Obstruction Starts to Come Into Focus

June 15, 2017–Just very quickly, because I am on something else. You are beginning to see the reasons why President Trump had an interest in having his officials stonewall at their congressional appearances. For Coats or Rogers to have confirmed that the president even mentioned to them the possibility of speaking out in behalf of Michael Flynn or, worse, pressing FBI Director Comey to drop the Flynn inquiry, would be disastrous for Mr. Trump. Our information is that the special counsel opened a wider inquiry on Donald Trump, to include obstruction of justice, shortly after the president fired Comey on May 9. Federal rules require the FBI to inform a person when they become the subject of an inquiry. Thus Mr. Trump was aware of that investigation from about mid-May. His officials, including the lap dog Jeff Sessions, testified at the Senate intelligence committee in June.

Mr. Trump could not openly claim executive privilege for his officials. There is legal precedent for criminal inquiry trumping (!!) privilege. The court hearing would merely worsen the president’s position–and his claim could itself be construed as a further act of obstruction. Mr. Trump could not claim secrecy–you saw in this space yesterday a citation to the statute that prohibits that. In addition there are prima facie grounds to argue that a personnel change is not secret. Trump’s minions were thus forced to contrive some excuse to justify their refusal to testify. An extremely awkward formula (of pretending to reserve the president’s ability to claim privilege later) was the result.

I continue to believe the Senate’s proper response, at the second (or was it the third? the first two occurred during the same hearing) instance of this maneuver, would have been to hold the witness in contempt.

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