Nadler: Whitaker will be first name on witness list
Rep. Jerrold WASHINGTON — Nadler, D-N.Y., who is poised to take control of the House Judiciary Committee in January, said Sunday that he plans to call acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker as his first witness.
The hearing would focus on Whitaker’s “expressed hostility” to special counsel Robert Mueller III’s Russia investigation, which Nadler called “a real threat to the integrity of that investigation.” The Democrat said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he is prepared to subpoena Whitaker if necessary.
Whitaker, who was named acting attorney general after Jeff Sessions stepped down last week, has been a controversial pick because of his vocal and written criticism of the Mueller probe. In his new role, Whitaker will supervise the investigation, absorbing the responsibility from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was overseeing it because Sessions had recused himself.
Despite his known conflicts, Whitaker reportedly has no intention of recusing himself.
Senate and House Democratic leaders sent a letter Sunday to the Justice Department’s ethics office outlining what they deemed Whitaker’s conflicts of interest and asking that it review his past statements and make a recusal recommendation.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Democrats will also determine if Whitaker can be an impartial custodian of the Russia investigation.
“If he doesn’t recuse himself, if he has any involvement whatsoever in this Russia probe, we are going to find out whether he made commitments to the president about the probe, whether he is serving as a back channel to the president or his lawyers about the probe, whether he’s doing anything to interfere with the probe,” Schiff said during an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
“Mr. Whitaker needs to understand that he will be called to answer. And any role that he plays will be exposed to the public,” Schiff continued.
Nadler, however, tempered expectations about seeking the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
He said that he saw “lots of potential” for impeaching Trump but that any move in that direction would be premature until the special counsel finished his investigation. Moreover, Nadler said, he wouldn’t move forward until there was enough evidence that when presented to the American people “a large fraction of people who voted for the president will grudgingly acknowledge to themselves and others that there was no choice but to impeach the president.”
Earlier on ABC News’s “This Week,” he adopted a similarly moderate tone, saying he would be “reluctant” to put the country “through the trauma” of an impeachment without the facts.
As for Kavanaugh, Nadler said on both shows that his committee would launch a probe into the FBI “not doing a proper investigation” of the sexual-misconduct accusations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that date to his high school years.