Trump says he will not try to stop former Justice
Dept. officials from testifying to Congress.
Katie Benner
By Katie Benner
Aug. 3, 2021
Former
President Donald J. Trump said this week that he would not move to stop former
Justice Department officials from testifying before two committees that are
investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert the results of the
presidential election, according to letters from his lawyer obtained by The New
York Times.
Mr. Trump
said he would not sue to prevent six former Justice Department officials from
testifying, according to letters sent to them on Monday by Douglas A. Collins,
who was known as one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters when he served in
Congress and who is now one of the former president’s lawyers.
Mr. Collins
said Mr. Trump might take some undisclosed legal action if congressional
investigators sought “privileged information” from “any other Trump
administration officials or advisers,” including “all necessary and appropriate
steps, on President Trump’s behalf, to defend the office of the presidency.”
The letters
were not sent to the congressional committees, but rather to the potential
witnesses, who cannot control whom Congress contacts for testimony or what
information it seeks.
By allowing
his former Justice Department officials to speak with investigators, Mr. Trump
has paved the way for new details to emerge about his efforts to delegitimize
the outcome of the election.
Even though
department officials, including the former acting Attorney General Jeffrey A.
Rosen and the former Attorney General William P. Barr, told him that President
Biden had won the election, Mr. Trump pressed them to take actions that would
cast the election results in doubt and to publicly declare it corrupt.
Mr. Trump
and his allies have continued to falsely assert in public statements that the election
was rigged and the results were fraudulent.
Mr. Rosen,
Richard P. Donoghue, a former acting deputy attorney general, and others have
agreed to sit down for closed-door, transcribed interviews with the House
Oversight and Reform and Senate Judiciary Committees. The sessions are expected
to begin as soon as this week, according to three people familiar with those
interviews.
Last week,
the Justice Department told former officials from the agency that they were
allowed to provide “unrestricted testimony” to the committees, as long as it
does not reveal grand-jury information, classified information or information
about pending criminal cases.
The
committees asked the Justice Department to allow former officials to testify
after they opened investigations this year into the Trump White House’s efforts
to undermine Mr. Biden’s victory, a pressure campaign that occurred in the
weeks before Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol as Congress met to
certify the electoral results.
Sign Up for
On Politics With Lisa Lerer A spotlight
on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the
country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what
you really need to know. Get it sent to your inbox.
The Justice
Department and the White House Counsel’s Office generally deny such requests
because they believe deliberative conversations between administration
officials should be protected from public scrutiny.
But they
ultimately decided to allow the interviews to proceed, saying in letters to the
potential witnesses that the scope of the investigation concerned
“extraordinary events,” including whether Mr. Trump tried to improperly use the
Justice Department to advance his “personal political interests,” and thus
constituted “exceptional circumstances.”
In his
letter, which was reported earlier by Politico, Mr. Collins also said Mr. Trump
continued to believe that the information sought by the committees “is and
should be protected from disclosure by executive privilege.”
Mr. Collins
said that no president had the power to unilaterally waive that privilege, and
that the Biden administration had “not sought or considered” Mr. Trump’s views
in deciding not to invoke it.
“Such
consideration is the minimum that should be required before a president waives
the executive privilege protecting the communications of a predecessor,” Mr.
Collins wrote.
The
committees have also received a slew of emails, handwritten notes and other
documents from the department that show how Mr. Trump, Mark Meadows, his former
chief of staff, and others pushed the department to look into voter fraud
allegations not supported by evidence, to ask the Supreme Court to vacate the
election results and to publicly cast doubt on the outcome.
Congress
has asked six former officials to testify in addition to Mr. Rosen and Mr.
Donoghue. That list includes Patrick Hovakimian, Mr. Rosen’s former chief of
staff; Byung J. Pak, the former U.S. attorney in Atlanta; Bobby L. Christine,
the former U.S. attorney in Savannah, Ga.; and Jeffrey Clark, the former acting
head of the Civil Division.
Katie
Benner covers the Justice Department. She was part of a team that won a
Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual
harassment issues. @ktbenner
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário