Legal threats surround Individual Number One
WASHINGTON >> Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency, nearly every organization he has led in the past decade is under investigation.
• Trump’s private company is contending with civil suits digging into its business with foreign governments and with looming state inquiries into its tax practices.
• Trump’s 2016 campaign is under scrutiny by special counsel Robert Mueller III, whose investigation into Russian interference has already led to guilty pleas by his campaign chairman and four advisers.
• Trump’s inaugural committee has been probed by Mueller for illegal foreign donations, a topic that the incoming House Intelligence Committee chairman plans to further investigate next year.
• Trump’s charity is locked in an ongoing suit with New York state, which has accused the foundation of “persistently illegal conduct.”
The mounting inquiries are building into a cascade of legal challenges that threaten to dominate Trump’s third year in the White House. In a few weeks, Democrats will take over in the House and pursue their own investigations into all of the above — and more.
The ultimate consequences for Trump are still unclear. Past Justice Department opinions have held that a sitting president may not be charged with a federal crime.
House Democrats may eventually seek to impeach Trump. But, for now, removing him from office appears unlikely: It would require the support of twothirds of the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans.
However, there has been one immediate impact on a president accustomed to dictating the country’s news cycles but who now struggles to keep up with them: Trump has been forced to spend his political capital — and that of his party — on his defense.
On Capitol Hill this week, weary Senate Republicans scrambled away from reporters to avoid questions about Trump and his longtime fixer Michael Cohen — and Cohen’s courtroom assertion that he had been covering up Trump’s “dirty deeds” when he paid off two women who claimed they had affairs with the president before he was elected.
“I don’t do any interviews on anything to do with Trump and that sort of thing, OK?” said Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho.
“There’s no question that it’s a distraction from the
things that obviously we would like to see him spending his time on, and things we’d like to be spending our time on,” said Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota. “So that’s why I’m hoping that some of this stuff will wrap up soon and we’ll get answers, and we can draw conclusions, and we can move on from there.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, summed it up another way: “It’s been a bad week for Individual Number One,” referring to the legal code name prosecutors in Manhattan used in court filings to refer to the president.
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did White House or Trump Organization officials.
As the bad news has rolled in, the president has cut back his public schedule. He spent more time than usual in his official residence this week, with more than two dozen hours of unstructured “executive time,” said a person familiar with his schedule.
In several tweets on Thursday, Trump sought to cast doubt on two former advisers who have cooperated with investigators. Cohen, Trump said, just wanted a reduced prison sentence. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, he said, was the victim of scare tactics by the FBI.
Then — after wordy explanations of how both men had gone wrong — Trump tried to sum up his increasingly complex problems with a simple explanation.
“WITCH HUNT!” he wrote.
“He’s just never been targeted by an investigation like this,” said Timothy O’Brien, a reporter who wrote a biography of Trump, adding that the longtime real estate mogul had contended with extensive litigation in his business career, but never legal threats of this scale. “The kind of legal scrutiny they’re getting right now — and the potential consequences of that scrutiny — are unlike anything Donald Trump or his children have ever faced.”