Donald Trump just gave Steve Bannon and Hope Hicks every motivation to publicly testify against him
The House Judiciary Committee announced last month that it was going to subpoena Steve Bannon and Hope Hicks, among other former Trump White House advisers, to publicly testify about the events documented in the Mueller report. Because the committee appears to want Robert Mueller and Don McGahn to testify first, we haven’t yet seen the Bannon and Hicks testimony issue comes to a head. But if they weren’t sure about whether to comply with the subpoena and testify, Donald Trump may have just made the decision a lot easier for them.
Yesterday, court filings revealed that Michael Flynn gave Robert Mueller solid evidence of Donald Trump’s crimes, including a voicemail from Trump’s personal lawyer. In response, Trump whined on Twitter this morning that someone should have warned him that Flynn was a criminal. This is laughable, because everyone from Sally Yates to President Obama did warn Trump about Flynn. But Trump just dragged some other people into this as well.
The Mueller report spells out that Steve Bannon and Hope Hicks both testified to the FBI that Donald Trump told them that President Obama had warned him about Michael Flynn, as flagged by Marcy Wheeler. So when Trump took the position this morning that Obama didn’t warn him about Flynn, he accused Bannon and Hicks of lying to the FBI about it – which would be a felony.
In other words, the President of the United States just accused two of his former advisers of a felony they didn’t commit, at a time when he’s vowing “long jail sentences” for his political adversaries, and his Attorney General is opening fraudulent criminal probes into those adversaries. Steve Bannon and Hope Hicks now have every motivation in the world to go in front of the House Judiciary Committee, and the television cameras, and spell out that they weren’t lying to the FBI. In so doing, they’d be spelling out that Donald Trump knew Flynn was a criminal, and tried to protect him.
