Trump says Congress can’t impeach him

President Donald Trump said Monday that Congress “can’t impeach” him over the findings of the Mueller report into Russian election meddling and his attempts to hamper the investigation.

 “Only high crimes and misdemeanors can lead to impeachment. There were no crimes by me (No Collusion, No Obstruction), so you can’t impeach,” Trump stated on Twitter.

 “It was the Democrats that committed the crimes, not your Republican President! Tables are finally turning on the Witch Hunt!”

 A redacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s approximately 450 page report was published last week after two years of intense investigations.

 It confirmed that Russian operatives had attempted to interfere in the 2016 election to help Trump beat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, including by hacking into email accounts.

 The report also found that Trump’s campaign took advantage of the impact on Clinton, but did not deliberately reach out to collude with the Russians.

 During the probe, Trump repeatedly tried to hamper Mueller’s work, the report said. Mueller said he could not rule one way or the other on whether Trump had committed the crime of obstruction of justice.

 Democrats, who control the lower house of Congress, are so far mostly holding off from calling for impeachment proceedings. However, powerful House committees plan to dig further into the scandal and are pushing to be given the whole Mueller report, without parts currently blacked out for security or legal reasons.

Trump sued on Monday to block a subpoena issued by the Democratic chairman of the U.S. House Oversight Committee that sought information about his personal and business finances.

The suit, the first salvo in what promises to be an escalating legal battle over efforts to investigate Trump by the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress, alleged Democrats have launched “all-out political war” on Trump and subpoenas “are their weapon of choice.”

The committee’s subpoena had sought eight years of documents from Mazars USA, an accounting firm long used by Trump to prepare financial statements, related to its investigation of allegations Trump inflated or deflated financial statements for potentially improper purposes.

Elijah Cummings, the House Oversight Committee chairman, issued the subpoena to the president’s accountant after Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified to Congress in February that Trump had misrepresented his net worth.

“Chairman Cummings’ subpoena is invalid and unenforceable because it has no legitimate legislative purpose,” Trump’s lawyers said in a filing.

“Its goal is to expose Plaintiffs’ private financial information for the sake of exposure, with the hope that it will turn up something that Democrats can use as a political tool against the President now and in the 2020 election,” they said.

The filing is the first effort by Trump’s legal team to quash multiple investigations by Democratic-led committees in Congress of Trump and his finances. His lawyers made it clear they would resist those efforts.

“Democrats are using their new control of congressional committees to investigate every aspect of President Trump’s personal finances, businesses, and even his family,” Trump’s lawyers said.

“Instead of working with the President to pass bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit Americans, Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the President politically,” they said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the U.S. House Oversight Committee did not immediately have a response.

The filing said Democrats have issued more than 100 subpoenas and requests “to anyone with even the most tangential connection to the President.”

An array of US companies have told the Trump administration that a citizenship question on the 2020 Census would harm business if it leads to an undercount of immigrants, undermining the data they use to place stores, plan inventory and plot ad campaigns.

Corporate executives, lobbyists and representatives from major industry groups like the Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation and the International Council of Shopping Centers have raised the issue in meetings with government officials, according to more than a dozen sources familiar with the matter. Some meetings date back to 2017, when the administration was first mulling adding the question.

Agencies