HOUSE DEMOCRATS, BIDEN CUT DEAL FOR MCGAHN TO TESTIFY

The Biden administration and House Democrats have reached a tentative deal to allow President Donald J. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to testify before Congress about Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia inquiry, according to a court filing late Tuesday.

The deal appears likely to avert a definitive court precedent that would draw a clear line in ambiguous areas: The scope and limits of Congress’s constitutional power to compel testimony for its oversight responsibilities, and a president’s constitutional power to keep conversations with a White House lawyer secret, Charlie Savage reported for the New York Times.

An appeals court had been set to hear arguments in the case next week, but lawyers for the Justice Department, which has been defending Mr. McGahn since 2019 against a House subpoena seeking to compel his testimony, and for the House of Representatives, asked the court in a joint letter to drop that plan.

What to do about the subpoena case, which President Biden inherited from the Trump administration, has been a rare point of institutional disagreement among Democrats in the two branches.

But the filing also flagged a potential wild card: “Former President Trump, who is not a party to this case, is not a party to the agreement in principle regarding an accommodation,” it said.

That leaves open the question of whether Mr. Trump could try to intervene to block Mr. McGahn from testifying by asserting executive privilege. Such an attempt would raise novel questions about the extent to which a former president may assert the privilege when the incumbent president declines to do so.

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