Hold Trump accountable
President Trump should turn back into bloviating entertainment star Donald Trump if he obstructed justice in the investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. But that will only happen if Congress or any other investigative body has the guts to go wherever the evidence leads.
Tuesday evening came the earth-shattering revelation that, according to then-FBI director Jim Comey, Trump urged him to deep-six its investigation of Flynn, a day after Trump tossed him.
Context matters, and denials are already coming fast and furious, but as reported by The New York Times, relaying an account drawn from Comey’s detailed notes of the meeting, Trump’s request sounds plainly Nixonian.
“I hope you can let this go,” the President is said to have told Comey, the politeness of the request belying its likely illegality.
The FBI boss, we now learn, meticulously documented each interaction with the President in real time, in memos that congressional committees must subpoena.
Under 18 U.S. Code Section 1503, “Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication . . . endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice” is guilty of a felony. This law has no exception for the President. That key could be the downfall for Trump, who has skated on presidential exceptions to government conflict of interests laws and, as we distressingly learned on Monday, on releasing classified materials.
Trump, always the last to admit to having anything to learn about anything, is insistent he was right to share classified details about an ISIS plot with Russia — and, in the process, inadvertently reveal the American partner from which those details came, which turns out to have been Israel.
Trump’s Tuesday-morning explanation of why he loosened his lips in last week’s meeting with Russia’s ambassador and foreign minister: for “humanitarian reasons,” tweeted the President — to encourage Russia “to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.”
But the specifics of a plot, revealed in such a way that the Kremlin could easily reverse-engineer their source, were obviously unnecessary to make that point.
What Trump did was give rise to the near certainty that the Kremlin will now marry what it has learned from the President with what it knows from other sources — and then share that insight with its allies and Israel’s sworn enemies, Iran and Syria.
The Israel-U.S. relationship will survive, but, diplomatic insistence that there’s been no harm done notwithstanding, this has got to hurt.
The reversal in posture from the White House Tuesday induced whiplash in a now-familiar way: Officials went from uncategorically denying the content of Monday night’s Washington Post report to essentially admitting its validity but poohpoohing its relevance.
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who had issued a broad denial Monday, said Tuesday that “what the President discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation.”
That doesn’t explain why, in the wake of the President’s indiscretion, White House officials rushed to contain the damage with the CIA and NSA. McMaster spitballed that this happened “maybe from an overabundance of caution.”
Moreover, McMaster said Trump didn’t know the source of the intelligence that he passed along to Russia — an attempt to absolve the commander-in-chief of responsibility that only underlines how irresponsibly the man in charge acted.
On Monday, we learned that Trump outed an ally and Tuesday that he tried to thwart a criminal probe. Today is Wednesday. God save us.