Tag: obstruction of justice

Jury finds Stone guilty of lying to Congress

The Hill logoRoger Stone, the right-wing provocateur and longtime associate of President Trump, was convicted on Friday of lying to Congress and witness tampering related to his efforts to feed the Trump campaign inside information about WikiLeaks in 2016.

Jurors convicted Stone on all seven counts of obstruction, making false statements and witness tampering.

The verdict marks another high-profile victory for former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose legal team alleged that Stone had tried to conceal from Congress his contacts with the Trump campaign and people he believed were feeding him inside information about WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign.

View the complete November 15 article by Harper Neidig on The Hill website here.

Barr says Mueller report will be released ‘within a week’

Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers on Tuesday that he will release a public version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “within a week.”

Barr also said that the redactions made to the report would be color-coded and footnoted so that the public knows why the Justice Department decided to redact those portions.

“The process is going along very well,” Barr said during testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee on the Justice Department’s fiscal 2020 budget request. “My original timetable of being able to release this by mid-April stands.”

View the complete April 9 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Questions mount over Mueller, Barr and obstruction

Questions are mounting over special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice as lawmakers on Capitol Hill await the release of his report.

While Barr’s four-page letter to Congress on Sunday silenced suspicions Mueller would charge Trump or members of his campaign with conspiring with the Russian government, its contents only amplified the mystery surrounding the obstruction inquiry.

It remains unclear why Mueller declined to make a decision one way or another on whether Trump impeded his investigation, and Democrats have grown increasingly skeptical of Attorney General William Barr’s judgment that the evidence was insufficient to accuse Trump of obstruction. They also argue he is not a neutral arbiter.

View the complete March 30 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

‘Completely in over her head’: Ex-Trump legal spokesman reveals how Hope Hicks yelled at him and helped light the fuse for Mueller’s probe

President Trump and Hope Hicks Credit: Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post

In a new interview with the ABC News podcast “The Investigation,” Mark Corallo, a former spokesperson for President Donald Trump’s legal team, was deeply critical of the role Hope Hicks played in key events in the special counsel’s investigation.

Hicks, who served as Trump’s communications director before leaving the White House, was on Air Force One with the president when he issued a statement about his campaign meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian emissary promising to bring “dirt” on Hillary Clinton the summer before the 2016 election. In that statement, Trump had omitted the fact that the Russians had offered any help with the campaign — a key revelation as Special Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Kremlin’s election interference was ongoing.

Corallo noted that the statement Trump put out was inaccurate and that regardless, Hicks should not have been involved in putting out the statement at all.

View the compete March 27 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

There’s a glaring omission in the Mueller report — and the obstruction of justice question hinges on it

Did President Donald Trump obstruct justice in the course of the Russia investigation? According to a new letter from Attorney General Bill Barr, Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not answer that question directly, only providing evidence for and against the proposition. But Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded, reading Mueller’s report, that there is not enough evidence to bring the charge of obstruction against Trump.

But there’s a key problem with this conclusion: Trump was never formally interviewed by Mueller.

Though he answered written questions from the special counsel, Trump steadfastly refused to sit down with him, despite having promised that he would testify in the case under oath. And this is particularly problematic because, as Barr noted in his letter, Trump’s intent with regard to potentially obstructive acts is a key factor when determining whether a crime was committed. How can the investigators come to a conclusion about Trump’s intent without asking him questions and assessing his answers?

View the complete March 24 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Trump signals White House won’t comply with Democratic probes

President Trump on Tuesday signaled the White House will not comply with a barrage of congressional investigations, accusing Democrats in the House of launching the probes to hurt his chances of winning reelection in 2020.

“It’s a disgrace to our country. I’m not surprised that it’s happening. Basically, they’ve started the campaign. So the campaign begins,” Trump told reporters at the White House after signing an executive order on veterans’ suicide prevention.

“Instead of doing infrastructure, instead of doing health care, instead of doing so many things that they should be doing, they want to play games,” he continued.

View the complete March 5 article by Jordan Fabian on The Hill website here.

Trump makes clear that he is still considering a pardon for Paul Manafort — deepening his own legal peril

“Obstruction of justice out in the open.”

This week has been full of Paul Manafort-related bombshells. On Monday, November 26, the news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was terminating Manafort’s plea deal because he had been lying repeatedly to federal investigators. And the following day, the New York Times reported that Manafort (President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager) had been funneling information on Mueller’s investigation to Trump’s attorneys—a major breach of the plea deal. But with Manafort now facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life in federal prison, Trump is not ruling out the possibility of a presidential pardon.

During a Nov. 28 Oval Office interview with the New York Post, Trump explained that a pardon for Manafort “was never discussed, but I wouldn’t take it off the table. Why would I take it off the table?”

Other reports have suggested that Trump has discussed the idea of pardoning Manafort.

View the complete November 28 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet.org website here.

Debate rages over Trump tweets and obstruction

The following article by Morgan Chalfant was posted on the Hill website August 4, 2018:

President Trump may have given special counsel Robert Mueller a new gift this week: tweets that could help build an obstruction of justice case against him.

Trump’s tweet lashing out at Attorney General Jeff Sessions and saying that he should quash Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference would seem to feed an obstruction of justice case — following reports that Mueller is looking at the president’s messages on Twitter closely.

Legal analysts say that a single message would not form the basis for an obstruction charge.

View the complete article here.

Mueller Examining Trump’s Tweets in Wide-Ranging Obstruction Inquiry Image

The following article by Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman was posted on the New York Times website July 26, 2018:

Investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, have told President Trump’s lawyers that they want to question him about his tweets. Credit: Doug Mills, The New York Times

WASHINGTON — For years, President Trump has used Twitter as his go-to public relations weapon, mounting a barrage of attacks on celebrities and then political rivals even after advisers warned he could be creating legal problems for himself.

Those concerns now turn out to be well founded. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is scrutinizing tweets and negative statements from the president about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to three people briefed on the matter.

Several of the remarks came as Mr. Trump was also privately pressuring the men — both key witnesses in the inquiry — about the investigation, and Mr. Mueller is examining whether the actions add up to attempts to obstruct the investigation by both intimidating witnesses and pressuring senior law enforcement officials to tamp down the inquiry.

View the complete article here.

Obstruction of Justice

Donald Trump is attempting to distract from his growing legal problems and undermine the investigation into him and his campaign. The investigation has already resulted in indictments and guilty pleas from multiple senior members of Trump’s campaign.

It is long past time for every member of Congress to stand up for the rule of law and take necessary action to prevent Trump’s obstruction and allow for the special counsel and Justice Department to continue the investigation.