No wonder Corey Lewandowski was angrily yelling around in the Oval Office yesterday
Last night a strange storyline emerged: Corey Lewandowski, who has never officially worked at Donald Trump’s White House, was nonetheless in an Oval Office meeting at the White House – and he was angrily yelling around at everyone. At the time, Palmer Report pointed to the incident as the latest sign that Trump and his people are cracking under the pressure as the Trump-Russia scandal closes in on them. Now it turns out we didn’t even know how on-the-nose we were.
It was the New York Times that reported Lewandowski’s Oval Office meltdown yesterday (link). But now the story has more context. Bloomberg is reporting that the House Intelligence Committee has asked Lewandowski and Steve Bannon to testify about their roles in the Trump-Russia scandal (link). Both men received letters from the committee earlier this week, meaning that Lewandowski already knew he was being targeted in the investigation when he began yelling around at the White House.
This development is remarkable for a few reasons. First, Lewandowski and Bannon ran the Trump campaign at different times. At no point did they officially work together. So the decision to tap them both for testimony suggests that two different new paths of investigation are being followed, one surrounding each of them. Bannon has deep ties to Cambridge Analytica, the voter data analysis arm of the Trump campaign; some suspect this firm may have been working with voter data stolen by Russian hackers. Lewandowski is known to have signed off on Carter Page’s trip to Moscow during the campaign.
The second remarkable development here is that, contrary to media reports, the House Intel Committee investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal is still alive and kicking. It’s asking Steve Bannon and Corey Lewandowski to testify earlier next year, which means the probe isn’t likely to be brought to an end over the holidays, as has been widely reported. This also means the more serious Trump-Russia investigations, such as the Senate Intel Committee and the Robert Mueller probe, are likely to target Bannon and Lewandowski soon as well – if they haven’t already.
