Hope Hicks Said Trump Open to Foreign Election Help, Nadler Says
Hope Hicks Said Trump Open to Foreign Election Help, Nadler Says
(Bloomberg) -- Former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks said she believed President Donald Trump was “serious” when he said he would accept information about a political rival from a foreign source, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said.
“His invitation to foreign actors is so alarming that even one of his most loyal former aides, Hope Hicks, knew that the president’s statement was alarming,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said Thursday, referring to Hicks’s closed-door testimony before the panel on Wednesday.
Nadler made the remarks at the start of his panel’s second hearing on the report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The comments referred to an ABC News interview with Trump last week. The president said “I’d take it,” when asked how he’d respond if a foreign individual or entity offered him damaging intelligence on a political opponent.
Hicks’ response to questions about what Trump told George Stephanopoulos in the interview was contained in the 273-page transcript of her testimony, released by the committee later Thursday.
“I didn’t see the entire interview, so I saw the clip you’re referencing,” Hicks answered. “I don’t know if there was additional context. I don’t think that was a joke based on what I saw.”
In the interview, when Trump was asked whether he’d accept information from foreigners or hand it over to the FBI, he said: “Maybe you do both.”
Hicks, who was subpoenaed to testify, was part of Trump’s inner circle as one of his longest-serving and most trusted advisers. She left the White House last year and is now chief communications officer for Fox Corp.
She angered some Democrats by declining to answer many questions after the White House told Nadler that the Justice Department considered her “absolutely immune” from discussing her time as a senior adviser to Trump at the White House.
The transcript shows Hicks was directed dozens of times by White House lawyers in the room -- the committee says 155 times -- not to answer questions. They typically argued that she had constitutional immunity from having to talk about her time as a senior adviser in the White House in order to protect the prerogatives of the Office of the President to assert privileges later.
The all-day questioning on Wednesday had some bizarre moments. At one point, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, asked Nadler if he would tell people in the hearing room to refrain from taking photos, because “it’s making the witness uncomfortable.”
At the beginning of the hearing, Nadler began by asking “who is Corey Lewandowski,” a reference to Trump’s campaign manager until June 2016. That led to questions about a visit to the White House by Lewandowski in June 2017, where Trump expressed anger at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation.
But White House lawyers right away objected to allowing Hicks to answer as Nadler continued to press Hicks about Trump seeking to get Lewandowski to deliver a directive to Sessions, which she had typed.
That directive, as described in Mueller’s report, was for Sessions to say the president didn’t do anything wrong and to get Sessions to limit the special counsel investigation.
At one point, when Nadler referred to her as “Ms. Lewandowski,” she replied: “My name is Ms. Hicks.”
Nadler apologized, saying, “I’m preoccupied.”
The pattern of non-answers continued throughout much of the session, though Hicks did talk about some of her time working on Trump’s campaign, and before his inauguration.
She was asked if the Trump campaign benefited from WikiLeaks’ release of material from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the product of a hack tied to Russians. She said there was a feeling of “relief” when the emails came out.
To contact the reporter on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Anna Edgerton, John Harney
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