The ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, and all nine of her Democratic colleagues are urging committee chair Chuck Grassley for public hearings on Russia's attack on our 2016 elections. Politico writes:
They want more information from President Donald Trump aides including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has "declined to schedule even a staff-level interview" with Judiciary, the Democrats wrote in a letter to Grassley. [...]
"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 group wrote to Grassley.
"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," they said.
Amen. One of the hottest topics and most gaping holes in the record surrounds the summer 2016 Trump Tower meeting attended by Kushner, Trump Jr., and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort. Not only has Kushner dodged granting any interviews to the committee, but he's failed to produce the documentation of his security clearance that would disclose his foreign travel and contacts (ya know, the one he amended like a million times). Gee, that doesn't seem fishy.
Nor does the fact that Trump Jr. has declined to give the committee drafts of his evolving July 2017 statements in response to reports about the Trump Tower meeting. He's also stonewalled the committee on his direct communications with WikiLeaks.
Grassley has previously committed to publicly releasing transcripts from people who have testified before the committee, a move Democrats praised in the letter. However, they maintained that "simply releasing these transcripts" was an inadequate show of transparency when key witnesses such as Kushner and Trump Jr. have been allowed to evade crucial committee requests.
