The acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, whom a federal judge ruled is illegally in office, ignored a Congressional subpoena and skipped a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, CNN reports.

Instead, Wolf attended a meeting of the Senate Homeland Security Committee staff in preparation for his formal nomination to be named DHS secretary.  It was unclear if Wolf had scheduled this meeting after receiving the subpoena.

The House hearing comes as whistleblower accusations that Wolf urged department officials to alter information in reports about threats from Russia and white supremacists groups became public.

Instead of Wolf attending the meeting, which also featured leaders of the FBI and National Counterterrorism Center, DHS offered Ken Cuccinelli, the senior official performing the duties of the deputy Homeland Security secretary, to attend.  Cuccinelli, whose position is also legally dubious, also failed to attend and instead posted his prepared testimony on Twitter.

“As the person running the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Wolf should be here to testify, as secretaries of Homeland Security have done before. Instead, we have an empty chair — an appropriate metaphor for the Trump Administration’s dereliction on so many of these critical homeland security issues,” Thompson said at the hearing.

President Trump, campaigning for re-election on a “law and order” theme, has supported administration members who ignore Congressional subpoenas.