Jake Tapper Questions Why Donald Trump Jr. Refuses to Testify to Senate if He Has Nothing to Hide

Donald Trump Jr. is fighting a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee because he does not want “to have a complete do-over of his testimony from December of 2017,” CNN’s Kara Scannell reported on The Lead with Jake Tapper Monday afternoon.

The committee apparently wants to ask the president’s son more questions about the Trump family’s pursuit of its Trump Tower Moscow project and his meeting with shady Russian contacts in Trump Tower in New York during the 2016 campaign.

Scannell also reported that the committee has been negotiating terms of an appearance with Don Jr.’s lawyers since December. Talks fell apart in April over the committee insisting on no limits to what they could ask about, while Don Jr. and his legal team feeling that he shouldn’t need to come testify for more than an hour or two.

It was the breakdown of these negotiations that led to the committee issuing the subpoena, the existence of which was revealed last week.

Tapper then turned to his panel for a brief discussion of the report, with Tapper asking why Don Jr. would refuse to come answer questions if he has nothing to hide, as the Trumps and their supporters have particularly crowed about in the wake of the release of the Mueller report.

In response, Sabrina Siddiqui of The Guardian noted that there are discrepancies between Don Jr.’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee and Mueller’s accounting of his actions in 2016 that need to be cleared up. Jeff Zeleny of CNN added that the scope of the committee investigation is different from Mueller’s, in that the former is a counterintelligence investigation and the latter was a criminal investigation that was fairly limited in scope.

The entire panel then expressed surprise that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has publicly told Don Jr. to ignore the subpoena, which was issued by his Republican colleague in the Senate, Richard Burr.

“The exact opposite of his position during the Clinton impeachment, when he said it’s important to comply with subpoenas,” Tapper noted after playing a clip of Graham saying his advice to Don Jr. is to “call it a day” and not testify anymore.

Watch the video up top, via CNN.