On Thursday, House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings said that the panel will be issuing subpoenas for, or at least interviewing, several of the people that former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen mentioned during his testimony on Wednesday — something that Republicans either failed or refused to do at almost every turn when they were in control of the House of Representatives.
But this widely-expected move will be a bit more broad than anyone could possibly have seen coming. Anyone might have guessed that Cohen’s testimony would raise further investigative issues for House Democrats, but it was the specific names that Cohen dropped that caused eyes to widen in DC today: He mentioned not just Donald Trump Jr. and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, but Trump’s daughter Ivanka as well.
During his testimony, Cohen remarked that Ivanka had been regularly kept apprised of the status of the Trump Tower Moscow project, the real estate deal that Cohen lied to federal investigators about the length of on behalf of President Trump — the lie for which he’s now going to prison, in fact.
Ivanka had mostly been able to avoid the spotlight during investigations into the Trump campaign’s joint activity with the Russian government during the 2016 election season, but with Cohen under oath calling her out as a very material witness, there’s essentially no chance she won’t be called to testify herself.
Don Jr will also be subpoenaed, of course, especially since the first time he testified before Congress, he swore under oath that he was only “peripherally aware” of the Trump Tower Moscow project, something that Cohen contradicted in no uncertain terms on Wednesday. Republicans had refused to call Trump Jr again after it was known that he had perjured himself regarding the Trump Tower meeting that took place in New York, attended by Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Ivanka’s husband Jared.
But it’s Ivanka’s testimony that should perhaps worry Team Trump the most. Although she has been fiercely loyal to her family thus far, she’s done so because she was never in any real danger of prosecution herself.
That’s all about to change.
Featured image via screen capture
