Democrats from the Senate Judiciary Committee want to hand over transcripts of Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony to FBI investigators, suggesting that the president’s oldest son committed perjury during his testimony to the committee last year.
As special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation heats up, Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Sheldon Whitehouse wrote a letter to Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley, urging him to release the documents.
“You have stated publicly that you believe it is important for the Special Counsel to carry his investigation through to completion and determine the facts,” Blumenthal and Whitehouse wrote in a letter to the Republican committee chairman Wednesday. “It is hard to see how withholding the transcripts achieves that goal. We urge you to take immediate steps to resolve this inconsistency.”
They added, “The transcripts of congressional testimony may reveal other, and better-founded, concerns about witness false statements.”
Trump Jr. met with members of the committee in September 2017 to discuss a June 2016 meeting he and other Trump campaign officials had with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer. In an email proposing the meeting, Trump Jr. had been promised damning information about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“It is our understanding that the Committee has not shared transcripts of these interviews with the Special Counsel’s Office, despite the investigative relevance of their contents to that Office,” Blumenthal and Whitehouse wrote in their shared press release.
After Trump Jr.’s September testimony, Blumenthal claimed there were “gaps” in what Trump Jr. said and requested that the chairman subpoena the president’s son for a public testimony in December 2017. Though there were several calls from Democrats for a public hearing late last year, no such interview has taken place yet.
“I did not collude with any foreign government and do not know of anyone who did,” Trump Jr. said in an opening statement during the closed-door meeting in September.
In recent weeks, it has been revealed that Mueller has questioned top Trump officials, as well as individuals who have had a leading role in the Russia probe.
