Miriam:
The ‘first’ liar never has a chance!
Richard
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 1, 2018, at 11:35 AM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Again, because I really respect James Risen, I'm posting this article,
although from everything I've heard and read, the Trump campaign collusion
with Russia is nonsense. But I do believe that Trump is attempting to
obstruct justice because the Mueller investigation will reveal his business
associations with criminals in Russia as well as in other countries. I guess
I should alter my statement to say that of course, Russia, like other
countries, meddles in US elections just as the US meddles in the elections
of other countries. But the Democratic Party's insistence that Clinton's
loss was caused by Russian collusion is an excuse that John Podesta
formulated, as reported in the book written about her campaign.
Miriam
The Case for Obstruction
By James Risen, The Intercept
01 June 18
Given Trump's conflicting explanations for firing former FBI Director James
Comey, it may be difficult to prove his intent beyond a reasonable doubt.
One of the most important things to understand about Robert Mueller, the
special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia case, is that he helped nail
New York mob boss John Gotti, the gangster known as the "Teflon Don."
One of the most important things to understand about Donald Trump, the con
man and hustler who happens to be president, is that he comes from the
mob-tinged New York real estate industry and knows exactly what happened to
Gotti and other mob bosses felled by racketeering prosecutions waged by the
likes of Mueller.
Trump knows that Mueller is now conducting the same kind of racketeering
investigation in the Trump-Russia case, and it frightens him.
Mueller is approaching his Trump-Russia investigation in the same way he and
his fellow Justice Department prosecutors went after Gotti and other
mobsters. He is rolling up Trump loyalists. He is slowly but surely climbing
the ladder from low-level operatives to more prominent figures, and holding
the threat of prison over their heads to get them to flip and talk about
people higher up the ladder. Eventually, Mueller's racketeering case will
make its way to Trump.
Whenever Mueller seems to be making progress, Trump tries to distract. That
is why a desperate Trump has been turning to crazed loyalists like Rudy
Giuliani to go on cable news and spout incoherent attacks on the Mueller
investigation. And it explains why Trump and his minions are now trying to
focus the public's attention on the FBI's use of an informant to falsely
claim that Trump was illegally spied on by the purported "deep state" during
the 2016 campaign. To be sure, there is plenty of ugly history behind the
FBI's use of informants. In the 1960s, the FBI infiltrated the anti-war
movement and other political organizations; more recently, it has used
informants to entrap people in ginned-up terrorism cases.
But there is no evidence that the FBI engaged in any of those abusive
tactics in the Trump-Russia investigation. Trump simply wants to depict
himself as the victim of partisan intelligence operatives so that he can
discredit and distract from Mueller's actual investigation. It is the same
kind of ploy he tried last year, when he claimed that he had been
wiretapped.
In fact, the stunning number of very public actions taken by Trump to
distract from or impede the Russia inquiry - a number that grows almost
daily - suggests that he has been desperate to make the investigation go
away from the moment it began.
I believe that it is obvious - and has been for more than a year - that
Trump is doing everything he can to obstruct any investigation into evidence
of collusion between his campaign and Russia in the 2016 presidential
election. If that means discrediting the FBI, the Justice Department, and
other government agencies, Trump will do it. He is quite willing to destroy
crucial governmental checks and balances to impede the investigation.
This is my third column for The Intercept about the Trump-Russia case. Given
all the conspiracy theories, false controversies, and Trump's other efforts
at distraction - which the media dutifully reports in mind-numbing detail in
excruciatingly narrow and incremental stories - it is easy to lose the
thread of the Trump-Russia narrative. My objective in this series of columns
is to step back and look at the big picture.
While Trump tries to make you look the other way, I want to remind you of
the big events, like the fact that Trump fired the FBI director to stop the
Trump-Russia inquiry.
This third column is very straightforward. It is about whether Trump has
attempted to impede the efforts, first by the FBI under then-Director James
Comey and now by Mueller, to investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded
with the Russians win the White House.
The answer, unequivocally, is yes.
There are many open questions about other aspects of the Trump-Russia
narrative, but not about this. Trump has been trying to block the
investigation from the very start. The only real questions about this aspect
of the case are whether Trump's efforts to impede the inquiry will meet the
legal definition of obstruction of justice, whether he will be criminally
charged with obstruction of justice, and whether he will face impeachment in
Congress.
And one more: Will Trump fire Mueller if he thinks he is getting too close
to making the case for obstruction?
Trump's efforts to derail the investigation have been very public and are
becoming increasingly unbalanced.
Trump's current focus on what he calls "Spygate" is straight from the
playbook he has been using since the investigation began. He is trying to
distract the public from the substance of the investigation by publicly
spouting conspiracy theories and other wild claims.
During the 2016 campaign, the FBI asked Stefan Halper, an American who was
an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, to act as an informant
in its fledgling investigation of Russian election interference and possible
ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Halper, a former Republican
operative, was asked by the FBI to talk to Trump foreign policy advisers
Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, both of whom the bureau believed were
in contact with the Russian government.
Halper's informal talks with the Trump advisers don't seem to have yielded
much. But press reports about his role as an FBI informant gave Trump and
his loyalists fresh ammunition to attack the FBI.
Trump purposefully and falsely branded Halper as a "spy" planted inside his
campaign. To sway public opinion, he tried to make Halper's role and the
FBI's inquiry sound far more nefarious than it was.
Giuliani recently acknowledged in a television interview that Trump and his
camp are waging a battle to discredit Mueller's investigation if the case
ends up going to Congress for impeachment proceedings, which are, by
definition, political and subject to the whims of public opinion.
"Eventually, the decision here is going to be: impeach [or] not impeach.
Members of Congress, Democrats, and Republicans are going to be informed a
lot by their constituents. So our jury . is the American people. And the
American people . Republicans largely, independents pretty substantially,
and even Democrats, now question the legitimacy of [Mueller's probe],"
Giuliani said on CNN last weekend.
Trump so successfully cast the Halper episode as a right-wing fever dream
that congressional Republicans demanded briefings on Halper's role in the
investigation. The FBI and the Justice Department gave in and agreed to
brief some Democrats as well. Afterward, like so many Trump conspiracy
theories before it, the Halper case began to fizzle. Most Republicans had
little to say, while Democrats said the briefings showed that there was no
substance to Trump's charges. Eventually, even some Republicans began to
break with Trump on the Halper matter. Sen. Marco Rubio acknowledged that
there was no evidence that the FBI had been spying on the Trump campaign.
Most surprisingly, Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and Draco
Malfoy lookalike who has long been one of the GOP's leading conspiracy
theorists, now says that the FBI's use of Halper was appropriate.
President Donald Trump, center, shakes hands with James Comey, director of
the FBI, during an Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders
Reception in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on
Sunday, Jan. 22, 2017.
"Spygate" is just the latest in a long string of actions by Trump designed
to impede the investigation.
Before Mueller, Trump went after Comey when he was running the Russia
investigation. Like Mueller, Comey quickly came to see Trump's similarity to
the mob bosses that he had pursued as a prosecutor in New York, particularly
after Trump began trying to pressure Comey to do his bidding.
Unlike the close-mouthed Mueller, Comey has been very public and explicit in
comparing Trump to a mobster. In his recent memoir, Comey describes one
meeting with Trump this way: "As I was sitting there, the strangest image
filled my mind. I kept pushing it away because it seemed too odd and too
dramatic, but it kept coming back: I thought of New York Mafia social clubs,
an image from my days as a Manhattan federal prosecutor in the 1980s and
1990s. The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Cafe Giardino. I couldn't shake the
picture. And looking back, it wasn't as odd and dramatic as I thought it was
at the time."
The Trump-Comey relationship got off to a rocky start, when Comey had to
brief the president-elect on the contents of the infamous Steele dossier.
Comey told Trump about an unconfirmed allegation included in the dossier
that during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Trump had spent a
night at the Ritz Carlton with prostitutes and been filmed by Russian
intelligence. Days later, after BuzzFeed published the dossier, Trump called
Comey to vent about it.
About two weeks later, on January 27, 2017, Trump again called Comey and
asked him to come to the White House for dinner that night. When Comey
arrived, he discovered that he was the only guest.
Over dinner, Trump asked Comey whether he wanted to stay on as FBI director.
Since Trump had previously asked him the same thing, and Comey had already
told him that he did, Comey rightly suspected that this was a veiled threat.
"Now it was pretty clear to me what was happening," Comey writes in his
book. "The setup of the dinner, both the physical layout of a private meal
and Trump's pretense that he had not already asked me to stay on multiple
occasions, convinced me this was an effort to establish a patronage
relationship."
"I expect loyalty," Trump told him over dinner.
Comey says he responded: "You will always get honesty from me."
Comey came away from the dinner feeling like he had just met with a Mafia
boss who was trying to strong-arm him.
On February 14, Comey met Trump again at the White House, this time with a
group of other officials. At the end of the meeting, Trump asked Comey to
stay behind for a private talk. When everyone else had left the room, Trump
told Comey that he wanted to talk about Gen. Michael Flynn, his onetime
national security adviser, who had resigned the day before amid questions
about his contacts with Russia and for lying to Vice President Mike Pence
about them.
Trump told Comey that Flynn hadn't done anything wrong in his dealings with
the Russians, and then made a statement that sounded to the FBI director a
lot like an effort to obstruct justice: "I hope you can see your way clear
to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can
let this go."
Comey says he replied only that Flynn was "a good guy," but did not say that
he would let the matter go.
Gen. Michael Flynn, right, former national security adviser to President
Donald Trump, leaves federal court on Dec. 1, 2017 in Washington, D.C. Flynn
pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with Russia, in a dramatic
escalation of the FBI's probe into possible collusion between the Trump
campaign and Moscow.
"At the time, I had understood the president to be requesting that we drop
any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his
conversations with the Russian ambassador in December," Comey writes in his
book. "I did not understand the president to be talking about the broader
investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. Regardless, it
was very concerning, given the FBI's role as an independent investigative
agency. Imagine the reaction if a President Hillary Clinton had asked to
speak to the FBI director alone and urged him to back off the investigation
of her national security advisor."
On March 30, Trump called Comey and told him that the Russia investigation,
then being run by the FBI, was a "cloud" over his presidency, and asked what
could be done to "lift the cloud." Trump also asked him to make public the
fact that Trump was not personally under investigation, which Comey had
previously told him privately.
On April 11, Trump called Comey again and made another veiled threat,
saying: "I have been very loyal to you, very loyal. We had that thing, you
know." This was apparently a reference to their dinner in which Trump had
demanded Comey's loyalty.
On May 9, 2017, Trump fired Comey in the midst of the FBI's investigation of
evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It was the most
public and consequential action taken by Trump in the growing obstruction
case against him. It ultimately led to Mueller's appointment as special
counsel to conduct an independent investigation into the Trump-Russia case.
At first, Trump suggested that a Justice Department memo criticizing Comey
for his handling of the Clinton email investigation prompted the firing. But
Trump couldn't control himself and soon admitted to a television reporter
that he was really thinking of "this Russia thing" when he fired the FBI
director.
The day after he fired Comey, Trump told visiting Russian officials: "I
faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off," according to a
memo describing the discussion.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, center, leaves after a closed meeting with
members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 21, 2017 at the Capitol in
Washington, D.C.
During those early months, Comey wasn't the only person Trump sought to
pressure on the Russia investigation.
In March 2017, before he fired Comey, Trump asked two top intelligence
officials - the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, and NSA
Director Mike Rogers - to say publicly that they saw no evidence that the
Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians. Both declined.
After he was fired, Comey decided he would go to the press, at least
indirectly. He used a law professor friend as an intermediary. The friend
told the New York Times about Trump's efforts to obstruct justice by
pressuring Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn. The resulting media
firestorm prompted Rosenstein to appoint Mueller to investigate the
Trump-Russia case. Rosenstein's decision so angered Trump that he has
reportedly wanted to fire him ever since.
Trump also wanted to fire Mueller almost as soon as he was appointed. He was
only stopped when his own White House counsel said he would quit rather than
carry out the order.
Trump has gone to great lengths to quash the investigation, even getting
directly involved in crafting a misleading statement to the press about the
purpose of a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between a Russian lawyer, Donald
Trump Jr., and campaign officials. The meeting was designed to get dirt on
Clinton, but the press statement said it was about Russian adoption policy.
It seems unlikely that Mueller will seek to criminally charge and prosecute
a sitting president. But if Mueller writes a report to Congress that could
be used in impeachment proceedings, there is historical precedent for a
focus on obstruction. During Watergate, the first count in the impeachment
proceedings of Richard Nixon included charges of obstruction of justice.
The big question in this case will be whether Trump's actions meet the legal
definition of obstruction. As president, he has the power to hire and fire
senior officials, like the FBI director. And given all of Trump's various
early explanations, including the laughable notion that he fired Comey
because of his handling of the Clinton email case (which, incidentally,
almost certainly helped Trump win the election), it may be difficult to
prove beyond a reasonable doubt what exactly drove him to fire Comey. Trump
has been so public and said so many contradictory things that it will also
be difficult to parse his words and intent on many other actions.
What's more, if Mueller gets enough evidence to make an obstruction case
against Trump but still can't prove the underlying case of collusion between
the Trump campaign and Russia, the obstruction case will ring hollow.
Trump's supporters will almost certainly rally to him, claiming he is just
being punished for his efforts to fight back against a partisan takedown.
It's important to remember what Trump thinks of his voters and how strongly
he believes they will always side with him. On the campaign trail in 2016,
Trump said: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,
and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."
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