Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Top Democrat: Whitaker didn’t deny talking to Trump
WASHINGTON — The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee said Wednesday that former acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker “did not deny” that President Donald Trump “called him to discuss the case” against his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, as well as decisions regarding the personnel at the federal prosecutor’s office bringing the case against him.
Speaking to reporters after a two-hour meeting with Whitaker, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., presented Whitaker’s closed-door comments as a contradiction with his public testimony from February, during which Whitaker said Trump never expressed his dissatisfaction with Cohen for pleading guilty to various financial crimes and lying to Congress. When asked at that hearing whether he had ever discussed the Cohen case with Trump, Whitaker refused to answer the question.
“Unlike in the hearing room, Mr. Whitaker did not deny that the president called him to discuss the Michael Cohen case and personnel decisions in the Southern District,” Nadler said, referring to the Southern District of New York, which brought the case against Cohen.
But Rep. Douglas Collins, R-Ga., who was also present for the interview, strongly disagreed with Nadler, calling it an “interpretation” — and insisting that Whitaker “said he did not talk with the president about Mr. Cohen at all, and had no conversations with the Southern District of New York.”
The dispute is the latest controversy to surround Whitaker’s statements, as lawmakers argue along partisan lines about whether Whitaker misled Congress about his brief tenure as acting attorney general and his contacts with the president while overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
According to Nadler, Whitaker did not refute the assertion that he was “directly involved in conversations about whether to fire one or more U.S. attorneys.” Nadler also said that Whitaker did not deny having been “involved in conversations about the scope” of the recusal of the SDNY’s lead prosecutor, U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman, from Cohen’s case — and whether the prosecutors “went too far in pursuing the campaign finance case in which Trump is Individual-1.”