Sure, they aren’t reliable witnesses but let’s take them at their word
Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly has convened two Grand Juries and is employing several investigators as part of the investigation to the Trump campaign and administration ties to Russia. But all you need is access to internet, a television or a radio or to collect three key admissions by Donald Trump and his son that the president is doing his best to obstruct justice.
- Donald Trump Jr. is now admitting that his meeting with Russians with connections to the Kremlin was prompted by his desire to conspire with with a foreign government to defeat Hillary Clinton — or to at least to see if Russia had the goods. This is a direct contradiction of the statement he originally released, which — according to sources in the Trump Administration — was either dictated or approved by President Donald Trump. Trump Jr. did his best to square this circle back to his dad’s alibi of “adoptions” — which is code for “sanctions.” But clearly, the goal of that statement was to obstruct the investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia.
- Trump proudly insisted that he would not have hired Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General if he knew Sessions was going to recuse himself from the Russian investigation in July. Clearly, Trump believes his Attorney General should be obstructing this investigation and this announcement — a warning to current and future members of his administration — was a warning that he expected the same from them.
- After Trump fired James Comey in May, he told Lester Holt the dismissal was because of the Russia investigation. He told Holt, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.” Mueller now has an early letter to Comey laying out the reasons for his dismissal. The Washington Post reports, “…it conveyed Trump’s displeasure that Comey would not say publicly what he had told the president three times privately: that the FBI’s probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was not focused on him.” Clearly, Comey was fired for not helping obstruct the Russia investigation.
I’m not a lawyer and have no idea if this meets the standard of criminal obstruction of justice. But he works for us and we deserve to know what he did and didn’t do to win the influence of the Putin regime, despite his obvious interest in making sure we don’t.
And regardless of their history of unrepentant lying, we should believe the Trumps when they admit that the president is participating in a coverup of into the most successful foreign interference into America’s elections ever documented.
[Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr]
