{"id":552041,"date":"2021-06-04T07:00:40","date_gmt":"2021-06-04T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=552041"},"modified":"2021-06-04T07:20:17","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T11:20:17","slug":"house-panel-to-interview-trump-counsel-after-2-year-battle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/house-panel-to-interview-trump-counsel-after-2-year-battle\/","title":{"rendered":"House Panel to Interview Trump Counsel After 2-Year Battle"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fhouse-panel-to-interview-trump-counsel-after-2-year-battle%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=552041&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/GetFile-191.aspx\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"  style=\"display:none\"><\/div>\n<p>The House Judiciary Committee is poised to question former White House counsel Don McGahn behind closed doors on Friday, two years after House Democrats originally sought his testimony as part of investigations into former President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n<p>The long-awaited interview is the result of an agreement reached last month in federal court. House Democrats \u2014 then investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct the Justice Department\u2019s probes into his presidential campaign\u2019s ties to Russia \u2014 originally sued after McGahn defied an April 2019 subpoena on Trump\u2019s orders.<\/p>\n<p>That month, the Justice Department released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s report on the matter. In the report, Mueller pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice but also did not recommend prosecuting him, citing Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Mueller\u2019s report quoted extensively from interviews with McGahn, who described the Republican president\u2019s efforts to stifle the investigation.<\/p>\n<p>While the Judiciary panel eventually won its fight for McGahn&#8217;s testimony, the court agreement almost guarantees its members won\u2019t learn anything new. The two sides agreed that McGahn will be questioned only about information attributed to him in publicly available portions of Mueller\u2019s report.<\/p>\n<p>Still, House Democrats kept the case going, even past Trump\u2019s presidency, and are moving forward with the interview to make an example of the former White House counsel. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the agreement for McGahn&#8217;s testimony is a good-faith compromise that \u201csatisfies our subpoena, protects the Committee\u2019s constitutional duty to conduct oversight in the future, and safeguards sensitive executive branch prerogatives.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It is unclear what House Democrats will do with the testimony, which they sought before twice impeaching Trump. The Senate acquitted Trump of impeachment charges both times.<\/p>\n<p>As White House counsel, McGahn had an insider\u2019s view of many of the episodes Mueller and his team examined for potential obstruction of justice during the Russia investigation. McGahn proved a pivotal \u2014 and damning \u2014 witness against Trump, with his name mentioned hundreds of times in the text of the Mueller report and its footnotes.<\/p>\n<p>McGahn described to investigators the president\u2019s repeated efforts to choke off the probe and directives he said he received from the president that unnerved him.<\/p>\n<p>He recounted how Trump had demanded that he contact then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to order him to unrecuse himself from the Russia investigation. McGahn also said Trump had implored him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, to remove Mueller from his position because of perceived conflicts of interest \u2014 and, after that episode was reported in the media, to publicly and falsely deny that demand had ever been made.<\/p>\n<p>McGahn also described the circumstances leading up to Trump\u2019s firing of James Comey as FBI director, including the president\u2019s insistence on including in the termination letter the fact that Comey had reassured Trump that he was not personally under investigation.<\/p>\n<p>And he was present for a critical conversation early in the Trump administration, when Sally Yates, just before she was fired as acting attorney general as a holdover Obama appointee, relayed concerns to McGahn about new national security adviser Michael Flynn. She raised the possibility that Flynn&#8217;s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak \u2014 and his subsequent interview by the FBI \u2014 left him vulnerable to blackmail.<\/p>\n<p>Trump\u2019s Justice Department fought efforts to have McGahn testify, but U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2019 rejected Trump\u2019s arguments that his close advisers were immune from congressional subpoena.<\/p>\n<p>President Joe Biden has nominated Jackson to the appeals court in Washington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The House Judiciary Committee is poised to question former White House counsel Don McGahn behind closed doors on Friday, two years after House Democrats originally sought his testimony as part &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2279179,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/GetFile-191.aspx","fifu_image_alt":"House Panel to Interview Trump Counsel After 2-Year Battle","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-552041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/GetFile-191.aspx","fifu_image_alt":"House Panel to Interview Trump Counsel After 2-Year Battle","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2279179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}