A former spokesperson for President Donald Trump’s legal team plans to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that White House communications director and Trump confidant Hope Hicks made a remark last year that left him concerned about obstruction of justice, the New York Times reported Thursday.
The New York Times reported, citing three unnamed sources with knowledge of Mueller’s interview request, that former Trump spokesperson Mark Corallo will tell Mueller that Hicks assured the President that emails from Trump Jr. to his acquaintance Rob Goldstone about a Russian lawyer nearly a year earlier “will never get out.”
According to the report, Corallo will tell Mueller that Hicks made the remark in a July 2017 on a conference call with Trump, amid the response to a New York Times report on the meeting and conflicting statements about its purpose.
Corallo told colleagues, according to the New York Times, that he was concerned that Hicks was suggesting hiding the emails from investigators, and that, regardless of her intent, she made the remark in front of Trump without a lawyer and the associated protection of attorney-client privilege. Shortly after the call, he left his position as spokesperson for Trump’s legal team after only two months on the job.
Hicks, who does not usually make public comments, responded to the Times through her lawyer Robert P. Trout.
“As most reporters know, it’s not my practice to comment in response to questions from the media. But this warrants a response,” Trout told the Times. “She never said that. And the idea that Hope Hicks ever suggested that emails or other documents would be concealed or destroyed is completely false.”
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“And the idea that Hope Hicks ever suggested that emails or other documents would be concealed or destroyed is completely false.”
This was exactly my first thought. Very careful and evasive phrasing.
No one is saying she “suggested” it to anyone, counselor.
She reported it. It had already been much more than suggested.
Nice try, though!
“That e-mail will never get out” is not in and of itself indicative of an obstructive intent. There’s got to be more to this than meets the eye. The interesting part is that Hicks’ lawyers are denying that she made this statement, rather than simply asserting that it was a (mistaken) prediction about what might happen in the ordinary scheme of things. The denial points to collateral matters that make the statement problematic.
More broadly, as Trump’s amanuensis and constant bystander, Hicks is extremely exposed to the risk of misleading the Feds. She is in very real danger, assuming the rule of law prevails.
Oh–and lock her up.
When it comes to believing Corallo or someone in Trump’s inner circle, I believe Corallo, meeting as he does the Literally Anyone Else standard.