Amid ongoing questions regarding the Trump administration's ethics, Politico reports Friday that the White House is shielding the president by rejecting Democrats' oversight inquiries.
The news outlet's Burgess Everett and Josh Dawsey write, citing "Republican sources inside and outside the administration," that the mandate to disregard the requests was delivered by White House lawyer Uttam Dhillon to top officials from federal agencies.
Rebuffing the requests would block "new information that could be used to attack the president," Republicans said. GOP lawmakers have also come under fire for failing to provide the necessary "ongoing and vigilant oversight" of the Trump White House.
Numerous Democratic lawmakers have already made such oversight requests, like demanding the visitor logs from Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in West Palm Beach, Florida; asking why the administration dismissed Surgeon General Vivek Murthy; and requesting details about Trump's use of his unsecured personal smartphone.
Those are just a sprinkling of the oversight inquiries; in fact, Politico writes, a "senior Democratic aide said that of the Senate Democrats' 225 oversight letters sent to the Trump administration since January asking for information, the vast majority have received no response."
The approach differs from his predecessor's, as the Obama "White House never ordered agencies to stop cooperating with Republican oversight requests altogether," Everett and Dawsey write, adding that it "is in many ways unprecedented."
