The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website December 4, 2017:
President Trump’s denials about former national security adviser Michael Flynn are raising new questions about obstruction of justice. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
THE BIG IDEA: President Trump’s aides spent the weekend applying tourniquets to stop the bleeding from more self-inflicted wounds. Continuing a pattern, the White House took a bad story and made it worse. With his legal exposure increased, the president then sought to change the subject.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted this about his former national security adviser: “I had to fire General (Michael) Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI.”
Legal experts said this could be used as evidence that the president was trying to obstruct justice when he allegedly asked James Comey to take it easy on Flynn and then, when he didn’t, fired him as FBI director.
On Sunday, Trump’s personal lawyer claimed responsibility for writing the tweet — which he called sloppy. John Dowd clarified that the president knew in late January that Flynn had probably given FBI agents the same inaccurate account he provided to Vice President Pence about a call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“Dowd said the information was passed to Trump by White House counsel Donald McGahn, who had been warned about Flynn’s statement to the vice president by a senior Justice Department official,” Carol D. Leonnig, John Wagner and Ellen Nakashima reported last night. “A person close to the White House involved in the case termed the Saturday tweet ‘a screw-up of historic proportions’ that has ‘caused enormous consternation in the White House.’”
— Washington is now consumed by speculation about what shoe drops next. Here are seven questions that will determine what course special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation takes from here:
Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty on Dec. 1 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
1. What did Flynn give up in exchange for leniency?
Flynn was part of Trump’s inner circle and even considered as a potential running mate. Mueller reportedly agreed to spare the disgraced ex-general’s son and does not plan to pursue several potential charges that carried much stronger potential penalties than making a false statement to the FBI.
If there was nothing inappropriate about reaching out to the Russians, as the president and his lawyers say, why didn’t Flynn tell the truth when FBI agents asked about it? What exactly was Flynn instructed to tell the Russians?
Trump insists he’s not worried about anything Flynn might say. “No, I’m not,” he said as he left the White House Saturday for fundraisers. “And what has been shown is (there was) no collusion.”
In fact, this has not been shown.
The Trump campaign and the White House have said there was no contact between anyone on their staff and Russia. This isn’t true. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
2. Has anyone else lied to the FBI?
“At least two dozen people who traveled in Trump’s orbit in 2016 and 2017 — on the campaign trail, in his transition operation and then in the White House — have been questioned in the past 10 weeks,” per Robert Costa, Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey. “The most high profile is (Jared) Kushner, who met with Mueller’s team in November, as well as former chief of staff Reince Priebus and former press secretary Sean Spicer. Former foreign policy adviser J.D. Gordon has also been interviewed. White House communications director Hope Hicks was scheduled to sit down with Mueller’s team a few days before Thanksgiving. Mueller’s team has also indicated plans to interview senior associate White House counsel James Burnham and policy adviser Stephen Miller.”
- “McGahn, who was interviewed by Mueller’s prosecutors for a full day Thursday, was scheduled to return Friday to complete his interview. However, the special counsel postponed the session as a courtesy to allow McGahn to help the White House manage the response to Flynn’s plea …”
- White House lawyer Ty Cobb declined to say which White House aides remain to be interviewed.
- “In the past several weeks, Mueller’s operation has reached out to new witnesses in Trump’s circle, telling them they may be asked to come in for an interview.”
Many of these interviews lasted several hours. If he can show that anyone made false statements, Mueller can now circle back and has leverage over them.
3. What did Kushner tell Mueller’s team about Flynn and the Russia contacts?
Trump’s son-in-law has been identified by sources as the “very senior member” of the transition team who Flynn says directed him in December to reach out to Kislyak and lobby him about a U.N. resolution on Israeli settlements. Flynn admits that he was not truthful when asked by the FBI on Jan. 24 about those interactions, but we don’t know what Kushner told investigators last month. Kushner’s lawyer has declined to comment.
Bob, Carol and Josh interviewed several witnesses who have been interviewed by Mueller’s team, and some of them said they were surprised by the volume of questions about Kushner. “I remember specifically being asked about Jared a number of times,” said one witness. “Another witness said agents and prosecutors repeatedly asked him about Trump’s decision-making during the May weekend he decided to fire (Comey). Prosecutors inquired whether Kushner had pushed the president to jettison Comey, according to two people familiar with the interview.” Conservative blogger Jen Rubin, who practiced law for two decades, raises several additional questions about Kushner: “What was the Trump team going to get in exchange for lifting sanctions against Russia? If Kushner directed Flynn to contact Russian officials, was he then looking to cover that up when he urged the president to fire (Comey)? … If Flynn’s contacts were authorized and legal, why did Trump allow him to lie to the vice president about them? … Did Kushner derive any financial benefit from contacts with Russians? Why did he meet with a Russian bank during the transition? … Did Kushner intentionally omit Russia contacts on his disclosure forms? … What connection, if any, exists between Russian officials and the Trump campaign data operation conducted by Cambridge Analytica and overseen by Kushner? … Will Trump attempt to pardon Kushner if he is indicted?”
Newsweek reports that, among other significant omissions, Kushner did not disclose in paperwork for the Office of Government Ethics that he led the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation from 2006 to 2015, during a time when the group funded an Israeli settlement then considered illegal under international law. “The failure to disclose his role in the foundation — at a time when he was being tasked with serving as the president’s Middle East peace envoy — follows a pattern of egregious omissions that would bar any other official from continuing to serve in the West Wing,” Chris Riotta reports.
President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. communicated with WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. Here’s what the messages say. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
4. How many other people on the Trump team knew about and/or approved of Flynn’s interactions with the Russians?
Flynn admitted in his plea deal that he spoke with another member of the transition team before he talked to Kislyak on Dec. 29 about why the Kremlin should not retaliate against the United States for sanctions that had just been announced by the Obama administration. People familiar with the matter say that this person was K.T. McFarland, who was pushed out as deputy national security adviser after Flynn’s departure and is now awaiting confirmation as Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Singapore.
That day, McFarland reportedly emailed Tom Bossert, who was another transition official and is now the president’s homeland security adviser, to say that the sanctions were aimed at discrediting Trump’s victory. According to the New York Times, McFarland passed along word that Flynn would be speaking with Kislyak hours after the sanctions were announced: “If there is a tit-for-tat escalation Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia, which has just thrown U.S.A. election to him,” she wrote.
Bossert then forwarded her email to six other people — including Priebus, Spicer and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon — and urged them to “defend election legitimacy now,” according to the Times, which said McFarland couldn’t be reached.
5. What did Trump himself know and when did he know it?
The day after he pushed Flynn to resign, Trump met with Comey. The former FBI director has testified under oath (and presented contemporaneous notes to back up his account) that Trump said, “I hope you can let this go.”
The president tweeted Sunday morning, “I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn.”
6. Who else and what else is Mueller looking at that we don’t know about yet?
Another lower-level Trump campaign aide, foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, previously pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Agents arrested him in July. He pleaded guilty at a secret hearing in October. Mueller kept the information private until he indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates, on Oct. 30.
“Precisely what Papadopoulos did in recent months to aid the government remains unclear and the subject of speculation among Trump aides and former campaign officials,” Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports. “Prosecutors seemed pleased with the cooperation because they dropped the obstruction charge … Spokespeople for Mueller’s office and the FBI declined to comment for this article, but in court papers they cited a need to keep the charges against Papadopoulos secret because of planned interviews with other Trump campaign officials and others relevant to the investigation.”
VIDEO HERE
7. How far will Trump and congressional Republicans go to thwart the ongoing Russia investigations?
Trying to go on the offensive, Trump spent Sunday attacking the integrity of the FBI. He noted that Peter Strzok — the former top FBI official assigned to Mueller’s probe — was taken off that job this summer after his bosses discovered that he and another member of Mueller’s team had exchanged politically charged texts disparaging Trump and supporting Hillary Clinton.
“Strzok, as deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, was a key player in the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server to do government work as secretary of state,” Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett reported Saturday. “During the Clinton investigation, Strzok was involved in a romantic relationship with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who worked for Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.”
In a tweetstorm, Trump said the FBI’s “reputation is in tatters.” He retweeted a conservative pundit saying that Chris Wray, who Trump appointed to replace Comey, needs to “clean house”:
It was reported last week that Trump has pushed key GOP leaders on Capitol Hill to “move on” from their investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Some Republican lawmakers are responding to damaging revelations about Trump by ramping up their calls for new inquiries … into Clinton.
Many people who are close to Trump have been warning him that Mueller means nothing but trouble, and that he’s making a mistake by being as cooperative as his lawyers want him to be. “I don’t know what they’re smoking,” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, a friend of the president’s, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “Robert Mueller poses an existential threat to the Trump presidency.” Now the question is what will Trump do about it.
Meanwhile, FBI agents and alumni are defending the bureau:
The president of the FBI Agents Association issued this statement after Trump trashed the bureau’s professionals:
Comey posted this quote from earlier in the year:
View the post here.