Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was grilled by House Judiciary Committee lawmakers for close to six hours Friday in an explosive hearing dominated by partisan clashes.
During the hearing, Whitaker fielded a slew of questions on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which he repeatedly declined to answer directly, infuriating House Democrats in their first crack at a top Trump administration official since recapturing the chamber in last year’s midterm elections.
The conclusion of the tense and highly dramatic hearing left Democrats unsatisfied and pledging that they will request a return appearance from Whitaker — even as his days as the top law enforcement official are numbered with the impending confirmation of William Barr.
In acting AG’s letter to House Judiciary, administration indicates it will resist disclosing president’s conversations with aides
ANALYSIS — The Trump administration on Thursday moved its first chess piece in what is
expected to be a contentious match between the White House and House Democrats as the latter seek documents and testimony for their oversight investigations of the president and his Cabinet.
Newly released financial disclosures also show that acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker made $15,000 during a three-month stint as a paid CNN commentator in 2017. Credit: Nicholas Kamm, AFP, Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s controversial pick to run the Justice Department, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, appears to have made more than $1.2 million heading a conservative nonprofit organization before joining the department last year.
As executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, or FACT, Whitaker made $502,000 in salary during the first nine months of 2017 before joining the Justice Department in September of that year as Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff, according to a financial disclosure form released Tuesday.
Whitaker took in $402,000 in salary from FACT in 2016, according to the group’s tax filings. The remainder of his compensation came from previous years with the group, where he started in 2014.
Matthew Whitaker doesn’t have to fire Robert Mueller to throw a wrench in the special counsel’s investigation.
Much of the focus on President Trump’s appointment of Whitaker to temporarily replace former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been on the possibility of Whitaker removing Mueller, a move that would undoubtedly spark public outrage and trigger full-scale investigations by Democrats, who are poised to take control of the House in January.
But federal regulations offer Whitaker, now acting attorney general, broad authority with respect to the special counsel that extends beyond the ability to remove Mueller, giving him the ability to curtail the probe in ways that would not necessarily become public knowledge until after the Russia investigation is over.
Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker released his financial disclosure form, and it shows a big paycheck from a dark money group and possible Hatch Act violations.
AP Photo, Charlie Neibergall)
Late Tuesday, Trump’s acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, finally released his financial disclosure form. While it is a pretty sparse document, what does appear there says a lot about Whitaker — and it’s not good.
First, it was difficult to even get Whitaker to release the form. Two weeks ago, when his appointment was first announced, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asked to see his previous disclosures. As disclosure forms are public, that should have happened right away.
Instead, he revised the forms five times in those two weeks. It isn’t quite as bad as Jared Kushner revising his disclosure forms over 40 times, but it still isn’t great.
President Trump last week in Washington. Some members of the Federalist Society are urging their fellow conservatives to speak up about what they say are the Trump administration’s betrayals of bedrock legal norms.Credit: Sarah Silbiger, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The annual convention of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, has long been a glittering and bustling affair. In the Trump era, though, the group has become more powerful than ever, supplying intellectual energy and judicial candidates to an assertive administration eager to reshape the legal landscape.
But as the group prepares to gather on Thursday for the start of this year’s convention, more than a dozen prominent conservative lawyers have joined together to sound a note of caution. They are urging their fellow conservatives to speak up about what they say are the Trump administration’s betrayals of bedrock legal norms.
“Conservative lawyers are not doing enough to protect constitutional principles that are being undermined by the statements and actions of this president,” said John B. Bellinger III, a top State Department and White House lawyer under President George W. Bush.
It may wind up being the most consequential legal question in Robert S. Mueller III’s entire Russia investigation, and it has nothing to do with Mueller.
Whitaker’s commentary on the Mueller probe is clearly sympathetic to Trump — to the extent of musing about defunding Mueller and even suggesting the Trump Tower meeting was business-as-usual. If he continues as acting attorney general, he could rule on consequential issues including potential indictments of Trump allies, up to and including the president’s son. He could reject an attempt to subpoena the president.
Prosecutors won’t likely charge a sitting president, yet have implicated him in a criminal scheme to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. What to do then? Go to Congress.
Friday’s in-depth Wall Street Journal report suggests the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York and the FBI appear to possess evidence of Donald Trump’s involvement in a criminal scheme that helped get him elected president. This raises serious questions about what comes next, particularly in light of Trump’s appointment of Matthew Whitaker, a political loyalist, as acting attorney general.
Trump played a central role in hush-money payments made to Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Journal reports, adding more detail to the case of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer-lawyerwho pled guilty to federal campaign finance violations in the Southern District in August.
Recall that when Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court, he stated under oath that he had made the payments “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office”—many assumed that that candidate was Trump, of course. We now know from the Journal that the person who directed Cohen in this criminal scheme was, indeed, Donald Trump. The charging document to which Cohen pled guilty states that he “coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments.” The Journal reports that “[t]he unnamed campaign member or members referred to Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the document.”
President Trump on Wednesday named Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general after Jeff Sessions turned in his resignation from the top Justice Department role, marking a new era of oversight for the DOJ and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The president’s relationship with his top cop — and Whitaker’s now former boss — had deteriorated over the past two years following Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the high-profile Russia probe.
In his new capacity, Whitaker will take the reins of overseeing the probe from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has been a loyal defender of the investigation since Sessions stepped aside.
