Bannon subpoenaed after stonewalling House Intelligence committee
WASHINGTON — Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon yesterday refused to answers questions from the House Intelligence Committee about his time working for President Trump, provoking a subpoena from the panel’s Republican chairman.
Bannon walked into a closed-door meeting with House members yesterday morning and was still being grilled last night as part of the committee’s investigation into Russian election inference. Lawmakers also wanted answers from him about Trump’s thinking when he fired FBI Director James B. Comey.
The committee chairman, Devin Nunes of California, issued the subpoena after Bannon refused to answer questions about his time on the presidential transition or his work in the Trump White House, said Nunes spokesman Jack Langer. It’s unclear if Bannon was more forthcoming after the issuance of the subpoena.
A spokeswoman for Bannon did not respond to multiple requests for comment yesterday afternoon. A White House official said the Trump administration did not seek to exert executive privilege over Bannon — a move that would have barred him from answering certain questions — because they didn’t have to. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
At the White House, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said “no one” had encouraged Bannon not to be transparent during questioning but there’s a “process of what that looks like.”
“As with all congressional inquiries touching upon the White House, Congress must consult with the White House prior to obtaining confidential material. This is part of a judicially recognized process that goes back decades,” Sanders told reporters.
The committee also planned to press Bannon on other “executive actions” taken by Trump that have drawn interest from congressional investigators prying into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives, said another person, who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record about the closed-door session and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Those key elements bear directly on the criminal investigation now underway by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is charged with investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia and whether the president obstructed justice by firing Comey or by taking other actions to thwart investigators.
The focus on Bannon follows his spectacular fall from power after being quoted in a book saying that he sees the president’s son and others as engaging in “treasonous” behavior for taking a meeting with Russians during the 2016 campaign.
In Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” Bannon accuses Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of essentially betraying the nation by meeting with a group of Russian lawyers and lobbyists who they believed were ready to offer “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.