Focused read in 3-4 minutes
"White House as crime
scene: how Robert Mueller is closing in on Trump
There is a grand jury in
Washington DC. The special counsel’s team is full of experts in
financial crime. On Russia, the president can feel the net closing..."
* Selected Excerpts *
The
legal net around Donald Trump’s beleaguered presidency tightened
dramatically this week with news that a grand jury has been
established a few hundred yards from the White House, to pursue
evidence of collusion with the Kremlin.
The
special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US
election, former FBI chief Robert Mueller, had been using a sitting
grand jury in Virginia to authorise his team’s demands for
documents and witnesses. The convening of a separate grand jury in
Washington suggests the Mueller team – working in a suite of
offices a few blocks’ walk from where the 20-odd jurors sit – is
going to be making extensive use of it. It will not be hospitable
terrain for the president. Trump won only 4% of the vote in the
District of Columbia.
The
grand jury is also clear evidence that the inquiry is widening, not
tapering off. It suggests that the special counsel is exploring
possible crimes committed inside the District of Columbia.
Meanwhile,
a report from Vox says that senior FBI officials have been told to
consider themselves potential witnesses in an investigation of Trump
for obstruction of justice. The former FBI director James Comey,
Mueller’s successor in the post, has testified that Trump tried to
put pressure on him to drop the Flynn investigation.
In
the investigation into the obstruction of justice, the White House is
the potential crime scene. That is where Trump contrived to be alone
on two occasions with Comey and where the alleged arm-twisting took
place.
On
Tuesday, after adamant denials from Trump’s lawyer, the White House
admitted that Trump had “weighed in as any father would” in
drafting a misleading statement about his son’s June 2016 meeting
with a Russian lawyer with strong Kremlin and intelligence links.
Reuters
has reported that the grand jury in Washington had already issued
subpoenas connected to that meeting at Trump Tower in New York,
another sign that the investigation is closing in on the Trump
family. Trump Jr’s rapid emailed response to the Russian offer of
dirt on Clinton – “If it’s what you say I love it” –
suggests at least an appetite for collusion, like his father’s own
call a month later, in July 2016, for Russia to find thousands of
Clinton’s “missing” emails.
Grand
jury subpoenas could oblige the president’s son and other
participants at the meeting, including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, and his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to testify
under oath about what really happened in Trump Tower.
CNN
reported on Friday that investigators had found intercepts of Russian
operatives referring to conversations with Manafort about
coordinating the release of information damaging to Clinton possibly
hacked from the Democratic National Committee.
It is
evident, however, that the scrutiny of Manafort, the now infamous
Trump Tower meeting and the obstruction of justice issue are just
fragments of a far bigger inquiry.
“The Mueller dream-team now has the top 14 financial crimes prosecutors in America,” said Malcolm Nance, a former US intelligence officer and the author of a book on Moscow’s role in the 2016 US election, The Plot to Hack America. Nance predicted that the Mueller investigation would look into every corner of Trump and Kushner’s past business dealings.
“The
wheels of justice grind finely and slow but this is a wood chipper,
and all these various items and going to get fed into it – Flynn,
[Jared] Kushner, Trump, Manafort and anyone who has been assigned to
the White House over this period,” Nance said. “Their entire
lives are going to be subjected to scrutiny. No one is getting out
unscathed. That’s why Trump is so terrified.”
In a
New York Times interview last month, Trump appeared to suggest that a
probe of his financial dealings beyond direct links with Russia would
represent a “violation”, a possible red line which Mueller should
not cross.
Firing
Mueller would come at a high price, triggering uproar in Washington,
alienating some Republicans in Congress. Two bipartisan bills were
drafted this week aimed at blocking Trump from doing just that.
Trump
has also been reported to be exploring the possibility of issuing
pardons to family members and other associates found to have broken
the law, including even pardoning himself, a stretch of executive
prerogative into uncharted territory.
For
now, his strategy is to seek to drain the legitimacy of the special
counsel and the FBI, ridiculing the investigation as a witch hunt.
His supporters are counter-investigating the Mueller team, looking
for weaknesses and points of leverage and portraying the
investigators as operatives of an amorphous “deep state”.
That
strategy looks ahead to an endgame in which the Mueller investigation
comes into its conclusion, next year or possibly even later than
that. The grand juries could issue indictments of Trump associates
along the way, but when it comes to the president himself, Mueller’s
judgment will most likely come in the form of a report to Congress.
It
will then be up to the House of Representatives whether to proceed
with impeachment and then the Senate to decide his guilt. Those will
be political judgments. Until now, only a few Republicans have broken
ranks openly against Trump.
Any
Republicans voting for impeachment would have to watch their back.
The unfolding investigation could topple a president, or could just
as easily leave the country even more grievously divided and wounded
than it is now...
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