The Justice Department was forced to reveal this weekend that neither former White House Counsel Don McGahn nor Donald Trump Jr. testified in front of special counsel Robert Mueller’s grand jury during his two-year investigation.
The revelation followed a court order from U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell, who is presiding over an effort by the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee to gain access to secretive grand jury material from Mueller’s investigation as part of the broader impeachment inquiry into the president.
Following a ruling by Howell last week, DOJ removed some redactions from a September letter by Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer, who was involved in the Mueller report’s redaction process in March. The newly unredacted information showed that McGahn and Trump Jr. “did not testify before the grand jury.”
McGahn was mentioned 529 times in Mueller’s 448-page report, though his attorney suggested he didn’t appear in front of the grand jury because he willingly sat down with Mueller’s team multiple times for more than 30 hours, with his testimony making up much of Volume II of the report. McGahn detailed events that Mueller considered possible obstruction of justice, including Trump asking McGahn to fire Mueller and requesting that McGahn publicly deny he’d been asked to do so.
Trump Jr.’s lack of grand jury testimony is striking — he is mentioned at least 166 times in Mueller’s report, including for his role in the campaigns outreach to Wikileaks and a controversial meeting in set up in Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016. It’s possible he planned to plead the fifth if he received a grand jury subpoena from Mueller.
Howell said last week that, without naming them by name, McGahn and Trump Jr. “figured in key events examined in the Mueller Report” though neither appeared before the grand jury. She seemed curious about why Mueller made this decision, stating his reasons “remain unknown.” Howell noted that “assessment of these choices by the Special Counsel is a matter for others” and ruled that grand jury secrecy rules were “no barrier to disclosure of the identities of two individuals whose testimony the Special Counsel chose not to present to the grand jury.”
Lawyers for the Democratic congressional committee had opposed DOJ’s argument that revealing the names of two people who hadn’t testified would improperly reveal the names of people who had testified, and the judge agreed.
