Playing 14 Questions with Steve Bannon

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon did not appear Tuesday to deliver planned testimony before the House Intelligence committee. Ranking member Adam Schiff said in a statement that Bannon’s lawyers “informed the Committee that the White House continues to prohibit Mr. Bannon from testifying to the Committee beyond a set of 14 yes-or-no questions the White House had pre-approved.”

Schiff, a Democrat from California, continued: “The White House’s bar on Bannon’s testimony covers matters during the transition, his tenure at the White House, and his communications with the president since leaving government service, even though the president has not in fact invoked executive privilege.”

Bannon’s interview with the House Intelligence panel has been rescheduled for next week, the same week the former Breitbart chairman is expected to meet with special counsel Robert Mueller (and for which the White House will have no standing to invoke or imply executive privilege). But what about those 14 pre-approved questions from the White House?

I’ve asked the White House who approved the questions and why, exactly, the White House is advising Bannon to only testify if his testimony is limited to those questions. I’ve also asked Bannon’s lawyer, William Burck, for a comment.

One More Thing—There’s a weird wrinkle in all of this: Bill Burck, Bannon’s lawyer, is also the private lawyer for White House counsel Don McGahn, whose office would be the most likely to direct Bannon on what questions to answer in testimony to a congressional committee.