Our live coverage of Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker’s testimony has concluded. Scroll through the posts below to see how the hearing unfolded or follow CNN Politics.
The House Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing, where Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker took lawmakers’ questions, just wrapped up.
The hearing ended just before 3:30 p.m. ET, meaning it went on for nearly six hours.
The hearing included many tense moments and fiery back-and-forths between Whitaker and some Democrats. At one point, he cut off committee Chairman Jerry Nadler to note that the top Democrat’s time was up, drawing the scoffs of astonished members of Congress.
Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal grilled Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker on the family separations at the southern border, describing the traumatized children she witnessed.
Whitaker repeated that “there was no family separation policy, despite a leaked memo among senior government officials revealing that the administration planned to separate families to deter migrants from coming to the US-Mexico border.
The administration’s controversial “zero tolerance” policy required that all adults apprehended at the border be subject to criminal prosecution, resulting in families being separated.
But Whitaker later conceded that the administration was not tracking the children who were separated by a parent or legal guardian after they were apprehended at the southern border.
“Before or after the zero tolerance policy was put into place and I call it the zero humanity policy, did the US attorneys track when they were prosecuting a parent or legal guardian who had been separated from their child? There’s only one answer to this. It’s gone through the courts,” Jayapal said.
“Did we track it?” Whitaker responded.
Jayapal followed up, “Did you track when you were prosecuting a parent of legal guardian who had been separated from a child?”
“I don’t believe we were tracking that,” Whitaker said.
A report from the Government Accountability Office and a Health and Human Services inspector general report have since revealed the chaos and confusion among federal agencies as the policy was rolled out. The HHS IG report, specifically, found that thousands of children had been separated prior to the policy being publicly announced.
Asked if the Justice Department provided advanced notice to other agencies, Whitaker repeatedly referred to a news conference by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in May 2018.
“The responsibility for the arrest, the detention and together with the custody of the children was handled by DHS and HHS before those people were ever transferred to DOJ custody through the US Marshals,” Whitaker added.
Watch the moment:
Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker said he has not received special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
The revelation came after Congressman Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, pressed Whitaker on the Mueller report.
Whitaker went on to say that Mueller is going to “finish his investigation when he wants to finish his investigation.”
Asked if he thought Mueller was honest, Whitaker said, “I have no reason to believe he’s not honest, so yes I do believe he’s honest.”
Here’s a portion of their exchange:
Swalwell: “Has there been discussion at the Department of Justice about keeping the Mueller report from going to Congress?”
Whitaker: “No. We in fact were continuing to follow the special counsel regulations as it relates to the report. We haven’t received the report.”
Swalwell: “Has there been a draft opinion about keeping it from going to Congress?”
Whitaker: “You know congressman I’m not going to talk about the kind of ongoing investigation that is the special counsel.”
Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell asked Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker about any discussions inside his department about potential pardons for former Trump associates Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen.
“Congressman, as I’ve been acting attorney general, I have not been involved in any discussions of any pardon, even and including the ones you’re discussing,” Whitaker said.
Here’s a look at the charges special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has brought against President Trump’s former associates:
Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker denied a CNN report that President Trump had lashed out at him on at least two occasions, angered by federal prosecutors who referenced the President’s actions in crimes his former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to.
Asked by Rep. David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island, if the President had “lashed out” at him after Michael Cohen’s guilty plea for lying to Congress, and again days later when prosecutors in Manhattan implicated Trump in a hush money scheme around the 2016 election, Whitaker said, “No, he did not.”
Whitaker also denied that anyone inside or outside of the White House had lashed out at him after the Cohen developments.
CNN’s report was based on multiple sources familiar with the matter.
Here’s the exchange:
Cicilline: “Did the President lash out at you after Michael Cohen’s guilty plea for lying to Congress about a Trump organization project to build a tower in Moscow?”
Whitaker: “The President specifically tweeted that he had not lashed out.”
Cicilline: “I’m asking you Mr. Whitaker, did the President lash out at you? Not asking what he tweeted. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the veracity of his tweets. I’m asking you under oath.”
Whitaker: “Congressman that is based on an unsubstantiated…”
Cicilline: “Sir, answer the question: yes or no, did the President lash out at you about Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea?”
Whitaker: “No he did not.”
The FBI is prepared to brief House Judiciary Committee members in a closed session on the factors that influenced their decision to conduct the Roger Stone arrest before dawn and with heavy weapons drawn, Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker said Friday.
“The FBI makes arrests in a manner most likely to ensure the safety of its agents and of the person being arrested. The FBI must also consider the safety of the surrounding community,” Whitaker said.
Whitaker continued:
Stone has been highly critical of the manner in which he was arrested, though he has praised the individual FBI officers that he dealt with as professional. A number of Republican lawmakers have asked the Justice Department to explain the manner of the arrest.
Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who earlier today told CNN that Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker was acting like a “petulant child,” opened his five-minute questioning by asking, “Who are you? Where did you come from? And how the heck did you become the head of the Department of Justice?”
Jeffries then proceeded to ask Whitaker to confirm the identified criminal acts, indictments, and prison sentences that have come from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation so far.
“One by one, all of the president’s men are going down in flames,” Jeffries said.
“Let’s be clear. The investigation into Russia’s attack on democracy is not a witch hunt, it’s not a fishing expedition, it’s not a hoax, it’s not a lynch mob, it’s a national security imperative. The fact that people suggest otherwise comes dangerously close to providing aid and comfort to the enemy,” he added.
Congresswoman Debbie Lesko, a Republican from Arizona, described her disappointment over the House Judiciary Committee’s handling of Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker’s hearing.
“You know, I have to say that I’m very disappointed in this hearing. You know, I ran for Congress to get things done, and at the beginning of this, you know, we were told that this is about asking about DOJ oversight and some legitimate questions,” she said.
Lesko said the hearing is “nothing but character assassination, harassment of our witness, and it’s really disappointing.”
The congresswoman said she was initially mad about the hearing. But now she’s sad.
Watch the moment:
Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said he doesn’t believe Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker’s assurances that he didn’t talk to President Trump about special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Cohen told CNN he thinks Whitaker is lying. (Remember: Lying to Congress is a crime.)
When pressed on the claim, Cohen had no evidence to contradict Whitaker. Yet he thinks Whitaker broke the law.
During the hearing, Cohen pressed Whitaker on whether he think the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt.” President Trump has repeatedly called the probe a “witch hunt.”
Whitaker did not answer the question. He however did say he has not denied funds to Mueller and his team.
Former Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California who decided to retire in the 2016 election, said she has never seen a witness “display the type of arrogance & contempt for democracy” that Acting Attorney General Matt Whittaker did in his testimony today.
Boxer served in the US House before she was elected to the Senate.
Here’s her tweet from this morning:
Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker explained why he thinks President Trump selected him for the top Justice role, highlighting his past experience as a prosecutor and his proximity to former attorney general Jeff Sessions that would let him “continue the momentum at the Department of Justice we had established in addressing these important priority issues, like reducing violent crime, combatting the opioid crisis, and others.”
Whitaker earlier said that he had no reason to doubt Trump’s contention in an interview last year that he was unaware of Whitaker’s past public hostility to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Whitaker also said he had no direct conversations about the Mueller investigation with anyone at the White House in the immediate months before he was selected as Sessions’ chief of staff in 2017.
Read his full remarks:
Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona asked acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker whether he had discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein the reports that Rosenstein had wanted to secretly record President Trump.
In September 2018, reports emerged that Rosenstein had discussed wearing a “wire” to record conversations with Trump and recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
Whitaker declined to answer, saying, “I’m not here to answer questions about the internal” talks within the Justice Department.
“This is an important question to you, but I’m not going to answer my conversations with Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. I believe that they’re deliberative,” Whitaker said.
Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, asked Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker about his decision not to recuse himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation — a decision that went against the advice of a Justice Department ethics official.
“I’d like to take a moment to better understand your decision not to recuse yourself from the supervision of the special counsel’s investigation. Isn’t it a fact, sir, that you received your final ethics guidance on this matter on December 19, 2018?” Johnson asked.
Whitaker did not answer the question and instead said this:
Committee chairman Jerry Nadler stepped in and called Whitaker out for not answering questions directly. He said it’s “getting a little tiresome hearing you stall and wasting the member’s time.”
Republican Congressman Jim Jordan pressed Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker on a memo that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein sent to special counsel Robert Mueller about the scope of his investigation.
In a contentious exchange, Jordan asked Whitaker if Rosenstein gave “the special counsel the authority to investigate specific Americans.”
Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, got into a heated exchange with Matt Whitaker, in which he asked the acting attorney general if special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is a “witch hunt.”
Whitaker, who is overseeing the special counsel, did not answer the question. President Trump has repeatedly called the probe a witch hunt.
Whitaker however did say he has not denied funds to Mueller and his team
Here’s how the full exchange went down:
Cohen: “Would you say the special counsel’s investigation is a witch hunt? Are you overseeing a witch hunt?”
Whitaker: “Congressman, as I’ve mentioned previously, the special counsel’s investigation is an ongoing investigation, and so I think it would be inappropriate for me to…”
Cohen: “But you wouldn’t oversee a witch hunt, would you? You’d stop a witch hunt, wouldn’t you?”
Whitaker: “Congressman, it would be inappropriate for me to talk about an ongoing investigation.”
Cohen: “You said you were not interfering with the special counsel’s investigation. Have you denied him any funds he’s requested at all?
Whitaker: “Congressman, I can tell this is an important issue for you…”
Cohen: “It’s an important issue for the American public and for the whole world.
Whitaker: “Congressman, to answer your question directly, I have not denied any funds to the special counsel’s investigation.”
Watch the exchange here:
Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries told CNN that he thought Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker has been acting like “a petulant child.”
Whitaker is currently testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. You can watch the hearing in the video player at the top of this page.
Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker has dodged some of the House Judiciary Committee’s questions, citing confidentiality and executive privilege – but the committee may have a second chance to grill him on those questions.
After Whitaker declined to answer whether he has discussed special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to any third parties, committee Chairman Jerry Nadler warned that the committee would require more concrete answers in a separate closed-door deposition.
“After today’s hearing, we’ll attempt to reach an accommodation with the Department to obtain answers to these questions. As part of that process, I ask for your commitment to return for a deposition before this committee in the coming weeks, under oath, with an understanding that the transcript will be released to the public as soon as practicable therefore,” Nadler said.
In response to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s questions on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker insisted he has “not interfered in any way” with the investigation.
“In your capacity as acting attorney general, have you ever been asked to approve any action or request to be taken by the special counsel?” Nadler asked.
“Mr. Chairman, I see that your five minutes is up,” Whitaker responded, to gasps and laughter from the Committee.
After a terse back-and-forth, Whitaker answered:
Watch the moment:
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler pressed Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Democrat asked is Whitaker if he and Trump had talked about the probe.
“Yes or not, have you communicated any information in that briefing to President Trump?” he asked.
After a long pause, Nadler continued: “It’s a yes or no question. Have you communicated anything you learned in that briefing about the investigation to President Tump? Yes or no?”
Whitaker then said this:
Watch the moment:
