President Donald Trump’s eldest son and former campaign chairman are slated to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week.
Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort are among the big-ticket names now expected at a July 26 hearing as part of that panel’s probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the foreign dealings of a number of the President’s associates.
Trump Jr. recently made a raft of headlines for his previously undisclosed participation in a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that was explicitly billed as a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign. Manafort, who also attended the meeting, has long been under investigation by authorities for his work on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party and his complex web of real estate dealings.
Another individual with ties to the attendees at the Trump Tower meeting is also expected to testify: William Browder, a London-based businessman, has lobbied for sanctions legislation that some of the Russian attendees at the meeting have worked to roll back.
The committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), confirmed to CNN on Tuesday that special counsel Robert Mueller had cleared Manafort and Trump Jr. to testify publicly.
Why Judiciary and not Intelligence?
I wonder how cocky Jr. will act during his testimony.
Ding. Ding. Ding. We have a winner. Judiciary got Jr first.
And we get to see two types of liars on full display to compare and contrast styles:
Manafort with the traditional form of crafty lies
vs.
Jr. with the currently popular form of blatant lie with a blank stare.
Actually we will all get to see if “Jr-lying-under-oath” looks any different than “Jr-lying-in-general”.
I am betting a number of questions go unanswered under the blanket of “kinda sorta Executive Privilege lemme ask the President if it’s okay to talk about it”.
I heard Malcolm Nance say that they could be walking into a perjury trap. If what they say under oath to the committee doesn’t exactly match what they said to Moeller or the FBI they are even more screwed.