The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website June 16, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: If Donald Trump thought he could intimidate Bob Mueller, he thought wrong.
A person who spoke with Trump on Tuesday told the New York Times that the president was pleased by the intentional ambiguity of his position on firing Robert S. Mueller as special counsel, “and thinks the possibility of being fired will focus the veteran prosecutor on delivering what the president desires most: a blanket public exoneration.”
If the president truly believes this, he fundamentally misunderstands what motivates the former FBI director – who has stood up to previous administrations and never swayed under political pressure.
Marines Corps veterans don’t scare easily. Mueller, 72, earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star with Valor for his gallantry in Vietnam before devoting most of the rest of his life to public service. Trump, 71, avoided military service by claiming a medical deferment for “heel spurs,” and he’s said that his “personal Vietnam” was avoiding sexually-transmitted diseases while sleeping around in New York. “I feel like a great and very brave solider,” the president once told Howard Stern.
— Just as almost every previous effort at damage control has made Trump’s Russia-related headaches worse, keeping the door open to firing Mueller earlier this week has now backfired. Key figures on Capitol Hill and in the conservative legal firmament have now gone on the record to warn that ousting the special counsel would trigger a constitutional crisis. That would make it much harder for Trump to go that route down the road.
“Firing Mueller would be an insult to the Founding Fathers,” Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel in the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations during the Clinton administration, writes in an op-ed for today’s Post: “Subject to the possibility of being fired for ‘good cause,’ Mueller should be allowed to do his work unhindered and unimpeded. Absent the most extreme circumstances, the president would be singularly ill-advised to threaten, much less order, Mueller’s firing. Under legally binding regulations, the special counsel’s fate rests exclusively with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. He alone is empowered to make that fateful decision. As a matter of honor, and in light of his sworn testimony before Congress, Rosenstein would inevitably resign if confronted with a White House directive to dismiss the special counsel. Wisdom counsels strongly against unleashing a 21st-century version of the Saturday Night Massacre of Watergate-era infamy.”
— On the investigative side, Mueller is demonstrating a willingness to pursue the facts wherever they lead – regardless of what Trump does or doesn’t say about firing him.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the special counsel’s investigation now includes an examination of whether the president himself attempted to obstruct justice – a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
— Following the money: Mueller is also investigating the finances and business dealings of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Sari Horwitz, Matt Zapotosky and Adam Entous scooped last night. “The White House has said Kushner’s meeting with [Sergey Gorkov, the head of a state-owned Russian development bank] was a pre-inauguration diplomatic encounter, unrelated to business matters. The Russian bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been the subject of U.S. sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, has said the session was held for business reasons because of Kushner’s role as head of his family’s real estate company. The meeting occurred as Kushner’s company was seeking financing for its troubled $1.8 billion purchase of an office building on Fifth Avenue in New York, and it could raise questions about whether Kushner’s personal financial interests were colliding with his impending role as a public official.”
— Another significant development: The vice president, whose balancing act as Trump’s number two is showing signs of strain amid the White House turmoil, has just hired his own outside lawyer to help him deal with the special counsel, Ashley Parker scooped last night. Mike Pence was one of the small group of senior advisers Trump consulted with as he mulled firing James Comey as FBI director.
Richard Cullen, the lawyer Pence hired, is a pro. The former Virginia attorney general, who lives in Richmond, is chairman of the influential firm McGuireWoods. He served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia under George H.W. Bush and helped George W. Bush during the 2000 Florida recount. He represented Tom DeLay during the Jack Abramoff affair.
In another sign of just how seriously the V.P. is taking Mueller’s probe, an aide said he spent several weeks on this process and interviewed several candidates before settling on Cullen.
— Pence lawyering up will likely have a domino effect inside the White House. The president’s private attorney, Marc E. Kasowitz, is focused on protecting the personal legal interests of Trump. He has told White House personnel that they do not need to hire their own lawyers. “But Pence’s move to hire an outside attorney could set off a scramble among other West Wing aides — many of whom are already bracing for subpoenas — to do the same, even if only as a protective measure,” Ashley notes.
— Aides and volunteers on Trump’s transition team were also instructed yesterday to save any records related to “several pending investigations into potential attempts by Russia interests to influence the 2016 election.” Transition lawyer Kory Langhofer of an Arizona firm called Statecraft, who previously worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, sent a memo telling campaign officials to preserve all documents related to the Russian Federation, Ukraine and a number of campaign advisers and officials, including Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Rick Gates, Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. “In order to assist these investigations, the Presidential Transition Team and its current and former personnel have a responsibility to ensure that, to the extent potentially relevant documents exist, they are properly preserved,” Lanhofer wrote in the memo, which was obtained by Politico.
— Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, meanwhile, spent more than three hours in a closed session with the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday. Last week he had declined to answer lawmakers’ questions in an open session about his conversations with Trump regarding the Russia investigation but suggested he’d be more forthcoming in private.
Coats and Mike Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency, have also agreed to be interviewed by Mueller as early as this week. Coats has told associates that Trump asked him whether he could intervene with Comey to get the FBI to back off its focus on Flynn. Trump later telephoned him and Rogers to separately ask them to issue public statements denying that there was evidence of coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials. Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the president’s requests, The Post has reported.
— Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee also met with Mueller to deconflict their investigations. The chairman and ranking member said that they will focus on Russian meddling and whether there was any collusion. “The criminal piece of the investigation will be handled by the special counsel,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) told CNN, adding that they will turn over any relevant information they uncover to Mueller’s office.
— Tomorrow is the one-month anniversary of Mueller being appointed special counsel. He has still not even installed a computer network in his work space at the Patrick Henry Building, but the Times reports that “there is evidence of a coordinated strategy” by Trump to try discrediting his work. The crux of the plan is to go after some of his early hires who have donated to Democratic candidates in the past. Andrew Weissmann, who led the fraud section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, served as FBI general counsel when Mueller was its director and previously led the Enron task force. In 2008, when he in private practice, he donated to Barack Obama’s campaign. Another lawyer on the team donated to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and a third has given money to both parties – but more to Democrats than Republicans.
The special counsel has now hired 13 lawyers, and several more are in the pipeline. But while Mueller won’t be cowed, the prospect of personal attacks by Trump allies could deter some attorneys from coming onboard. “A former federal prosecutor said Mr. Mueller was hiring rank-and-file prosecutors to fill out his office staff, and has been prospecting for detailees from several prominent United States attorney offices, including the Southern District of New York,” Scott Shane and Charlie Savage report on the front page. “But prospective hires thinking about joining Mr. Mueller’s team are watching those who have signed up come under intense scrutiny of the sort that ordinary prosecutors and corporate lawyers rarely experience … For Mr. Trump, the tactic of trying to discredit anyone who poses a danger to him has become familiar. Campaigning for the presidency while being sued for fraud over Trump University, he attacked the judge overseeing the case as biased against him because the judge was Mexican-American.”
— Tomorrow is the one-month anniversary of Mueller being appointed special counsel. He has still not even installed a computer network in his work space at the Patrick Henry Building, but the Times reports that “there is evidence of a coordinated strategy” by Trump to try discrediting his work. The crux of the plan is to go after some of his early hires who have donated to Democratic candidates in the past. Andrew Weissmann, who led the fraud section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, served as FBI general counsel when Mueller was its director and previously led the Enron task force. In 2008, when he in private practice, he donated to Barack Obama’s campaign. Another lawyer on the team donated to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and a third has given money to both parties – but more to Democrats than Republicans.
The special counsel has now hired 13 lawyers, and several more are in the pipeline. But while Mueller won’t be cowed, the prospect of personal attacks by Trump allies could deter some attorneys from coming onboard. “A former federal prosecutor said Mr. Mueller was hiring rank-and-file prosecutors to fill out his office staff, and has been prospecting for detailees from several prominent United States attorney offices, including the Southern District of New York,” Scott Shane and Charlie Savage report on the front page. “But prospective hires thinking about joining Mr. Mueller’s team are watching those who have signed up come under intense scrutiny of the sort that ordinary prosecutors and corporate lawyers rarely experience … For Mr. Trump, the tactic of trying to discredit anyone who poses a danger to him has become familiar. Campaigning for the presidency while being sued for fraud over Trump University, he attacked the judge overseeing the case as biased against him because the judge was Mexican-American.”
— As Trump lashes out on Twitter at what he’s calling a “WITCH HUNT,” his White House press shop has adopted a sort of bunker mentality and answers fewer questions than it used to. From Ashley Parker and John Wagner: “At a previously scheduled off-camera briefing for reporters, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the principal deputy White House press secretary, was peppered with more than a dozen questions about ongoing investigations over about 20 minutes. In keeping with a new practice, she referred one question after another to Trump’s personal lawyer. Sanders, for example, was asked whether Trump still felt ‘vindicated’ by the extraordinary congressional testimony last week by Comey … ‘I believe so,’ she said, before referring reporters to Kasowitz. … Mark Corallo, a spokesman for (the outside lawyer), did not respond to an email and phone call seeking comment on the questions Sanders referred to him.”
— White House aides are privately fretting to one another over Trump’s obsession with the probe, Politico’s Josh Dawsey reports: “Trump, for months, has bristled almost daily about the ongoing probes. He has sometimes, without prompting, injected ‘I’m not under investigation’ into conversations with associates and allies. He has watched hours of TV coverage every day — sometimes even storing morning news shows on his TiVo to watch in the evening — and complained nonstop. ‘It’s basically all he talks about on the phone,’ said one adviser. … Aides have tried to change the subject, with little luck. Two people close to Trump note that his is an obsessive personality [but staffers] say they fear his incendiary tweets and public comments have spurred ‘countless’ leaks of damaging information.”
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