Did Stephen Miller just testify against Donald Trump to the DOJ grand jury?
After the U.S. Court of Appeals cleared the way last week for a number of Trump White House advisers to immediately testify against Donald Trump, one major news outlet reported that one of these witnesses – Ken Cuccinelli – was put on the DOJ grand jury stand later that same day. Now it appears a bigger witness may have also testified.
NBC News is reporting that longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller spent six hours today at the courthouse where the DOJ grand jury meets. There are theoretically other reasons why Miller could have been at the courthouse today. But it doesn’t take six hours to show up and file an appeal or anything like that. The most plausible explanation for Miller’s six hours at the courthouse today would be that he testified.
Remember, even if someone like Miller doesn’t want to testify against Trump, he doesn’t have a choice. Grand jury subpoenas are not optional. Once the courts have definitively ruled that you must testify, you have to promptly show up and testify, or the courts will hold you in contempt and drag you in.
Also keep in mind that someone like Stephen Miller can only plead the fifth in response to any specific topics where he feels that he may be criminally targeted by prosecutors. In any areas where he’s merely a witness to Trump’s alleged crimes and has no potential criminal culpability of his own, he cannot plead the fifth.
For that matter, at this late stage in an investigation this comprehensive, witnesses cannot simply lie their way through their grand jury testimony. At this point prosecutors have already pieced together the basics of what’s happened. If a witness were to lie under oath to try to protect Trump, that witness would merely get criminally charged with perjury.
Someone like Stephen Miller knows all of the above. He knows that he has to decide whether to help send Donald Trump to prison by testifying against him, or send himself to prison for perjury and/or obstruction, and he knows that there are no other options. We’re way past the point where there’s any relevance to whether grand jury witnesses want to protect Trump. They simply can’t.
So now we wait for media confirmation of whether Stephen Miller’s six hours today at the same courthouse as the DOJ grand jury was indeed because he was testifying today, or whether his testimony is coming on a different day. Either way, even the most Trump-loyal of witnesses in this case were always going to have to end testifying against him eventually. That point in the judicial process was always going to arrive, and now it has.
