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Democrats on the House intelligence committee want Donald Trump Jr. to testify again, this time under the less forgiving gavel of a Democratic majority. A lot has come to light since that first September 2017 appearance that could lead to trouble for junior. So what could House Democrats get from a second swing at the First Namesake?
Trump Tower, Moscow: Committee members will want to hone in on what Don Jr. knew about the Trump Tower, Moscow, proposal and when he knew it. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s rare public denial Friday of BuzzFeed’s big scoop Thursday about how Donald Trump Sr. allegedly told Cohen to lie to Congress about the project has caught everyone’s attention. Nonetheless, there’s plenty in the special counsel’s own criminal information filed on Michael Cohen that could prompt congressional followup questions. Prosecutors alleged that Cohen “briefed family members of [Trump Sr.] within the company about the project.”
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So, if and when Don Jr. retakes the stand, House Democrats are going to want to pin him down on whether he was one of those briefed about the project, when those briefings took place, whether and when he may have discussed the project with his father, and whether he ever discussed it with any Russian nationals.
Trump Tower, New York: The one Russia investigation chapter where Don Jr. appears to be a pivotal character is the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others promising Clinton dirt. Veselnitskaya, we’ve since learned, is even closer to the Russian government officials than the public knew when Don Jr. first testified back in September 2017. What we’ve learned about her habit of ghostwriting official Russian documents isn’t something that’s likely to produce new or interesting answers from Don Jr.. But there are a few areas that could yield some insights.
Phone records: On June 6, 2016, three days before the meeting with Veselnitskaya, Don Jr. got a call from a blocked number at 8:40 AM. The timing has piqued the interest of Democratic lawmakers because it took place after Veselnitskaya’s intermediaries pitched Don Jr. on the meeting but before it took place. Don Jr.’s lawyers say they included the call record in their document production to the committee out of an abundance of caution, because they weren’t sure who it was from or whether it was relevant. Don Jr. himself wasn’t much help either. He told the committee he didn’t know or couldn’t recall who it was from.
Committee Democrats are skeptical of that explanation. Schiff has speculated about the possibility that the call might have come from then candidate Trump, which would have given him advance notice of the outreach—something he’s since denied. Trump Sr. has come out and said that the explicit purpose of Don Jr.’s attendance at the meeting was to get dirt on Clinton and not, as initially claimed, a bait-and-switch meeting about adoption policy. That sounds a lot like an acknowledgement that he has some understanding of his son’s thoughts. Given that Don Jr. has already said he doesn’t know who the call came from, or whether his father uses a blocked number, the House intelligence committee will likely try a different track and flex the subpoena power the Republicans denied them when they were in the majority and grab the underlying phone records.
Privilege fight: One of the other issues that Democrats are likely to re-litigate is whether Don Jr. can assert attorney-client privilege about a conversation with his dad because a lawyer was physically present at one point. Don Jr. pulled the claim when questioned about a conversation he had with his father on the Trump Tower meeting a year after it took place. At the time, House Democrats were skeptical that Trump’s conversation with his father could be privileged, given that neither are attorneys, but Republicans let the claim stand. If Democrats can drag Don Jr. back to Capitol Hill, it’s likely that assertion will get some pushback.
Don’t cross the streams: One of the dangers in trying to investigate a presidential scandal when there’s a special (or independent) counsel looking into the same issue is that the congressional investigation can end up undermining what’s supposed to be the complementary work of a prosecutor. Flash back to the Iran-Contra affair, when a Democratic majority reigned in both the House and Senate, and controlled the investigations into the Reagan administration’s provision of arms to the Iranian government in order to secure the release of American hostages. Those committees granted immunity to a handful of key witnesses to get their testimony—and dealt a fatal blow to the independent counsel’s attempts to prosecute those same figures.
The takeaway is that two branches of government working towards the same goal, in the same investigation, can trip each other up. Schiff comes to the House intelligence committee chairmanship with a background as a federal prosecutor, so that possibility is something he’ll be acutely aware of. Nonetheless, he’ll have to be careful when treading in Mueller’s footsteps.
