Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are urging the panel’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley, to hold public hearings related to its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including hearings during which Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner testify.
Led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., nine Democrats on the committee sent the letter to Grassley, R-Iowa, on Wednesday expressing support for requests by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s top Democrat, for public hearings.
“Committee members have long been led to believe that they would have the chance to question witnesses directly—to follow up on the many questions raised by the staff interviews and to ensure that witnesses testify publicly and under oath,” the Democratic senators wrote. “Any effort to end the committee’s inquiry before committee members have been able to ask a single question—and before a single witness has been questioned in public or under oath—would be a disservice to the Judiciary Committee’s long history of serving as a forum to ferret out the truth and inform the American people.”
The senators called for Grassley to schedule public hearings with Trump Jr. and Kushner, as well as other key witnesses in the committee’s Russia probe.
Trump Jr. has met voluntarily with Judiciary Committee staff, but the Democrats said he has refused to give the panel documents related to a July 2017 statement about a June 2016 meeting he attended at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer.
Trump Jr. met with the lawyer, along with Kushner and then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, after he was promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Kushner, meanwhile, has declined to meet with committee staff to discuss the Trump Tower meeting.
“Mr. Kushner’s recent decision to refuse a private interview with our committee does not diminish the need to compel his public testimony and that of other crucial witnesses,” the Judiciary Committee Democrats wrote. “If anything, it makes his public testimony all the more essential.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee is one of several congressional committees investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, as well as possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
The committee interviewed five witnesses about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, including Trump Jr., Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, businessman Ike Kaveladze, British publicist Rob Goldstone, who helped set up the meeting, and translator Anatoli Samochornov.
Grassley said last month he now wants to release the transcripts of those interviews, as the part of the investigation related to the Trump Tower meeting had concluded.
But the Iowa senator also said the release of a transcript from Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the committee, unilaterally released by Feinstein, “spooked” other possible witnesses from appearing before the committee.
Grassley said the committee’s chances of interviewing Kushner were “shot.”
