The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley said he is asking Donald Trump Jr. to testify and will subpoena if necessary, according to the Associated Press.
Trump Jr.’s 2016 email exchange with a Russian lawyer regarding potentially damaging information against Hillary Clinton has gotten the attention of Grassley. The heads of the Senate judiciary committee are writing a letter to Trump Jr. on Thursday, according to CNN.
The president’s son tweeted the email chain earlier this week, presumably to get out in front of a report that was going to reveal the information. The top Democrat on the committee, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, told CNN on Thursday that she wants the president’s oldest son to go before the committee as early as next week.
Trump Jr. was a guest on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Tuesday to discuss his previously undisclosed meeting with a Russian lawyer with alleged ties to the Kremlin.
Host Sean Hannity asked Trump Jr. if he now regretted the meeting that also included Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner and took place in June 2016, two weeks after his father, Donald Trump, landed the Republican nomination for president. It is the first confirmed private meeting between the Russians and Trump’s team.
“In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently,” the president’s eldest son told Hannity. “Again, this is before the Russia mania — this is before they were building this up in the press.”
Trump Jr. said he attended the meeting for “opposition research” in hopes of learning damaging information about Hillary Clinton’s possible connection to the Russian government.
“They had something, maybe concrete evidence to all the stories I’d been hearing about — probably underreported for years, not just during the campaign,” he said. “So I think I wanted to hear it out. But really it went nowhere, and it was apparent that wasn’t what the meeting was about.”