PROBE EYES HICKS’ DENIAL
Trump confidant said no Kremlin communique
Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is focusing on one of President Trump’s closest yet quietest confidants.
The special counsel’s lawyers plan to sit down by the end of this month with White House Communications Director Hope Hicks to find out what she might know about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Hicks’ denial that top campaign aides spoke with foreign dignitaries is likely to come up during the discussions.
“It never happened,” Hicks told The Associated Press soon after the election last November. “There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.”
Information that emerged in the past year, however, reveals that wasn’t so.
Since Trump was elected, it’s come out that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions (then a senator, now attorney general), Paul Manafort, Carter Page and other campaign workers spoke with Russian nationals in some capacity during the Trump’s presidential campaign.
Hicks has retained Washington lawyer Robert Trout, who declined to comment. A spokesman for Mueller also declined to comment.
Since her November 2016 comment appears to now be in dispute, Hicks might find herself in a tight spot when she meets with the special counsel’s staff.
“It puts her easily on the defensive and once somebody’s on the defensive it’s easier to get them to say what you want them to say,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School. “She’s going to be forced into a corner to explain those lies.”
Hicks, who’s worked with the Trumps for five years, has been a quiet force with the campaign and White House.
But she received wider attention after Donald Trump Jr.’s correspondence with WikiLeaks was revealed.
The documents site — which released leaked emails from the Clinton campaign and members of the Democratic National Committee during the campaign — reached out to Trump Jr. in September 2016. Trump Jr. emailed top campaign members, including his brother-inlaw, Kushner, about his WikiLeaks contact. The Senate Judiciary Committee this month wrote an angry letter to Kushner, alleging that he withheld those emails, which he reportedly forwarded to Hicks.