Senate panel referred Trump family members to DOJ over suspicions of 'misleading' Russia testimony: report
16 August 2020
Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year notified the Department of Justice that members of President Donald Trump’s family and close circle “might have presented misleading testimony” to the panel during its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Washington Post reports.
According to the Post, then-Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-VA) referred a list of individuals, including Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner to federal prosecutors after their accounts of a pre-election meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya “were contradicted by the president’s former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates” during former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
In a separate section, the congressional panel said it had reason to believe Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and former campaign co-chair Sam Clovis “had lied to congressional investigators — a potential felony,” the Post reports.
According to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported on the referrals and viewed a copy of the panel’s letter, the committee believes Bannon may have lied about his knowledge of a meeting Prince held in the Seychelles with a Russian official tied to the Kremlin. Per the Post, “Prince had told Mueller’s team that he briefed Bannon on the meeting, which occurred before Trump’s inauguration in early 2017; Bannon denied the conversation took place.”