Washington: Subpoenaed by the US Congress, the Salahi couple, who gatecrashed President Barack Obama`s State dinner for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, would invoke the Fifth Amendment which encompasses the right to silence when they appear before a Congressional panel on January 20.
"They will be there for as long as they are required to be there, but they will repeatedly invoke their Fifth Amendment privileges," Leslie Maria, a Dewey and LeBoeuf counsel working on the Salahis` case, told `The Politico`.
Salahis - Tareq and Michaele - were subpoenaed by the US Congress after they failed to appear before the House Homeland Security Committee, which had asked them to testify before it last month on their gate-crashing of the White House on November 24 last year when Obama hosted his first State Dinner in honour of Singh.
The White House has officially closed the case, but the results of its investigations have not been made public.
The Politico said plenty of well-known figures have invoked the Fifth Amendment during Congressional hearings, though they have usually perpetrated high-profile crimes -- former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay did it during a Congressional inquiry into the company`s downfall.
Oliver North also used it when Congress examined the Iran-Contra affair in 1986 in which senior US figures agreed to facilitate the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo, to secure the release of hostages and to fund Nicaraguan contras..
PTI
