Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says he would be “happy” to testify before Congress after House Democrats subpoenaed him this week as part of their investigation into key figures included in the Mueller report.
The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Lewandowski and former White House official Rick Dearborn on Thursday, with Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) saying he wanted public testimony from those “prominently” involved in the push to persuade then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his recusal in the federal Russia probe.
{mosads}”Could someone just give me the winning lottery numbers as opposed to subpoenaing me?” Lewandowski said during an interview on Fox News Radio on Friday.
“This entire investigation is a witch hunt,” he continued, echoing the president’s attacks against the special counsel investigation.
Lewandowski said he looked forward testifying as “a guy who’s going to fight back” against Democratic allegations against President Trump.
“I am an open book. I want to go and remind the American people that these guys are on a witch hunt, right?” Lewandowski said on the “Brian Kilmeade Show.” “Never did I say I wasn’t coming.”
“They didn’t have to subpoena me,” Lewandowski said later. “They could have just said, ‘hey, Corey, will you show up?’ I would have said: ‘I’m happy to come,’ right? Because I want to explain that there was no collusion, there was no obstruction.”
Nadler is seeking testimony from Lewandowski and Dearborn on Sept. 17.
The Democratic chairman said in a statement that the pair “were prominently featured in the Special Counsel’s description of President Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice by directing then-White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire the Special Counsel, and then by ordering him to lie about it.”
News of the subpoena emerged hours before Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first campaign manager in 2016, appeared with the president at a rally in New Hampshire on Thursday night.
Lewandowski is considering running for Senate in the Granite State and he told Fox News Radio that he would make a final decision in early October on whether to throw his hat into the race to take on Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) in 2020.
Robert Mueller’s report said that when Trump discovered Mueller was investigating him for possible obstruction, he ordered then-White House counsel Don McGahn to remove the special counsel over alleged conflicts of interest.
Trump also asked Lewandowski around the same time to persuade Sessions, then serving as attorney general, to reverse course on his decision to recuse himself from the federal probe, according to the Mueller report.
Lewandowski pushed back after news of the subpoena first emerged this week.
“It’s sad and pathetic that Congressman Nadler is harassing private citizens just to fend off his primary challenge from the Left. Mueller’s testimony proved what everybody knew all along: No Collusion, No Obstruction,” Lewandowski tweeted.