The brand new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, was fresh off an interview with the New Yorker in which he outlined the new House subcommittee he intends to form for the purpose of investigating Trump when he sat down with CNN’s Kate Bolduan to talk some more specific information.
Engel was discussing the recent revelation in the Washington Post that Trump has been purposefully hiding his private communications with Vladimir Putin by refusing to allow senior staffers in the room, confiscating notes taken by others present, and swearing his interpreter to secrecy — all the hallmarks of hiding something significant from the American people.
But even after the discovery of the lengths to which Trump went to hide his talks with Putin, the White House has given no indication that they ever intend to release transcripts or otherwise make public what the two world leaders discussed, even during the specific meeting in Hamburg, Germany in 2017 that is the subject of speculation. And that’s enough to give a brand new Foreign Affairs Chairman pause:
I would like, in a perfect world, not to have to look at what an interpreter wrote … We may have no choice [but to subpoena the translator].”
That should scare Donald Trump if in fact there was any good reason for him to have taken the interpreter’s notes and sworn them to secrecy.
And of course, this entire line of reasoning comes after the explosive report from the New York Times over the weekend that detailed how the Federal Bureau of Investigation was so concerned by Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey that they opened an investigation into whether Trump might actually be working as a witting or unwitting Russian Asset.
Watch the interaction between Engel and Bolduan on CNN’s Newsroom this morning:
Featured image via screen capture
