“I don’t think that was a joke based on what I saw.”
When former White House communications director Hope Hicks spoke to the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, she didn’t answer many questions. In fact, USA Today counted 155 questions that she refused to answer. But she did address a few questions about President Donald Trump, including whether he would accept dirt on his election opponents from foreign adversaries in 2020, as he claimed in a recent interview.
Yes, Hicks confirmed, Trump was serious about that.
Committee lawyer Norman Eisen first asked Hicks about Trump’s public statement during the 2016 campaign asking Russia to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” referring to deleted messages on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Hicks said that based on her conversations with Trump immediately afterward, she believed the remark had been “a little bit tongue-in-cheek” and not “intended as an instructive or a directive to a foreign government.”
View the complete June 21 article by Zack Ford on the ThinkProgress website here.