Don Jr. will be first to face the music in new House Russia probe

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are renewing the Russia investigation and plan to issue their first subpoena to Donald Trump Jr., according to committee member Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA).

Speier was asked Tuesday night who would be subpoenaed first as the new Democratic-controlled committee reopens the investigation that Republicans prematurely shut down last year.

“Donald Trump Jr.,” she replied, according to the Washington Examiner.

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have already expressed interest in re-interviewing several witnesses, including Trump Jr., who they believe may have committed perjury.

In December, Speier said she believed that there were “at least two occasions when [Trump Jr.] lied to the committee.” She further said that Republicans helped cover up his potential perjury by blocking efforts to subpoena documents and other records that could disprove Trump Jr.’s testimony.

The new chair of the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), has also expressed his intent to investigate whether some witnesses may have misled the committee during testimony — and, if warranted, to bring perjury charges against those witnesses.

On Sunday, Schiff said he has concerns that “multiple witnesses” may have committed perjury, and he has previously stated that “the testimony of Don Jr., Erik Prince, Roger Stone and others is inconsistent with the public reports of meetings, conversations and other facts that have now been established.”

Speier reiterated those concerns Tuesday night while addressing the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington.

“There are a number of persons that testified before the committee that I feel were not telling the truth,” Speier said.

Now that Democrats are in control of the committee, they can finally investigate these instances of potential perjury — and they’re starting with the president’s son.

Democratic committee members have previously pointed to inconsistencies in Trump Jr.’s testimony about his June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Among other things, Trump Jr. failed to disclose his father’s involvement in crafting a misleading statement to deceive the public about the true purpose of the Trump Tower meeting.

Other reports suggest that Trump Jr. may have lied when he testified that no foreign governments had offered or provided assistance to the Trump campaign, despite his attendance at a meeting when representatives from the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates said they wanted to help the campaign with a “social media manipulation effort.”

Despite these clear inconsistencies, Republicans on the committee refused to provide oversight and blocked efforts by Democrats to obtain documents to investigate whether any witnesses perjured themselves.

The Republicans who controlled the committee ultimately ended the investigation, and wrote their report, without even interviewing a slew of key witnesses.

Speier criticized that report as a “whitewash” on Tuesday, and said Democrats would work to obtain the documents that Republicans had refused to subpoena.

“Those documents were never subpoenaed by the Republicans and so they were able to just produce a whitewashed report that probably was written by someone on the presidential staff. I think it was truly a disturbing series of events over the last two years,” Speier said.

With Republicans in control of Congress for the last two years, Trump and his associates have not had to face any actual oversight or scrutiny. But all of that changed when Democrats won the majority in the House — and Trump Jr. is about to be the first to face this new reality.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.