The money eventually was released.
The accountability office also found in 2014 that former President Barack Obama's administration broke the law in exchanging five Taliban commanders for a captured U.S. soldier without giving Congress 30-days' notice
The accountability office is also scrutinizing whether the White House or the State Department or both violated the law by possibly withholding some portion of $161 million in foreign military financing during a six-day period in August, according to the decision.
The accountability office is led by Gene L. Dodaro, who was nominated by Obama in 2010 and confirmed by the Senate. Directors of the agency serve 15-year terms so as to remove the influence of politics on their decisions.
Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Taylor and Zeke Miller of The Associated Press; by Emily Cochrane, Eric Lipton and Chris Cameron of The New York Times; and by Jeff Stein, Ellen Nakashima, Erica Werner and Rachael Bade of The Washington Post.
A Section on 01/17/2020