Republican Representative Tom Rooney (FL) has an announcement for the nation.
"Tonight I've asked our chairman [Rep. Mike] Conaway that we need to end this investigation," Rooney, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN's Erin Burnett.
During her extremely limited testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, one day before she announced that she was resigning from the White House, Hope Hicks was apparently herded into that hazard that so worries Donald Trump. She faced the dreaded perjury trap.
"The whole line of questioning was a trap," said Rooney, who recently announced he would not run for re-election. "They sent her down a rabbit hole that she could not get out of. And it was completely unfair."
Democrats allegedly forced poor Hope into this hopeless position through that trickiest of maneuvers—they asked Hicks a question:
“Have you ever been asked by your boss to lie for him?”
That seems to be the entire “trap” that Democrats built for Hicks. Of course, Democrats were also standing by with a set of Hicks’s own public statements as compared to the facts, but it wasn’t necessary to go point by point as Hicks’s response included an admission that she was telling lies for Trump.
… the Democrat who led the questioning, U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-California, fired back, "it's a question that is asked of witnesses every day across America – and most people don't have a hard time answering it."
It seems to be the whole idea that someone would be asked, point blank, if they had been telling lies in defense of Donald Trump that offends Republicans. If Democrats can ask that, next they’ll be asking if Trump ordered someone to do something … unsavory.
"I think the fair representation is that it was a setup: Use an extremely gratuitously broad question to make her look bad and ignore the rest of the nine hours that we were down there," Rooney said.
By most accounts, what happened for eight and a half of the nine hours that Hicks visited with the House committee was that she deployed the expansive new Trump privilege claim, one in which any question, even in areas where no claim of executive privilege has been made, can be answered. Because Trump might make a claim of executive privilege at some time in the future. Or something.
Under this expansive and unsupported view, and ignoring the fact that the House committee is not supposed to respect privilege in the first place, Hicks’s hours behind closed doors consisted of being asked a question, pausing for a consultation with her attorney, asking for a delay, conducting further consultations, then decided not to answer. In fact, it appears that Hicks failed to answer any specific question about her time at the White House, her time in the transition team, or her work on the campaign. Instead, what the committee got was a lot of delays and a lot of charming shrugs.
In fact, the most amazing thing about the question that generated the “white lies” response was not that it was asked, but that Hicks decided to give any answer at all.
Swalwell defended the question by pointing to Hicks' reaction to it. "If your response to the question, 'Have you ever been asked by your boss to lie for him?' is to take two time outs, we already know the answer to the question," Swalwell said, referring to pauses Hicks took to consult with her legal counsel during that round of questioning.
In fact, while Rooney was outraged that someone ignored all those other hours the committee spent with Hicks, it seems that there really was someone who didn’t pay attention to the rest of Hicks’s time in the chair.
Swalwell said -- and Rooney acknowledged -- that Rooney was not in the room for the very beginning of the questioning, which began with Swalwell asking Hicks about her relationship with Mr. Trump. He said he asked whether Hicks and Mr. Trump had a "typical" employer-employee relationship.
Rooney’s complaint that other people weren’t giving fair weight to the rest of the questioning is hard to swallow, when Rooney himself was apparently so bored with the day long demonstration of Hope Hicks smiles benignly that he left the room. Before Hicks was asked about lying for Trump, Swalwell asked her to answer several other questions concerning her relationship with Trump. These questions were clearly meant to determine if Trump had asked Hicks for any kind of formal declaration of “loyalty” and if he’d asked her to take actions to show her loyalty. In short, the same questions that every Trump official has faced since James Comey first made public Trump’s efforts to extort a pledge of undying fealty.
Critically, the “white lies” response came after a ten minute conference with Hicks’s legal representatives. Which suggests that this wasn’t an off the top of her head bit of fluff, but a carefully calibrated response meant to isolate Hicks from a clear series of public fictions. This is the answer her lawyers provided to protect Hicks from charges of perjuring herself, because that she lied isn’t in doubt, but how those lies are characterized is more subjective.
Rooney, just stepping back into the room, objected to the question and argued that Swalwell was asking Hicks to defend statements that anyone might make (i.e. “Does this suit make me fat?”), but it wasn’t Hicks who mounted this defense. It was Rooney. Hicks didn’t explain the range of items or the scale of statements that she grouped into her “white lies” response.
Follow up questions from Rooney handed Hicks a carefully worded set of questions to which she could safely say “No.” Which in turn allows Rooney and other Republicans to make their twice daily statement that the investigation had clearly run its course and now end.
After all, when people are admitting to lying—that’s a sure sign that the investigation has to stop.