The former White House communications director acknowledged one of Trump’s directives as “odd” but otherwise stonewalled during her closed-door testimony.
The transcript of Hope Hicks’ all-day Wednesday interview in front of the House Judiciary Committee, released to the public on Thursday afternoon, confirmed what Democratic lawmakers grumbled as they streamed out of the hearing room: She wasn’t much help.
During the course of the eight-hour examination, Hicks’ legal team repeatedly invoked a claim of “absolute immunity” and blocked her response to questions by objecting in 155 separate instances, according to a tally from the Judiciary Committee’s Democrats.
Hicks, a loyal and long-serving aide of President Donald Trump, was directed by the White House not to answer questions related to her time in the administration. That meant she declined to offer any additional information about instances of possible obstruction of justice raised in Robert Mueller’s report, such as Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey and the president’s attempts to fire Mueller.
Perhaps the only nugget of information that Democrats mined from Hicks related to Mueller was an admission from the former communications aide that she found it “odd” that Trump requested Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager and not a White House employee, deliver a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions instructing him to give a speech undermining the Mueller investigation.
The legal team on hand for Hicks — which included two of her personal attorneys and three attorneys from the administration — blocked questions even tangentially related to her White House service, including where she sat relative to the Oval Office.
