Trump administration faces multiple threats as it seeks to investigate itself
After six weeks spent scrambling to fend off chaos, the Trump White House has found itself in territory familiar to several past administrations: trying to pursue a sense of normality as it conducts an investigation into itself.
The decision by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from supervising an FBI inquiry into Russia’s efforts to influence the presidential campaign — and the Trump campaign and administration’s ties to that country — may have settled one thorny issue. But it left a series of others.
The biggest challenge, according to veterans of past administrations of both parties, will be to convince Americans of the credibility of an investigation into its own activities while avoiding the internal damage that a prolonged investigation can cause for a White House.
“It’s very easy to get an atmosphere that’s a combination of paranoia and the desire to please the boss and panicky fear of what’s going to come out next,” Michael Waldman, a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton during that investigation-marred administration, said of the sentiment inside a White House under siege. “It can be very debilitating.” If history holds, President Donald Trump and his staff will face two distinct problems. They will have to guard against administration officials becoming more and more fearful about their own futures as they contemplate interviews with the FBI or summonses to appear before congressional committees. Those fears can limit internal cooperation and complicate hiring new staff.
At the same time, the administration will have to work harder to propel policy goals to the forefront in a media environment dominated — to this point — by a series of controversies. “White Houses act like 8year-olds playing soccer: Everyone runs to the ball,” said Democratic veteran Mickey Kantor, who served as Clinton’s trade representative and secretary of Commerce.
“When you run to the ball, it gets in the way of other work, it disrupts other work,” said Kantor, who said he was not casting judgment on whether Trump or his team had done anything wrong.
Except for President Barack Obama’s, no recent administration has avoided an independent counsel or special prosecutor investigation since they began sprouting in the Watergate era. So far, the Trump administration has signaled it will not exercise the option of bringing in an outsider to serve as a special prosecutor. Instead, it wants to keep the Russia matter under the control of the president’s and Sessions’ subordinates in the Department of Justice.
That may mean a more controlled investigation, but it also means the White House itself will be called to answer for every development.
“This isn’t and shouldn’t ever be political, much less civil war,” said John Q. Barrett, who served under independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh during the 1980s Iran-Contra investigation, which looked into efforts by Reagan administration officials to use proceeds from arms sales to Iran to finance rebels in Nicaragua. (The sales and the financing were barred at the time.)
“It should be law enforcement done in a high-spotlight, high-stakes process,” said Barrett, now a professor of law at St. John’s University in New York City. “There’s always a fever of the moment, and you hope for people on all sides who can sort of not succumb to that.”
For those working for the president whose administration is being investigated, the stakes are also personal. During the Clinton administration, multiple investigations were conducted by independent counsels, not only of Bill and Hillary Clinton but also the administration’s secretaries of Housing and Urban Development and of Agriculture.
The initial look at the Clintons’ pre-presidential investment in an Arkansas development known as Whitewater morphed into a six-year investigation that ultimately covered the suicide of a White House aide and President Bill Clinton’s affair with a young intern, and prompted impeachment proceedings against him.