The House Judiciary Committee are bearing down on getting those Grand Jury notes which their lawyers petitioned again for today in hopes of nailing down whether T did lie about his knowledge of the Wikileaks dumps. With the Impeachment Inquiry rolling now, their lawyers requests may get some better traction with finding those notes and seeing if they do indeed reveal that T did know more about Wikileaks.
I bet they may be right…and looking for more smoking guns within all the obfuscation.
Lawyers for the House of Representatives revealed on Monday that they have reason to believe that the grand-jury redactions in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report show that President Donald Trump lied about his knowledge of his campaign’s contacts with WikiLeaks.
The attorneys made the stunning suggestion in a court filing as part of the House Judiciary Committee’s bid for Mueller’s grand-jury materials, which have remained secret by law.
“Not only could those materials demonstrate the president’s motives for obstructing the special counsel’s investigation, they also could reveal that Trump was aware of his campaign’s contacts with WikiLeaks,” the lawyers wrote in the filing, which was in response to the Justice Department’s opposition to the disclosure of the grand-jury information.
To back up their claim, the House’s legal team — led by House General Counsel Douglas Letter — cited a passage in Mueller’s report about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s testimony that he “recalled” Trump asking to be kept “updated” about WikiLeaks’ disclosures of Democratic National Committee emails. There is a grand-jury redaction in that passage, the lawyers note.
“The text redacted … and any underlying evidence to which it may point are critical to the committee’s investigation,” they wrote.
“Those materials therefore have direct bearing on whether the president was untruthful, and further obstructed the special counsel’s investigation, when in providing written responses to the special counsel’s questions he denied being aware of any communications between his campaign and WikiLeaks,” they added.
In a text message to POLITICO, Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal attorney, said the suggestion that Trump lied to Mueller’s investigators is “absurd.”
…
Monday’s filing also referenced the most recent scandal engulfing the Trump White House — the president’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden — which caused Speaker Nancy Pelosi to formalize an impeachment inquiry. Letter, the House general counsel, and his deputies argued that Mueller’s grand-jury evidence could also be useful for the House’s ongoing Ukraine probe.
“Those events may also be relevant to the House’s investigation of the president’s solicitation of Ukrainian interference in the 2020 election,” the lawyers wrote, referencing Trump’s efforts to curtail the Mueller probe.