President above the law - Trump team
UNITED STATES: US President Donald Trump’s legal team argued yesterday that he stands above the law and cannot be guilty of obstructing justice, mapping out a controversial defence against accusations that he tried to neuter an FBI investigation.
John Dowd, a personal lawyer for Trump, dismissed the idea that the president may have acted illegally when he allegedly urged the head of the FBI to drop an investigation into Mike Flynn, his disgraced former national security adviser.
Dowd told the Axios website that a president ‘‘cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution] and has every right to express his view of any case’’.
The remarks were the clearest hint yet that Trump’s legal advisers regard an obstruction of justice charge as a potential danger to his presidency.
Dowd’s analysis was quickly disputed. The articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton and those drafted to be applied against Richard Nixon both included allegations that they had obstructed justice.
Norm Eisen, a former head of ethics for the Obama White House, said: ‘‘Dowd is serving baloney [for] breakfast. Courts regularly consider otherwise lawful conduct by government officials to be obstruction if undertaken with corrupt intent.’’
The Republicans in Congress are on the cusp of delivering the president’s first significant legislative achievement, a sweeping reform of the US tax code. As the new year approaches, however, the spectre of Russia looms large.
Washington woke yesterday to renewed scrutiny of Trump’s state of mind in February when he fired Flynn, who pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the FBI. At the time the White House said Flynn had to go because he had lied to Mike Pence, the vice-president, about whether he had discussed sanctions with a Russian envoy. In a tweet on Saturday, however, Trump appeared to admit for the first time that he knew Flynn had lied to the FBI.
Opponents pounced on that tweet as evidence that Trump had tried to obstruct justice when he allegedly asked James Comey, the director of the FBI at the time, to back off Flynn. Trump has flatly denied the accusation.
Dowd said on Monday that he – and not Trump – had written the contentious tweet. Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser, said yesterday that Dowd had drafted the tweet before it was sent to the White House director of social media, Daniel Scavino, to be posted on Trump’s Twitter account.
Conway said it was common for Trump’s lawyers to craft his tweets. ‘‘The lawyers are the ones that understand how to put those tweets together,’’ she said.
However, the waters were again muddied when Dowd told The Washington Post that Trump had, indeed, known that Flynn had probably lied to FBI agents.
Dowd claimed that Sally Yates, the former acting attorneygeneral, told the White House that Flynn had misled the FBI. In testimony to Congress this year, however, Yates repeatedly said she had not shared information about Flynn’s FBI interview with the White House.
That raised the question of how Trump would have known that Flynn had lied to the FBI. The former security adviser faces a potential five-year prison sentence but has agreed to co-operate with Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who is leading a special counsel investigation into whether the Trump campaign co-ordinated with the Kremlin to influence the presidential election.
Trump bristled yesterday at how Flynn had been treated. ‘‘I feel badly for General Flynn,’’ the president said as he left the White House for an event in Utah.
‘‘I will say this: Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI and nothing happened to her. Flynn lied, and it destroyed his life, and I think it’s a shame. Hillary Clinton . . . lied many times, nothing happened to her. Flynn lied, and it’s like – it ruined his life. It’s very unfair.’’
Trump ignored questions earlier in the day about whether he would campaign for Roy Moore, a Republican candidate for a Senate seat in Alabama who has been accused of molesting teenage girls. However, Trump later phoned Moore from Air Force One while flying to Salt Lake City. According to Moore’s campaign, the president ended the phone call by saying: ‘‘Go get ‘em, Roy!’’
In Utah, Trump called for two national parks, the Bears Ears National Monument and the Grand Staircase-escalante National Monument, to be reduced in size by hundreds of thousands of hectares, reversing protection imposed on the land by presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
The move has pleased conservatives who want the federal government to relinquish control to allow drilling, mining, grazing and other development.
Environmentalists and Native American tribes said they would challenge Trump in court.
– The Times