Mitch has Junior’s back
by digby
You’ll recall that Lindsey Graham went on Fox News Sunday and said this:
If I were Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer, I would tell him, you don’t need to go back into this environment anymore. You’ve been there for hours and hours and nothing being alleged here changes the outcome of the Mueller investigation. I would call it a day.
That was a shocking thing for the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to say, particularly about a Senate subpoena. Even a Fox News legal analyst was taken aback:
“I never heard of a senator saying disobey a valid lawful subpoena issued by the chairman of another Senate committee,” Napolitano said. “The subpoena, just like the one to Bill Barr, is presumed valid.”
He then said that Trump Jr. would be putting himself in serious legal jeopardy if he took Graham’s advice.
“If you can’t or don’t want to comply with it, you’ve got to challenge it in court,” Napolitano said. “You can’t just sit on it and you can’t not show. Somebody will show up with handcuffs.”
Graham has since tried to clean this up a little by saying that he meant for Junior to take the 5th (which would be totally appropriate) but that’s not what he said on Sunday. And I think there’s a different strategy at work:
If Trump Jr. refuses to honor the Senate subpoena, it could lead to a debate among Republicans over whether to hold the president’s son in contempt. The decision on such a vote would ultimately be left to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had declared the investigations into the 2016 election “case closed” before news of Trump Jr.’s subpoena surfaced.
McConnell said last week in a radio interview that Trump “ought not to worry” about the subpoena against his son.
So far, most of the Republicans on the Intelligence Committee are giving Burr their support. (Cornyn, running for reelection, is the main exception.) But who knows if they would even vote out the contempt citation if Junior just tells them to pound sand. But in any case, I think we can count on Mitch to pull the plug if it gets that far. He’s pretty much already said so.
Update: NYT is reporting that Junior will show for a limited Q and A next month. Somehow ai doubt that it will add up to much.
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