The Washington Post reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee leaders from both parties advised federal prosecutors that witnesses, including member of the Trump family, gave misleading testimony in the committee’s investigation into Russia’s involvement in 2016 election tampering.
The republican and Democratic leaders of the Intel Committee delivered a letter to the US Attorney in the District of Columbia detailing concerns about testimony from Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis.
The letter, written in June 2019 by republican committee chairman Richard Burr and Democratic vice chairman Mark Warner, note that the testimony by those witnesses contradicted the statements by other witnesses and the individuals’ own public statements.
The existence of this letter precedes the release of the committee’s final volume of its own report on Russian interference in the 2016 election this week. The committee has been very clear in stating that the Russians interfered in the election to favor President Trump.
The letter refers the testimony of these individuals to the Department of Justice for further investigation, although it is unclear if the DoJ has taken or is currently undertaking any action on the referral.
The letter specifically points to Bannon’s and Prince’s testimony regarding a meeting Prince held with a Kremlin official in the Seychelles, saying that the pair’s accounts vary significantly from other testimony they had given specifically to the House Intelligence Committee and from others’ accounts.
It also questions the testimony from Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort and former Trump communications director Hope Hicks, who were all involved in the meeting or the aftermath with Russians, including Kremlin agent Natalia Veselnitskaya, at Trump Tower in June 2016.
Their accounts vary from testimony given by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Trump campaign deputy chair Rick Gates, as well as public statements by Trump Jr. Junior had said in sworn Congressional investigators that he did not discuss the Russian meeting with his father, however both Gates and Cohen said they were in a meeting with both the father and son, where Junior told senior members of the campaign that he had a meeting scheduled to follow up on a lead about negative information about the Clinton Foundation.