It seems Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has finally gotten her way. After months of promising that President Donald Trump’s son Donald Jr. would testify publicly about the infamous “Russia meeting,” the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning that she knows “for sure” that Trump Jr. will testify publicly “sometime this fall.”
“I think it’s Senator Grassley’s intent, and it’s certainly my intent, to have him before the Committee in the open to ask him some questions.”
When asked about the timing of the testimony by CNN’s Dana Bash, Feinstein said she that while she expects Don Jr. to appear before the committee this fall, “things keep changing.”
“It’ll be this fall, I know that for sure things keep changing not by design but just the press of other business on the Committee and I think people have to anticipate that it will take a long time. This will take a year, a year and a half, if not more. The chairman and I work well together. If we have a difference, we work it out between us. We will be able to answer some questions, let me put it that way.”
Feinstein added that the committee would likely subpoena former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort if he continues to rebuff the committee’s interview requests.
“We will likely do that if he refuses to come before the Committee. One of the things we’d like to do is investigative work. We now have people who can do that.”
Feinstein also said that the committee has “no evidence” that Jared Kushner’s “data operation” during the campaign played a role in suggesting Facebook targets for the Russians, as CNN’s Dana Bash suggested in another blatant example of the media embellishing potential connections between Trump and the Russians.
While Trump Jr. has submitted to endless “closed door meetings” with the various investigations probing links between Russia and his father's campaign, none of those occasions allowed lawmakers the same opportunity for political grandstanding as public testimony would. Testimony involving the president’s son would probably create the largest media circus since former FBI Director James Comey’s second round of public Congressional testimony in June, where he famously stopped short of accusing the president of attempting to obstruct justice.
Trump recently sat for a five-hour interview with the Judiciary Committee where he reportedly discussed his reasoning for taking a meeting with Russian Lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and her entourage in June 2016, around the time that Trump had secured the nomination.
What more could the committee possibly want to know?