A Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee says he wouldn’t be shocked if Donald Trump Jr. and Roger Stone, a former confidant of President Trump, lied to Congress.
Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., suggested on MSNBC’s “Kasie DC” late Sunday that President Trump’s eldest son may not have been truthful when he appeared before the panel in December 2017 for about seven hours. In particular, Quigley referenced testimony Trump Jr. gave over how much his father, when he was a candidate, knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between key campaign aides, including his Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-linked lawyer. The meeting was allegedly set up based on the promise of sharing political dirt on Trump political opponent Hillary Clinton.
“I wouldn’t say that I know for sure that Don Jr. lied to us. I think that he had some failures of memory. I wouldn’t be surprised if he lied to us,” Quigley said.
[Also read: Trump praises Roger Stone for having ‘guts’]
Quigley’s comments come after Michael Cohen, the president’s former longtime personal lawyer and fixer, pleaded guilty in a New York federal court last week to “knowingly and willfully” making “a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement and representation” to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in 2017 regarding a Trump real estate project in Moscow. Quigley said Sunday Cohen’s guilty plea, emanating from special counsel Robert Mueller’s federal Russia investigation, called “into question everybody involved in the Trump financial world who testified” about the same deal.
After Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress last Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee reviewed its transcripts from Trump Jr.’s September 2017 appearance before the panel, according to USA Today. Trump Jr. was additionally interviewed last December by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on that panel, said Sunday the committee had also made “a number” of referrals to Mueller in relation to witness testimony.
On Sunday, Quigley said Stone, a self-described political trickster, may face legal problems as well for being dishonest with Congress when he came to Capitol Hill in September 2017.
“I do,” Quigley said, when asked whether he had reason to believe Stone lied to lawmakers. “We now know more than he let on. There are any number of witnesses who are similarly situated. Subsequent information and documentation we received led us to believe that they were perjuring themselves.”
