It doesn’t surprise me in the least that the Office of the Special Counsel is looking carefully at President Trump’s tweets for evidence that he has obstructed their investigation. And I suppose it’s difficult to prove intent in a traditional jury trial let alone a trial that will be conducted in the U.S. Senate and probably require a vote to convict from well more than a dozen Republican officeholders. My problem isn’t with Mueller’s team thoroughness and attention to detail. My problem is the idea that the case for obstruction is not already considered as proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
Just one single solitary fact should suffice. Trump has admitted that he would not have nominated Jeff Sessions as attorney general if he knew that he would recuse himself. His fury towards Sessions was entirely related to his belief that Sessions could have and would have obstructed the investigation for him. All the tweets and threats, the rescinded order to fire Sessions, the attacks on his deputy Rod Rosenstein, the firing of James Comey and the demonization of his deputy Andrew McCabe, etc., have been efforts to gain control of an investigation in order to thwart it.
Imagine if Jeff Sessions had never met with Ambassador Kislyak in his Senate office and failed to disclose that fact during his confirmation hearings. Imagine of Sessions had not been a major part of the Trump campaign and had no reason to recuse himself. How would Trump feel and how would he have reacted if Sessions had appointed a special counsel to lead the investigation?
He would have seen that as a much bigger betrayal than mere recusal.
It’s Trump’s public statements and known actions with respect to his attorney general that make it as clear as anything ever could be that he wanted to stop the investigation in its tracks and had not been able to accomplish that goal.
There is a lot more evidence available to make an obstruction charge airtight, but to me it’s all superfluous. Trump has tried to obstruct the investigation even as he has felt compelled to cooperate with it.
If the Sessions evidence is not enough for you, then what he said to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office should close the deal. Here’s what he announced to the Russians on May 10th, 2017, the day after he fired James Comey as FBI director.
“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off. I’m not under investigation.”
That is a confession. He fired Comey because he was being investigated over his ties to Russia. Now that Comey has been eliminated, he is no longer under investigation. He said it. There’s a transcript. That’s obstruction of justice.
Considering the audience, it’s also pretty strong evidence of collusion. Why were the Russians invited into the Oval Office the day after Comey was fired? Last week at the Aspen Security Forum, journalist Andrea Mitchell questioned the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats about that meeting.
Trump’s intelligence chief added that he didn’t know about the president’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office beforehand — the meeting where Trump reportedly told them, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off. I’m not under investigation.”
MITCHELL: It occurred to me: Did you know beforehand that Kislyak and Lavrov, the ambassador and the foreign minister, were going into the Oval Office that day?
COATS: I did not.
MITCHELL: What was your reaction afterward?
COATS: Probably not the best thing to do.
In the ordinary course of events, the president doesn’t hold meetings with foreign ministers and ambassadors without the foreknowledge of the Director of National Intelligence. Trump fired Comey and then immediately summoned the Russians to the White House to let them know that the pressure was off and he was no longer under investigation.
In other words, he told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador that he thought he had succeeded in obstructing justice.
So, I don’t think we need a close examination of tweets or even a personal interview to make the case. We just need some Republicans to face reality and summon a little courage.
Perhaps it is the common thread of his using the public eye to actually disguise so much of his law breaking.
His tweets easily raise eyebrows of obstruction, of witness intimidation and surely of collusion with Russians to ‘find her 30,000 emails’ but taken together the pattern of how he uses the public forum to break the law is key.
Rudy’s caution that obstruction happens in secret places is a bingo moment for his game of distraction. Trump announcing that Americans shouldn’t believe their lying eyes told us exactly where to look for the truth.
His whole being vibrates obstruction.
The thing that gets me is that so far, he seems particularly bad at actually obstructing justice… which is why I think the Senate will never convict him on that, or any of the other “petty” crimes: lying on his tax returns (hey, everyone does that!); perjuring himself to investigators (he lies all the time!); covering up an affair (everyone knew he cheated when they voted for him!); laundering money (It was just real estate- all the rich people pay cash!); or any of other of the myriad of scandal possibilities that would absolutely sink a Democratic president.
My thought is that Mueller will probably use the obstruction to show Trumps willfulness in committing a major crime. And, regrettably, I think there is going to take some incontrovertible hard evidence like tapes, photos, bank records, lost apprentice episodes, etc. to convict him in the Senate. And when I say major crime, I mean things like treason, stealing the election through vote fraud, extortion, bribery, and other things like that.
My reasoning is that since he is trying to blow as much smoke as possible up the Republican electorate’s ass as faux news will let him, and they are eating up every single lie, I think it will be imperative to suck the oxygen out of the room from the right wing water carriers like Jim Jordan and the only way that will happen is if Mueller can go big in a shock and awe campaign. If that can happen and the stars align, maybe, just maybe you will hold the D’s shithole caucus in the Senate and get the dozen or so R’s needed to vote to convict him to throw him out of office. Otherwise, I fear that it’s going to be a long war of attrition until 2020
Yes. That’s precisely correct. I’m not sure what will come first, though. The obstruction to which Trump responds “you can’t obstruct when there’s not a crime”, to which Mueller responds with “all these crimes, traitor.” Does it all come at the same time? Obstruction last?
Marcy Wheeler thinks it’ll all be at once, but she’s obviously annoyed at the lack of reporting and all of the stenography and Rudy Spin of stuff we have known for some time.
NYT Discovers Tweets They Discovered 3 Months Ago
Martin may say we know that President Trump has obstructed Justice
But the good people at The Nation are sure we’re all just spinning our wheels. There’s nothing there. You can’t obstruct an investigation into something that doesn’t exist.
So, get back in your lane, everyone! Stop being elite, and fixated!
Extraordinary how far The Nation has fallen.
It does sound as if there is really nothing according to them. Guess all those folks working for Mueller or in the IC are just lying to us and they really have nothing, The shocker for me was finding out Trump is actually very hard on Putin. I was truly shocked shocked. I need time to recover and research this thing again.
They’re not stupid, they’re purposefully obtuse because they decided to hitch their wagons in currents that overlap with Russian propaganda. Mate, for example, won’t straight up say the chemical weapons attacks didn’t happen, but he’ll frequently have guests on his show who argue that they didn’t happen. But he’ll balance it with someone who knows and argues the truth. He’s scum. Same with Max Blumenthal, just to a different degree.
Only Trump’s innate pacifist streak and long-standing attachment to non-intervention has kept Trump from pulling us into a shooting war with Russia already.
Contrary to Rudy’s ridiculous claim, Trump has obstructed justice out in the open. He publicly verbalized his intent to obstruct with his continuous lament that, had he known Sessions would recuse himself he never would have selected him for AG. He did it again when he told Lester Holt why he fired Comey and when he told Lavrov in the Oval Office the same thing. He did it when he drafted that statement for Don Jr about “adoptions.” That’s just for starters. Only question is which of these has more proof of intent. My money is on the phony adoption statement.
Lying, cheating and swindling, and then covering his tracks is Trump’s SOP. It’s his business model. The fact that he’s used to operating this way and doesn’t understand the law, combined with his low intellectual wattage, accounts for his obstructing out in the open. Rudy ridiculously says obstruction is never done in the open, and that may be true for someone who has at least a working knowledge of the law and has self-control to not blurt out in public then lie about it. Trump is lacking on both counts.
Unlike special counsels in the past, Mueller has played it so close to the vest its allowed Trump supporters and doubters to claim there is no evidence, but the ending to that statement is obviously “yet.”
I think this is part of the attraction, for some of his cult members. Some seem completely clueless, but it must be obvious to other believers just as it is to Democrats and never-Trumpers. The believers want this in their leader. They want the Con put back in conservative!
As you know, the GOP does not care one wit about the rule of law or democratic norms and institutional rules. They care only about winning and gradually transforming the US into a version of Putin’s corrupt oligarchic autocracy if they can.
The focus should be on winning back the House and Senate and then stopping Trump/Pence in their tracks. Thinking that the GOP will do anything other than laugh at multiple charges of Trump obstructing justice is just naive.