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White House acknowledges telling Bannon not to answer questions in Russia probe

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Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon refused to answer questions Tuesday from the House Intelligence panel at the direction of White House attorneys.
WASHINGTON — The White House acknowledged Wednesday that it instructed former chief strategist Steve Bannon not to answer questions posed by the House Intelligence Committee as part of its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the committee’s senior Democrat, said the action amounted to a “gag order” on Bannon from the White House during Bannon’s closed-door appearance before the panel on Tuesday. Committee members said they will bring Bannon back soon for more questioning under a subpoena they issued Tuesday.
White House lawyers monitored Bannon’s testimony on Tuesday, and instructed him not to answer certain questions based on a claim of executive privilege. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders acknowledged the arrangement Wednesday, which she called “standard procedure.”
“I can tell you that this White House is following the same practice that many White Houses before us have, that goes back decades,” she said. “There’s a process that this works through, and it’s not just isolated to this instance. Executive privilege goes back decades because it’s something that needs to be protected.”
Sanders stopped short of saying whether the White House actually invoked executive privilege to block Bannon’s testimony, however.
“I’m talking about the process. I can’t go any further than that,” she said during a press briefing.
Bannon brought his own attorney, Bill Burck, with him to the committee Tuesday. Burck conferred with the White House by phone, Schiff told reporters.
Schiff said the White House attorneys’ instruction to Bannon “was effectively a gag order by the White House preventing this witness from answering almost any question concerning his time in the transition or the administration and many questions even after he left the administration.”
Schiff said Bannon refused to answer questions on the grounds that President Trump might invoke executive privilege in the future.
“The breadth of this became very apparent because he not only refused to answer questions that took place within the White House but also any conversations he had with people outside the White House,” Schiff told reporters.
“So the position that the White House was evidently insisting upon in this interview was, even when Mr. Bannon might be speaking to outside parties, might be speaking to members of the press, might be talking publicly on the record or off the record, that somehow this was covered by a potential claim of executive privilege down the road.”
If the White House is permitted to impose that kind of gag rule on witnesses, “no congressional investigation would ever be effective,” Schiff said.
Bannon’s refusal to answer the committee’s questions Tuesday spurred lawmakers to issue and serve an immediate subpoena on Bannon to compel his appearance and testimony. That subpoena will remain in effect when Bannon comes back before the committee for more questioning, members said.
“He has additional answers he needs to give us,” said committee memeber Mike Conaway, a Texas Republican who leads the panel’s Russia investigation.
Bannon, who resigned from the White House in August amid feuds with other staff members, was interviewed by committee members and staff behind closed doors during a day-long session Tuesday. After about 10 hours, the meeting ended in frustration. Neither Bannon nor his attorney spoke to reporters.
Bannon had a dramatic public split with Trump earlier this month.
The former top adviser, who had remained in touch with the president after leaving the White House, was quoted in a new tell-all book as saying that a meeting attended by Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., “treasonous.”
In the book Fire and Fury, author Michael Wolff said Bannon was referring to Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer to try to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
Trump responded to Bannon’s quotes in a blistering statement that said: “When he (Bannon) was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
Bannon later said he was referring to former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, not Trump Jr., when he criticized the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians.
Sanders said Wednesday that the White House is cooperating with the Russia investigation and wasn’t concerned that Bannon’s testimony could incriminate members of Trump’s team.
“There was absolutely no collusion, but in terms of what he might say I can’t answer that,” she said. “I can’t speculate on that.”

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