Mark Corallo resigned from position after revelation that president’s son arranged meeting with Russian lawyer
Special counsel Robert Mueller is seeking an interview with Mark Corallo, the former spokesman for President Donald Trump’s legal team
.. When news of the New York meeting first broke, Mr. Trump Jr. said the participants “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” Emails he subsequently released showed he took the meeting after he was told that the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had damaging information about Democrat Hillary Clinton that was being offered by the Russian government in support of Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
.. Mr. Mueller is examining an Air Force One flight that followed initial reports about the Trump Tower meeting during which top White House advisers, including the president, crafted a statement about that meeting
.. in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” a book the president has repeatedly attacked. Mr. Wolff wrote that Mr. Corallo quit after “privately confiding that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice.”
The president’s legal team is also debating whether to allow Mr. Trump to interview with Mr. Mueller, which the president last week told reporters he was “looking forward” to doing.
Yet Mr. Trump’s lawyers have been studying a 1990s federal court ruling that could serve as a basis for delaying, limiting or avoiding an interview with Mr. Mueller
If Trump’s own advisers think he has obstructed justice, how could Republicans decide otherwise?
One day, law professors may use President Trump’s case in a law school exam: Find all the evidence of obstruction of justice. Diligent students will find a wealth of material, if news accounts are proven to be true: requesting a loyalty oath from then-FBI Director James B. Comey; pressuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions to remain in charge of the Russia investigation to protect Trump; leaning on Comey to let former national security adviser Michael Flynn off; firing Comey; cooking up a pretext for firing Comey; telling Lester Holt of NBC News that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation; falsely suggesting there were White House tapes so as to affect Comey’s testimony; threatening some kind of legal action against Comey for “leaking“; launching spurious conspiracy theories (unmasking, accusing Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower while he was president, smearing FBI officials who could be witnesses) to discredit the investigation; trying to get one of the potential FBI witnesses, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, fired; drafting a misleading statement about Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower; ordering that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III be fired; and publicly denying he ever considered firing Mueller. We’ve probably missed a few, but even a mediocre law student could get an A on that test.
What’s more, at least two Trump advisers likely think Trump obstructed justice.
- Legal team spokesman Mark Corallo reportedly quit after he concluded there was obstruction of justice in drafting on Air Force One the statement about the Trump Tower Russia meeting.
- Second, the White House counsel very likely made a legal judgment (not simply a political one) in refusing to help Trump fire Mueller.
.. What counsel would have wished to advise the Justice Department that Mueller’s fatal ‘conflict’ arose out of his unwillingness to remain a member of a Trump golf facility that had raised its fees?” In other words, once again a phony pretext was to be used to fire someone atop an investigation of the president.
.. the president does not enjoy an attorney-client privilegewith McGahn, unlike with his personal lawyers. McGahn works for the people, not Trump.)
.. They have refused to protect the special counsel legislatively from being fired. And they have completely suspended their own judgment as to whether Trump’s actions constitute an abuse of power — that is, an impeachable offense — relying on Mueller to make a legal judgment on possible criminal liability.
- .. If President Bill Clinton’s lie under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky (which was not the topic that independent counsel Kenneth Starr was originally charged with investigating) was grounds for impeachment, would a Trump lie under oath regarding any aspect of the Russia investigation, including potential acts of obstruction of justice, also be grounds?
Questions That Mueller Might Ask Trump
The most consequential could involve the President’s understanding of the rule of law.
.. His most consequential questions for Trump might not be about Russian influence over American voters but about the power that the President of the United States believes he has to control, or to abrogate, the rule of law.
To that end, Mueller might ask Trump why he has, or has not, fired various people. He might start with James Comey,
.. Mueller also will likely ask Trump why he fired Michael Flynn, his first national-security adviser, and what assurances he might have given him at the time.
.. Flynn was already in legal jeopardy, because he had hidden his contacts with Russians and because his lobbying firm had taken money from Turkish interests without reporting it. Comey testified that Trump nonetheless asked him to go easy on Flynn
.. Does the President imagine that the job of the Attorney General is to protect the law, or to protect him?
.. They also reportedly spoke to Mike Pompeo, the head of the C.I.A., and Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence. All were apparently asked whether Trump pressured them in regard to the investigation. If Mueller has these men’s statements in hand, he can see if Trump’s answers match theirs.
.. The President might not care. He has said that he has an “absolute right” to control the Justice Department and “complete” pardon power. Speaking to reporters last week, he mocked his critics: “Did he fight back? . . . Ohhhh, it’s obstruction.” Often, for Trump, fighting back has meant just saying that everything is Hillary Clinton’s fault. Indeed, if Mueller gets Trump talking about Clinton, it will be hard to get him to stop
.. The memo was shared only with House members, and reportedly alleges that the Russia investigation is tainted at its core, because, in an application to surveil Carter Page, a Trump-campaign associate, the F.B.I. made use of a dossier that had been partly paid for by the Clinton campaign.
.. Sessions had tried to get Christopher Wray, the new F.B.I. director, to fire McCabe; Wray refused.
.. Trump’s strategy seems obvious: to create confusion, suspicion, deflection, doubt, and, above all, noise.
.. if he does sit down with Mueller’s team, once the first question is asked there will be an interval of silence that only the President can choose how to fill. Will he try to turn the interview against Mueller? If Trump thinks that Mueller can be scared off by the prospect of being fired
Why Does President Trump Fear the Truth?
Mr. Trump may call this behavior “fighting back,” but the federal criminal code would almost surely call it obstructing justice — an offense that has led to the resignation of one president and the impeachment of another.
.. Other defenders of the president have argued it was no big deal. Hey, this happened seven months ago, and he didn’t even follow through!.. But he did follow through with firing Mr. Comey. If there were any remaining doubt that he did so for an innocent reason, Thursday’s news snuffed it out. Mr. Trump’s claim that he wanted Mr. Mueller gone because of his supposed “conflicts of interest,” which included a claimed dispute long ago over fees at one of Mr. Trump’s golf clubs, is not worth taking seriously... Second, why the repeated lies by Mr. Trump and his associates about the contacts with Russian officials? Maybe they truly believed they did nothing illegal during the campaign and transition, but thought it would be embarrassing for the contacts to become public in light of the intelligence community’s finding that Russia attempted to interfere in the election. For this White House, though, mere public embarrassment has never seemed a source of chagrin.