The Washington Post reports:

House investigators are demanding that the White House turn over documents related to the security clearances of top officials by Monday, an escalation of a fight between congressional Democrats and the Trump administration that could lead to subpoenas in the coming days.

The move follows the revelation that President Trump interceded to give his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance despite concerns from intelligence and White House officials about Kushner’s contacts with foreign individuals and his failure to disclose them on his clearance application. Both of those factors ordinarily would all but guarantee that an applicant not be given access to government secrets.

Overriding those concerns, the president in May 2018 directed his then-chief of staff, John F. Kelly, to approve the clearance application. Kelly, who had already stripped Kushner of an interim, temporary clearance, documented the president’s intervention in a memo.

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), in a letter to the White House on Friday, urged “full and immediate compliance” with outstanding requests the panel had made related to security clearances over the past two years. Cummings’s staff in a Friday phone call with White House officials tried to confirm the existence of the Kelly memo and a second written by former White House counsel Donald McGahn. The White House refused three times to confirm or deny the documents’ existence, Oversight Democrats said. [Continue reading…]