Hope Hicks Declines to Answer Lawmakers’ Questions on Transition and White House – By Nicholas Fandos (New York Times) / June 19 2019
WASHINGTON — After weeks of simmering frustration, House Democrats took their first shot on Wednesday at questioning a key figure from Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into whether President Trump obstructed justice. They were not entirely happy with the results.
Behind closed doors, lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee pressed Hope Hicks, one of Mr. Trump’s closest former aides, for nearly seven hours on her recollections of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, as well as on episodes documented by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, in which Mr. Trump tried to assert control over investigations into those contacts. And they resurrected an older accusation against Mr. Trump: his role in an illegal scheme to make hush payments to two women during his 2016 campaign.
But if the hearing held out the promise of kick-starting Democrats’ stalled investigations into Mr. Trump, it quickly veered toward an increasingly familiar outcome. It took place in public rather than private. And under the direction of the White House, Ms. Hicks declined to answer nearly every question about her time working in the administration, citing instructions from the president that she was “absolutely immune” from answering, lawmakers from both parties said.
At one point she refused, Democrats said, to even identify the location of her West Wing office.
© Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director, testified on Wednesday in a closed hearing on Capitol Hill.
Ms. Hicks did engage in queries about her work on the campaign, which is not subject to executive privilege or claims of immunity, discussing what she knew about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. But there was no immediate evidence that those exchanges produced meaningful new revelations. The Judiciary Committee said it intended to release a full transcript of the interview within 48 hours.
Democrats were displeased, if not altogether surprised. Several lawmakers threatened to take Ms. Hicks to court to enforce a subpoena for her full testimony.
“I’m watching obstruction of justice in action,” said Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California. “We’re going to go to court. We’re going to win and just make Hope Hicks come back again and actually answer the questions about her tenure in the White House.”
© Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times Ms. Hicks, at the direction of the White House, declined to answer nearly every question about her time working in the Trump administration.
Republicans, for their part, called the session “a complete waste of time,” given Ms. Hicks’s extensive past statements to other congressional committees and Mr. Mueller’s investigators. They did not fully use their allotted time for questioning and accused Democrats of refusing to accept Mr. Mueller’s decisions not to charge Mr. Trump or his campaign for either conspiracy with the Russians or obstruction of justice — ignoring the special counsel’s conclusion that he could not exonerate the president of obstruction, either.
“They are just trying to continue to make some hay out of the whole Russian collusion and obstruction of justice,” said Representative Steve Chabot, Republican of Ohio. “They seem to be bound and determined to keep this story alive about the president getting impeached.”
Mr. Trump seethed on Twitter, accusing Democrats of putting Ms. Hicks “through hell” and seeking a “Do Over” of the Mueller investigation.
So sad that the Democrats are putting wonderful Hope Hicks through hell, for 3 years now, after total exoneration by Robert Mueller & the Mueller Report. They were unhappy with result so they want a Do Over. Very unfair & costly to her. Will it ever end? Why aren’t they…….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2019
….asking Hillary Clinton why she deleted and acid washed her Emails AFTER getting a subpoena from Congress? Anybody else would be in jail for that, yet the Dems refuse to even bring it up. Rigged House Committee
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2019
The president’s view has bedeviled House Democrats for weeks, as his aides have systematically tried to cut off potential witnesses and contain evidence that Democrats have requested. The stonewalling has prompted a growing number of lawmakers — nearly a quarter of the Democratic caucus — to support opening an impeachment inquiry.
Some Democrats on the committee have begun arguing that they should reach down the witness list to Trump associates who may figure less prominently in Mr. Mueller’s report — Ms. Hicks was referenced more than 180 times — but whom the White House cannot shield from testifying because they never worked in the administration.
One such possibility is Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager whom the president ordered in June 2017 to deliver a message to the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, to reassert control over the special counsel investigation and to drastically limit its scope, according to the Mueller report. Another is Christopher Ruddy, a friend of Mr. Trump’s, who recounted to the special counsel about being told during a White House meeting the same month that Mr. Trump was thinking hard about firing Mr. Mueller.
But both men, and others like the former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, are also political allies of the president and savvy messengers capable with the help of House Republicans of upending a hearing to undermine Democrats.
Under an agreement forged last week with the Justice Department, Judiciary Committee members have begun to get access to F.B.I. summaries of witness interviews and notes and other communications that Mr. Mueller collected. The documents could influence where the committee goes next and how quickly it goes to court to try to push back against defiant witnesses.
Ms. Hicks’s refusal to answer questions about her White House work was not entirely new. When she appeared for private questioning by the House Intelligence Committee in February 2018, she declined to answer questions about her work on the Trump presidential transition or in the White House. On Wednesday, she came armed with a letter from the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, saying that she is “absolutely immune” from being forced to testify.
“The longstanding principle of immunity for senior advisers to the president is firmly rooted in the Constitution’s separation of powers and protects the core functions of the presidency,” he wrote in a letter to the committee’s chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York. But the president stopped short of trying to assert executive privilege over his conversations with Ms. Hicks.
The White House made the same argument to stop the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, another key Mueller witness, from testifying before the Judiciary Committee.
The claim of absolute immunity is separate from the concept of executive privilege. The Justice Department under both Republican and Democratic administrations has taken the position that the president’s closest advisers have such immunity from congressional subpoenas so they cannot be forced to comply with demands for testimony. But the theory has not been fully proven in court, and Democrats believe it is unlikely to stand up when tested.
In the closed hearing room, Democrats protested that stance. They have argued that any claims of executive privilege or immunity over information that Ms. Hicks had already shared with Mr. Mueller and was subsequently released in his redacted 448-page report were unlikely to stand up to scrutiny. Lawmakers also typically argue that communications from presidential transition periods are not subject to presidential protections.
Democrats asked anyway about a litany of episodes Ms. Hicks knew about or witnessed given her proximity to Mr. Trump, and called up relevant passages of Mr. Mueller’s report. They include a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between campaign officials and a Russian lawyer offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton and the drafting of a misleading statement about the meeting. Mr. Mueller’s report also mentioned Ms. Hicks’s role in discussions of the firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, the appointment of Mr. Mueller as special counsel and later attempts by Mr. Trump to fire the special counsel or curtail his inquiry.
Because executive privilege does not apply to conversations and events that took place during Mr. Trump’s campaign, there were signs that lines of questioning around the hush payments to a former Playboy model and pornographic film actress were at least somewhat more productive. Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer who arranged the payments, pleaded guilty to related campaign finance charges and other felonies and has told prosecutors that Mr. Trump was involved in the scheme.
Democrats are expected to cover the same topics at a public hearing on Thursday before the Judiciary Committee. They have called legal experts from both parties to discuss the implications of the hush payments and Mr. Trump’s boast last week to ABC that “I’d take it” if Russia again offered his campaign assistance in 2020.
