Good luck with that, Rudy
Even as federal prosecutors, bloodhound noses to the ground, start sifting through files from a raid of fixer Michael Cohen’s office, even as Special Counsel Robert Mueller tries to set a date to interview President Trump under terms and conditions yet to be determined, Rudy Giuliani, sniffing something, joins the President’s legal team with promises to bring Mueller’s investigation to a swift conclusion.
With all the subtlety of a superhero, or at least an actor portraying one, Giuliani boasts of his “long relationship with Bob Mueller” and says, “I don’t think it’s going to take more than a week or two to get a resolution.”
“I’m going to ask Mueller, ‘What do you need to wrap it up?’ ”
With due respect to the onetime heavyweight prosecutor who’s been consulting and lawyering on and off since he left City Hall, that’s just not how this works.
It seems like Rudy’s been spending too much time in Trump Town, where everything revolves around personal loyalty to the man in charge. Back here on Earth, prosecutors and the rest of us are digesting fresh evidence of how severely that way of doing business has stained the White House carpets.
The latest is in the just-released memos authored by then-FBI Director Jim Comey documenting Trump’s attempts, as President-elect and President, to get him to play ball and drop the Russia probe in its early stages.
Republicans had been threatening to subpoena those memos from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official who oversees Mueller’s investigation, on the suspicion that they’d help exonerate the President. When Rosenstein handed them over, they did something else entirely.
The memos paint a vivid, detailed, believable, real-time portrait of a man so obsessed with disproving allegations about unsavory contacts with Russia that he relentlessly sought to cultivate and control the head of the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
Lest one imagines an elaborate conspiracy to fabricate detailed conversations, the memos confirm what Trump has long denied: that he pressured Comey to drop the investigation into thennational security adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russia, and that he repeatedly demanded Comey’s personal loyalty.
We all know what happened when Comey resisted. A year ago, he was fired, for what Trump at first claimed were reasons dating back to the FBI director’s handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email in 2016.
Days after laying out that thin pretext, Trump contradicted himself, saying on national TV that when he decided to send Comey walking, he was thinking about “this Russia thing.”
Facts are facts, and obstruction of justice is obstruction of justice. The President of the United States can’t wish them away; nor can the man once known as America’s mayor.