White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, who announced Wednesday she is resigning, refused to tell House Intelligence Committee members during nine hours of testimony Tuesday whether anyone in the administration had ever asked her to lie.
The question came after Hicks admitted she sometimes tells white lies for President Trump.
According to a Democrat and a Republican on the panel, Hicks refused to answer questions about whether she had been asked to lie by White House aides and Trump’s family members, including Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, and former campaign officials Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort.
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The one exception she made, according to Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), was acknowledging that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn had asked her during the transition period to dissemble about questions he was getting regarding his conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
She claimed that she didn’t know she was being asked to lie, but she felt that Flynn was being ‘’dishonest,” he said.
He said she did not answer when Swalwell asked why she would refuse to say whether other aides had asked her to lie when she was willing to speak about Flynn, or whether she had ever witnessed Trump asking others to lie for him.
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[Republican committee member Peter] King (R-NY) and Swalwell both said that Hicks left the interview room for about five to 10 minutes to confer with her lawyers after she was asked about the lies. When she returned, she said she had not lied for the president on matters relating to Russia.
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Democrats asked for a subpoena after Hicks then refused to detail whether other Trump advisers and staffers had asked her to lie. They asked for a subpoena again when Hicks refused to detail how many times Trump had asked her to lie for him, or tell them the last time she had been asked to lie, Swalwell said. A subpoena was never granted.
Hicks took a second timeout to confer with her lawyers, again for about five to 10 minutes. When she returned to the room, she said “she never knowingly lied,” Swalwell said. “She said she may have told white lies — but not about anything on Russia.”
King said that when Hicks returned to the room after consulting with her lawyer about how to answer the “lies” question, Swalwell said, “Let the record show that I asked you: Did President Trump ever ask you to lie?”
King said he rushed to correct Swalwell: “You didn’t say President Trump, you said Donald Trump.” The distinction is a potentially serious one because of questions about the role Hicks played last summer in drafting a misleading statement to explain Donald Trump Jr.’s participation in a June 2016 a meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer.
Full story: Hope Hicks refused to tell House panel if she had lied for senior Trump officials, lawmakers say (WaPo)