On May 18 Trump was asked: “Did you, at any time, urge former F.B.I. Director James Comey, in any way, shape or form, to close or to back down the investigation into Michael Flynn?” The president’s response: “No. No. Next question.”
Comey, in his statement to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says that in a Feb. 14 Oval Office meeting Trump did precisely what he denies.
.. a president who had already tried through a veiled threat to establish a “patronage relationship,”
.. No doubt Mueller is also wondering what possible benign motive could lead Trump to clear the Oval Office before asking the F.B.I. director to spare Flynn.
.. “Trump’s business is infecting the people around him. To show loyalty you have to engage in the corrupt or mendacious behavior he engages in. So he’s a form of contagion — and Comey did not want the investigation infected.”
.. if Mueller suggests the president could be indicted, impeachment proceedings will be hard to resist — and then, as Burbank put it, “what we might colloquially call ‘obstruction of justice’ might be deemed a high crime or misdemeanor even if it would not violate federal criminal law.”
Why Comey’s testimony was utterly devastating to Trump
The day before, then-acting attorney general Sally Yates first alerted White House Counsel Donald McGahn that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had lied about his transition contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak
.. This was no casual get-to-know-you social occasion. It occurred just as Trump was learning that Flynn was in enormous jeopardy.
.. he understood Trump’s expression of “hope” as a clear direction to drop the case. If this request was so benign, why did Trump seemingly feel uncomfortable making it in the presence of witnesses?
.. Even on the question of obstruction alone, he would want to question multiple additional witnesses about Trump’s dealings with Comey and the Flynn case/larger Russia inquiry, including
- Chief of Staff Reince Priebus,
- senior adviser/son-in-law Jared Kushner,
- McGahn,
- Attorney General Jeff Sessions and
- Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
- Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and
- National Security Agency Director Michael S. Rogers
may have stiff-armed senators’ questions about Trump’s reported efforts to have them intervene on the Russia matter; they won’t be able to easily evade Mueller.
Could the Russia Investigation Reveal Trump’s Tax Returns?
If special prosecutor Robert Mueller suspects they contain evidence of a crime, the most sought-after documents in Washington might just be unearthed.
Trump—who is the first president in 40 years to refuse to make his tax returns public, despite once promising to do so— would have almost no way of stopping him. In fact, the prosecutors said, the president and his lawyers would not necessarily even know that Mueller had obtained them.
.. Notably, this does not necessarily mean that the public would ever see the returns.
.. Trump’s two adult sons have both been quoted as saying that Russian investments represent a lopsided share of their revenues
.. Rosenstein is, nominally, Mueller’s supervisor, which means Rosenstein could try to overturn any significant decision made by Mueller, including a decision to seek the tax returns.
Trump’s tweets ‘a gold mine’ for Mueller probe
The president’s running public commentary gives investigators real-time insight into the intent behind his actions – and could create problems for him or his aides.
.. the @realdonaldtrump account gives investigators a detailed timeline of Trump’s thoughts and opinions – including where they might differ from official accounts – and can also be used to establish intent, which can be critical in a criminal investigation.
.. The president’s warning last month to the fired FBI director James Comey, that he’d “better hope that there are no tapes” of their conversations, “could well be interpreted as an effort to intimidate a witness,” Forde added.
.. Legal experts say the president’s recent statements, including his admission to NBC News’ Lester Holt that he had the Russia investigation in mind before firing Comey, as well as his comment reported by the New York Times that Comey was a publicity-seeking “nut job” helps them paint a poignant picture of the president’s intentions.
“You could use those tweets to show the president was angry and frustrated by this Russia investigation, that he was furious that it was ongoing, that he didn’t think it was legitimate, that he therefore fired the FBI director to thwart it,” Zeidenberg said. “You could support that whole theory almost entirely on tweets and statements of Trump.”
.. The degree of attention Trump has given to the Russia probe on Twitter, Zeidenberg said, would make it challenging for the president’s attorneys to argue he wasn’t being serious on his social media account.