Presidents being impeached (and their administrations) have always refused Congress's requests for testimony and documentation.
Congress can take the President to court and compel documents and testimony (or else face contempt of court and imprisonment like Manning). The House did exactly that for Nixon and Cliton.
For Trump, the House chose not to do that, because (I believe) it would slow them down, and that wasn't acceptable to them.
From this point forward: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/us/p... the DOJ has allowed the WH to refuse to comply with a bunch of subpoenas, and there's no amount of partisan rhetoric that can hide that fact.
It's simply not up for debate, sorry.
That said, I don't know what are they standing on to be able to do that without any court just sending them all to jail.
"The right of the president of the United States to withhold information from Congress or the courts."
The article you mentioned cites executive privilege multiple times, and describes how it is unclear what the boundaries are. Simply saying "The House issued a subpoena and therefore the executive branch must comply" is just as invalid as "The executive branch can ignore all subpoenas".
Not sure what memo you're seeking or what game you're declining.
You said you didn't know what the DOJ/Trump administration was standing on to not comply with the congressional subpoenas. I explained they were standing on executive privilege.
As the article you linked described, the Trump administration was asserting executive privilege, and conflicts between congressional demands and executive privilege assertions need to be mediated by the courts ("But each of the emerging fights raises somewhat different legal questions that courts would have to sort through."). When the administration asserted privilege and declined to comply with House demands, the House chose proceed without court rulings, though courts probably would have compelled testimony about information previously revealed in the Mueller investigation.
For more authoritative sources than your NY Times article provides, executive privilege has been recognized in various supreme court decisions, particularly in military and diplomatic issues, even in cases where the court decided the privilege did not cover the material demanded (like U.S. v. Nixon https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/418/683/#tab-opi...).
The impeachment inquiry started exactly because of an allegation of perjury.
The ratified Articles of Impeachment were in fact (1) Perjury and (2) Obstruction of Justice (witness/evidence tampering).
I may have mistakenly characterized Clinton as explicitly withholding information by invoking executive privilege like Nixon and Trump, rather than deceptively doing so.
Congress was explicitly told they could not do this by the DOJ, but news weren't clear on the legal reasoning, relaying instead the handwavy explanation by Barr on the popelike infallibility of the president's office.
I'm really curious about the actual legal reasoning behind this, it's got to be a fascinating read.
> For Trump, the House chose not to do that, because (I believe) it would slow them down, and that wasn't acceptable to them.
The full House has to authorize a committee to to conduct an impeachment investigation and to vest it with the proper authority before the subpoenas become enforceable. The Democrats never did this because in that case, the Republicans in the House would have been able to send out their own subpoenas.
Congress can take the President to court and compel documents and testimony (or else face contempt of court and imprisonment like Manning). The House did exactly that for Nixon and Cliton.
For Trump, the House chose not to do that, because (I believe) it would slow them down, and that wasn't acceptable to them.