By Billy House
Bloomberg News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The House Intelligence Committee voted Friday to release 53 transcripts of closed-door interviews it conducted, including with Donald Trump Jr., White House adviser Jared Kushner and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in its probe into Russian election interference.
But Democrats, led by Rep. Adam Schiff of California, protested that Republicans who control the panel wouldn’t vote to set a specific timeline for the release, once the transcripts go through a declassification process with intelligence agencies and are scrubbed for personal information.
“They’re trying to bury them as long as they can” while making a pre-election show of transparency, Schiff said. Democrats also wanted some of the transcripts sent to special counsel Robert Mueller, asserting that some of the witnesses appeared to give false testimony. Schiff said Republicans rejected that too.
The move to release the material was approved by voice vote. Dismissing Schiff’s complaint, Jack Langer, a spokesman for Republicans led by Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the panel’s chairman, said “it’s amusing to see the Democrats continuing to promote their never-ending chain of absurd conspiracy theories.”
In addition to interviews with Sessions, Trump Jr. and Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, the transcripts to be released include interviews of long-time Trump adviser Roger Stone, current Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, and former aides Stephen Bannon, Corey Lewandowski and Hope Hicks.
Democrats pressed unsuccessfully for the release of other transcripts, including of a number of agency heads; California Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher, who may be the most pro-Russia lawmaker in Congress; and Florida Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who headed the Democratic National Committee when it was hacked in 2016.
The House panel has long been bitterly divided along partisan lines. Democrats protested when the Republican majority ended the active investigation by saying they found no evidence anyone close to Trump colluded in Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, and echoing the president’s frequent assertion that anti-Trump forces in the Justice Department and FBI were engaged in a “witch hunt” against him.
