House Threatens to Subpoena White House for Ukraine Records

The House threatened on Wednesday to subpoena the White House if it did not comply by Friday with requests for a broad range of documents related to an alleged scheme to pressure Ukraine into investigating a leading political rival of President Trump.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee, notified his committee of the impending subpoena on Wednesday. He said the White House had thus far ignored Congress’s voluntary requests.

“I do not take this step lightly,” Mr. Cummings wrote. “Over the past several weeks, the committees tried several times to obtain voluntary compliance with our requests for documents, but the White House has refused to engage with — or even respond to — the committees.”

The impeachment inquiry has escalated quickly: The House has already issued two subpoenas for records. Mr. Cummings’s warning suggests lawmakers and their staffs are working methodically to collect the evidence they believe they need to evaluate an anonymous C.I.A. whistle-blower complaint that touched off their inquiry. First, they targeted the State Department, then Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and now the White House.

The subpoena threat came as House Democratic leaders were preparing to lay out the next steps in their rapidly unfolding impeachment inquiry, and as lawmakers expected to hear a mysterious bit of new information abruptly offered up by the State Department’s independent watchdog.

After a Wednesday morning news conference where Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, planned to outline the progress of their inquiry, Steven A. Linick, the State Department’s inspector general, was to brief lawmakers in the afternoon about urgent material he said was relevant to the investigation.