Washington – Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, has agreed to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee after reaching an agreement with lawmakers to discuss his contacts with the Russians, media reported.
According to that agreement, Donald Trump Jr. will testify between two and four hours in mid-June and the questions will focus on five or six topics related to his contacts with the Russians.
After that appearance, the son of President Donald Trump will not have to return to testify before the Committee of Intelligence of the Senate, according to the terms of the agreement.
On May 8, that committee issued a subpoena to force Donald Trump Jr. to testify about his contacts with the Russians, amid suspicions that he may have lied to lawmakers on that subject.
The judicial summons is the first one that Congress issues against a son of the president, and confirms that the legislative branch keeps open its investigation into the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections, after special prosecutor Robert Mueller concluded his own investigation.
The committee, which has a Republican majority, wants Donald Trump Jr. to testify before them, behind closed doors, about the circumstances surrounding the meeting he had with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, on June 9, 2016 at the Trump Tower in New York.
The Democratic opposition believes that, in its previous talks with Congress, the president’s son may have lied to lawmakers about whether or not he informed Trump that such a meeting would take place, the Washington Post reported.
The meeting at the Trump Tower -which was also attended by the son-in-law of the current president, Jared Kushner, and his then campaign manager, Paul Manafort- centered part of Mueller’s investigation, but he concluded that there was no evidence that the Republican campaign I would have collaborated with Russia in its presumed electoral interference.
However, Mueller’s report indicates that Michael Cohen, who
during the 2016 campaign he was Trump’s personal lawyer, he assures that he was in a meeting in which Donald Jr. told his father that he planned to go to a meeting “to obtain unfavorable information about (Hillary) Clinton,” the candidate democrat.
The agreement reached on Tuesday can pave the way for clarifying an issue that has divided Republicans in the Senate.
Some conservative senators, led by Lindsey Graham, have criticized the president’s son being summoned to testify before the Intelligence Committee about his interactions with the Russians after Mueller determined in his report that he found no evidence of coordination between the team. election of the current president and Russia in the campaign for the 2016 elections. (EFEUSA).
