Trump Scandal Fight Revived With Flynn Reversal, Russia Papers
Trump Scandal Fight Revived With Flynn Reversal, Russia Papers
(Bloomberg) -- Scandals that rocked Donald Trump’s first years as president came roaring back on two fronts Thursday, as the Justice Department suddenly abandoned its case against his first national security adviser and House Democrats released thousands of pages of transcripts on whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the 2016 election.
The move by the Justice Department to vacate the prosecution of Michael Flynn for lying to FBI agents came after weeks of demands by Trump and his allies to redress what the president often calls a Democratic “hoax” and a “witch hunt” intended to tar his administration.
Trump cheered the reversal on Flynn, which provoked outrage from Democrats, who again accused Attorney General William Barr of doing Trump’s partisan bidding and renewed demands that he resign. The president, though, insinuated that his predecessor Barack Obama was more involved in the Russia probe and Flynn’s prosecution than publicly known.
“There’s more to come, from what I understand,” Trump said on Fox & Friends on Friday. “If anyone thinks that he and Sleepy Joe Biden didn’t know what’s going on, they have another thing coming.”
The transcript release closed out a lengthy saga over a series of interviews with Trump advisers and former Obama administration officials.
The papers reveal Trump confidants resisting lawmakers repeatedly, declining to answer questions and saying they didn’t recall specific moments. Ultimately, the probe ended with each party releasing competing reports, with Republicans clearing Trump and Democrats accusing his 2016 campaign of malfeasance.
As the U.S. now grapples with an economic and a health crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, the Flynn case and the Mueller inquiry seem almost like ancient history. But with the 2020 election just months away, those events provide ammunition both for the president’s most ardent supporters and his bitterest opponents.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said the transcripts showed Trump “invited illicit Russian help, made full use of that help, and then lied and obstructed the investigations in order to cover up this misconduct.”
Republicans, however, have been trying to build a case that the entire Russia investigation was built on a pretext by Obama-era officials. Representative Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee noted that the transcripts show James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, testified he “never saw any direct empirical evidence” of plotting with the Russians even though there were concerns about “anecdotal evidence.”
“But Adam Schiff and the Democrats put us through three years of the Mueller probe anyways?” he tweeted. “Ridiculous.”
The Russia allegations eventually led to a lengthy investigation headed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller concluded last year that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Trump or any of his associates with conspiracy, but there was evidence that the president had obstructed justice.
The Justice Department’s decision to drop the Flynn prosecution still must be agreed to by the judge in the case. If he accepts the move, it will spare the president the politically sensitive question of whether to pardon Flynn in the midst of the election campaign. Barr acted after court documents were unsealed last month in which FBI officials discussed whether they should try to get Flynn to lie during an interview in January 2017 so that he could be prosecuted or fired from his White House post.
Former FBI officials disputed the Justice Department’s filing.
“I would point out that General Flynn was not targeted. He was properly investigated in a well-predicated case,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told CNN Friday morning. “He was investigated because we had reason to believe he posed a threat to national security. I still think that those things are worthy of investigation. Apparently the president does not.”
The reversal plays into Trump’s re-election strategy, as Flynn has become a symbolic figure among conservative activists who believe a cabal of government officials were out to take down the Trump administration.
It came after Barr put a different prosecutor, Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, in charge of reviewing the Flynn case. Similarly, Barr assigned John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to review the origins of the Russia-Trump investigation. He has yet to submit his findings, but Republicans are eager to see his report.
“We must ensure that no American is subjected to similar witch hunts in the future. But our work won’t stop there,” the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee tweeted Thursday evening. “Durham is coming.”
The House Intelligence probe’s transcripts give fodder to both parties, but much of it showed Trump aides doing their best to not answer questions from Democrats.
Perhaps singularly unhelpful was Trump’s former security guard, Keith Schiller. During hours of testimony, he said he couldn’t recall numerous times in answers to questions -- and couldn’t say if he’d been to Russia more than once.
Moscow Hotel
He said he couldn’t remember the hotel where he and Trump stayed in Moscow and couldn’t remember if they spent more than one night.
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner told the committee in an interview on July 25, 2017, that he had no way of knowing whether Russia’s interference affected the election results, a possibility the president has repeatedly rejected.
“The candidate ran a great campaign. He had the right message. That’s why he won,” said Kushner, who’s a senior adviser to the president. “Whatever happened with some hacks of emails and what was released one way or the other, maybe it was determinative or not on the election results. We’ll never know.”
A transcript of an interview with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon shows that during one of his two committee interviews, he described as “unpatriotic” and unwise a June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Kushner and then-Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. But he stopped short of calling it “treasonous” as he was quoted as saying in a book.
Trump’s son, in his interview with the panel, compared his willingness to meet with Veselnitskaya to accepting an invitation from a friend saying, “Hey, you want to go grab a beer after work?”’
Clapper told the panel that “our antenna was up certainly” for why Russia reacted mildly to sanctions imposed by the outgoing administration. He said the answer was clear when intelligence agencies learned of a conversation Flynn had with Russia’s ambassador “effectively neutering” the sanctions.
Still, Trump allies seized on Clapper’s statement that he lacked empirical evidence.
“I wonder why they didn’t release this statement three damn years ago?” Trump Jr. tweeted on Thursday. “I guess so long as the media was their willing lap dogs and run with their narrative there was no reason to tell the truth! Hurt Trump at all costs.”
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