Democrats Suggest Trump May Have Lied Under Oath to Mueller
It seems like a lifetime ago that Robert Mueller filed his report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, Democrats have largely shifted their attention to Ukraine, and President Donald Trump’s efforts to persuade President Volodymyr Zelensky to interfere in the next presidential election. But because what is dead may never die, the Mueller report came back into the spotlight this week, with an allegation from congressional Democrats that Trump may have lied under oath during the special counsel’s investigation.
As Politico reported on Monday evening, a team of attorneys lead by House General Counsel Douglas Letter have been working to gain access to the grand jury materials used in Mueller’s investigation which, by law, have remained secret. In a court filing earlier this week, the Democratic lawyers zeroed in on a particular passage in Mueller’s report, in which then-Trump campaign chairman (and current incarcerated felon) Paul Manafort testified that Trump had asked him to be “updated” on Wikileaks’ publication of material stolen from the Democratic National Committee.
That same passage of Mueller’s report also contains a reference to the grand jury which has been redacted. And now Democrats want to know what it contains.
“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 Democrats’ lawyers explained in their filing.
“Those events may also be relevant to the House’s investigation of the president’s solicitation of Ukrainian interference in the 2020 election,” they added later in the filing, per the site, in reference to Democrats’ ongoing impeachment inquiry.
In a statement to Politico, Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow called the insinuation that the president may have lied under oath “absurd.”