WASHINGTON – In her marathon nine-hour closed-door meeting with the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, White House communications director Hope Hicks refused to say whether she had lied for a number of senior White House and Trump campaign officials, even as she acknowledged telling “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 Bannon, and former campaign officials Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort.
The testimony came a day before Hicks, 29, announced her plan to resign from the White House.
The one exception she made, according to Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-California, 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.
[Trump aide Hope Hicks to resign amid personal tumult and Russia probe]
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.
Hicks’s admission came toward the end of her interview, as part of an exchange with Swalwell about whether Hicks had “ever lied for” Trump – a question Hicks initially refused to answer until she had consulted with her lawyer. Her recalcitrance left Democrats and Republicans on the panel with radically different interpretations about what her answers – particularly her admission that she had told “white lies” – means.
“If your response to the question, ‘have you ever lied for your boss’ is to pause and take two timeouts, then we already know the answer,” Swalwell said, recapping his version of the exchange for The Washington Post. “She couldn’t answer it.”
On several occasions, Democrats asked Republican panel leaders to issue Hicks a subpoena for failing to provide more detailed answers to their questions about lies, but they refused.
The GOP maintains that Hicks was simply a victim of her own conscientiousness, and her “white lies” answer, according to Republican panel member Rep. Peter King of New York, was simply an effort to avoid what he said was “a setup” and “a perjury trap.”
“If she had said no, and had some person come back and said they called and asked to meet with Donald Trump and she said ‘he’s not in’ when he really was, then she would have perjured herself,” King said. Hicks said she “never lied about anything of substance, and certainly nothing about anything involved in this investigation or with Russia,” he added.
“What I have done is what everyone has done, is tell ‘white lies,’” King said, continuing to quote Hicks to the best of his memory. “What she was doing is what any honest human being would say.”
[In Russia probe, Hicks refuses to answer questions about Trump administration]
The distinction highlights the sharp partisan divide between members of the House Intelligence Committee, who have interviewed the same witnesses during their months-long probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, but are at odds over whether Trump affiliates’ actions and conversations were innocuous or potentially insidious.
Hicks came under added fire during her Tuesday appearance before the committee because she refused to answer questions related to anything that occurred after Trump took office, despite the fact that Trump has not invoked executive privilege. That meant lawmakers were unable to compel her to testify about the role she might have played last summer aboard Air Force One in drafting a misleading statement to explain why the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., had taken a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer.
King 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 to the president on matters relating to Russia.
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.”
Democrats were frustrated with Hicks’ answers, and the exchange infuriated Republicans on the panel, who believe Swalwell’s whole line of questioning was designed to paint Hicks in the worst possible light – and create the impression that she had told larger lies than the minor communications obfuscations she was admitting to.
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.
King said he wished the exchange had been televised, to demonstrate to the public that Hicks was trying not to dissemble, but to be honest an accurate with her answers, which she delivered “in excruciating detail.”
“This is disgraceful what they’re doing to her, they’re trying to set it up,” King said. “To try to bring her down on this type of cheap stunt, really that’s what it was, a cheap stunt hit job.”
The exchange took place at least seven hours into the nine-hour hearing, King said, who added that he was not aware of any discussions Hicks’ lawyers had with the White House in preparing her to answer Swalwell’s questions about whether she had lied to the committee.
Earlier, in the midafternoon, a committee counsel interrupted the meeting so that Hicks’s lawyers could take a call from the White House lawyers. During that conversation, the White House’s lawyers told Hicks she had permission to answer questions pertaining to the transition period, King said.
The committee had obtained a transcript of an interview Hicks did with the Senate Intelligence Committee in the fall – based on that, they had successfully argued to the White House that Hicks ought to answer the House Intelligence Committee’s questions on the same topics.
There was never a formal invocation of executive privilege, and Hicks’ never specifically discussed privilege, King said – she was deferring to her employer. Once Hicks has formally resigned as communications director, it is possible that congressional panels may attempt to call her back to testify.
But King guessed that would “probably not” happen in the House, and in the Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Virginia, is not pushing for Hicks’ return either.