PRESIDENT’S MOUTH BRINGS ON BIG TROUBLE

This is the latest interpretation of President Trump

 

Trump’s own words are the key pieces of evidence against him.

 

Isn’t it interesting that if the president could just keep his mouth shut and if he would stop tweeting, most or all of his negative issues would never have happened.

 

Trump’s own words and actions are what led directly to both the appointment of special counsel Robert Muller, and to the fact that Trump’s own conduct is now being reviewed.

Trump’s tweets tell all about his full meltdown mode. In just a couple of tweets, he has lashed out at an unnamed “they,” who according to Trump failed (so far) to get at him on Russian collusion charges.  But "they" are now trying to get him on “obstruction,” which he fumed at as the “single greatest witch hunt in American history,” one that is “led by very bad and conflicted people.”  More and more it appears that "Tweets" will be Trump's down fall.

 

Because he can’t shut up, now the president has hinted that he might try to remove Mr. Mueller.  And with this president, it is a possibility that this must be taken more seriously, now that Trump is the direct target.

 

The Washington Post’s latest story reports that the FBI investigation of Trump for possible obstruction began just “days” after he fired former FBI director James Comey, and now Mueller has taken up that issue. Mueller will interview the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and other officials about reported conversations in which Trump allegedly asked them to help get Comey to back off his probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s Russia ties. The Post also notes that Mueller has collected Comey’s memos, in which Comey recounted that Trump demanded his “loyalty” and pressed him to drop the Flynn probe, as part of Mueller’s own investigation.  (He will also interview the FBI personnel that had received the Comey memo’s when they were first written.  This will confirm that they weren’t written “after the fact”.)

The Post also says that “accounts by Comey and other officials of their conversations with the president could become central pieces of evidence if Mueller decides to pursue an obstruction case”,  Also that investigators will examine Trump’s public and private statements about his reasons for firing Comey” in the context of his “concerns about the Russia probe.”

 

What this means is that it was Trump’s own words, in multiple settings, that are potentially the key pieces of evidence against him.

 

Remember, Trump publicly admitted he fired Comey because of unhappiness with the Russia investigation. Comey testified that Trump’s demand for “loyalty” came in the context of a conversation about whether Comey would continue to serve as FBI director at his pleasure. Comey also said he took Trump’s request that he drop the Flynn probe as a “direction” and an “order” by the president.

 

Benjamin Wittes, editor of the Lawfare Blog, notes that it’s important that in obstruction investigations, the pattern of the facts is often critical. “When you’re doing an obstruction investigation, all the facts are important.”  A reasonable prosecutor, Wittes noted, won’t look at this “as a discrete series of interactions,” and instead is likely to ask, “Is there some pattern of behavior that constitutes obstruction? If you’re looking for a pattern of behavior that constitutes obstruction, you want to know & see the entire pattern.”

 

As expected, some of these facts are in dispute. Trump of course, has denied demanding Comey’s loyalty, and his advisers have said that Trump merely asked Comey to drop the Flynn probe.  (As if that in itself is not a big problem for the president.)

 

There is a large set of shared facts that are not in dispute, and those already constitute a pattern of conduct that is deeply problematic for Donald Trump, whether or not they end up amounting to obstruction of justice.

 

Those facts are:

 

·       Trump did fire Comey. Trump and the White House did contradict themselves about the rationale for that firing. They both did originally say that Trump fired Comey at the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy Rod J. Rosenstein, who created a memo detailing that recommendation rooted in Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe. But after that story fell apart, Trump subsequently told NBC News that he was going to fire Comey regardless of any recommendation and that he did so over the Russia probe. Therefore, Trump and the White House themselves did say that Trump tried to recruit Sessions and Rosenstein to create a cover story for the Comey firing, and this (among other things) did leave Rosenstein no choice but to appoint a special counsel.

 

·       The interaction between Trump, Sessions and Rosenstein over Comey’s fate, could also prove important. The Post has reported that the three met just before Comey was fired and that Trump, having already decided to fire Comey, demanded that Rosenstein memo as a false rationale. One key question is whether Trump made it clear in that meeting with Sessions and Rosenstein, that he’d already made his decision due to his unhappiness with the Russia probe. Both Sessions and Rosenstein have refused to detail these interactions before Congress, citing privileged conversations. Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe says:  “The conversation Trump had with Rosenstein and Sessions just before firing Comey would clearly be important to Mueller’s probe into whether Trump obstructed justice because it would bear directly on whether Trump acted “corruptly” in ‘endeavoring to influence or impede the due administration of justice’ by firing Comey.”

 

·       Trump’s decision to fire Comey, which reportedly emerged from a highly irrational, grievance-saturated flight of anger at Comey for failing to make the Russia probe disappear.  This is plainly what led the special counsel to focus on possible obstruction.

 

·       Please note, all of this was of Trump’s doing.

 

The fact that Trump continues to claim persecution is a cause for serious worry beyond the obvious concerns about Trump’s grasp on reality. That’s because the New York Times reports that people around Trump believe he could still try to remove Mueller, if he comes to “believe the investigation has been compromised.”

 

It would not be hard for Trump to move from deciding that the investigation is a “witch hunt” being orchestrated by his enemies, as he tweeted, to deciding that it has been “compromised,” meaning that it is illegitimate, giving him ample grounds to move to end it?

 

In Trump’s very simple mind, the line between those two things is hazy to nonexistent.

 

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) now reports that the special counsel Mueller will interview former deputy National Security Agency director Rick Ledgett about Trump’s private conversations with NSA chief Mike Rogers.  While Mr. Ledgett was still in office, he wrote a memo documenting a phone call that Mr. Rogers had with Mr. Trump. During the call, the president questioned the intelligence community’s judgment that Russia had interfered with the election.  Trump had tried to persuade Mr. Rogers to say there was no evidence of collusion between his campaign and Russian officials.

 

The intelligence community of 16 organizations not only widely concluded that Russian sabotage in the election happened, they also said Russia will try to do it again.

 

Yet our president refuses to agree it even happened at all.

 

Stay tuned, this is only the beginning of this episode with the president.

Copyright G.Ater  2017