The question of whether President Trump obstructed justice in the FBI’s investigation of Michael Flynn has always hinged on his familiarity with the details of that probe — and when he learned them.
A new report out Tuesday in the New York Review of Books suggests Trump knew that there was an ongoing criminal investigation into Flynn and his interactions with Russian officials when he asked then-FBI director James Comey on Feb. 14, 2017 to let Flynn “go.”
Reporter Murray Waas said that he reviewed a White House memo that “explicitly states that when Trump pressured Comey he had just been told by two of his top aides — his then chief of staff Reince Priebus and his White House counsel Don McGahn — that Flynn was under criminal investigation.”
According to Waas, “people familiar with the matter” have told him that both Priebus and McGahn also testified to Special Counsel Robert Mueller that they personally provided this information to Trump during a Jan. 26, 2017 meeting.
These details flatly contradict the case that Trump’s personal legal team has made in denying the obstruction of justice allegations. In a confidential January 29 letter to the special counsel leaked to the New York Times in June, two of Trump’s attorneys say that the President knew only that Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI. Trump believed the bureau’s investigation was over and that Flynn had been cleared, his attorneys claimed.
Setting aside how odd it would be for Trump to ask the FBI director to end a probe that he didn’t think was happening, the special counsel is reportedly in possession of testimony and documents that contradict that version of events.
This evidence includes interviews with Priebus, McGahn and several other members of the White House Office of Legal Counsel, according to Waas’ reporting. Waas said it also includes the Feb. 15, 2017 White House memo outlining a timeline of the events that led up to Flynn’s firing, as well as “underlying White House records quoted in the memo.”
Is this the smoking gun?
I’m glad to read this today… if it would have been published tomorrow I would have missed it as (in the catholic tradition of no meat Friday) tomorrow would be No Trump Wednesday!
More seriously as stuff starts piling up will anyone have the courage, as top R’s did with Nixon, to step up and tell Trump the gig is up?
No, let’s not set that aside just yet. First let’s savor it!
I’m old enough that I watched the Watergate hearings when they happened. It’s impossible to imagine today’s republicans doing anything remotely as honorable as the Watergate Committee that included Lowell Weicker and Howard Baker. The GOP is so corrupt, so willing to ignore the Constitution, that it will forever more be impossible to impeach/convict a republican president with a GOP majority.
Only if the Democrats take at least one House, maybe two, in November. Anything less and it won’t happen and even then it may not happen. It was an entirely different Republican party then. It is possible - I don’t know the odds - that if after the Dems clean their clocks in the fall, that some (probably only some, too) Repubs will abandon ship if only to save their own skins.