Senate Republicans are shooting down a Democratic push to have the U.S. translator who sat in on President Trump’s Monday meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin testify before Congress on what was said during their one-on-one discussion.
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Republicans roundly dismissed the idea, first mentioned by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., to have Marina Gross, a longtime translator for the State Department, testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pointing to the precedent it would set moving forward for presidents and the executive branch.
“Not particularly,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters when asked if he wants to hear from Gross. “We’re not going to go and start having interpreters in private meetings come out and testify.”
Graham noted that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is slated to come before the committee next Wednesday, adding that he wants to know if any agreements were reached in the meeting.
Shaheen, who was immediately backed up by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., over her call for Gross to testify, first made the remarks during Tuesday’s Senate Democratic press conference. She reiterated them on Twitter.
Senate Republicans also believe this would do harm to future discussions between heads of state.
“No. I don’t want to hear from the translator from any other heads of state meeting because it completely destroy the kind of dialogue they’d have in those meetings,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C. “The people who are requesting a translator need to commit to me that when they become chairs, lets say if majorities change, that they’ll never have a closed session.”
“That doesn’t strike me as a good idea,” said Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. “Those are private conversations and I think a president ought to be able to have a translator in a private conversation without that person being hauled before Congress to say what took place in there. That’s not the right way to do it.”
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said that he would “absolutely” like to be privy to what Trump and Putin said during their discussions and hear the interpreter’s point-of-view, it would be a precedent-setting move that could have major ramifications down the road.
“Sure, I’d be curious to do that, but everybody would,” Shelby said. “But then I’d probably set a precedent that would cause problems in the future with any president.”
Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., who serves along with Shaheen on the committee, said that he would at the very least like to have a closed briefing with Gross to find out what happened in the meeting.
[Opinion: Trump’s Putin press conference walk-back is not actually a walk-back]
