Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.com.
Trump called it “fake news” when The New York Times reported he was in talks to hire Emmet Flood, a lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton during his impeachment proceedings.
But on Wednesday, Trump did just what the Times said he would.
White House lawyer Ty Cobb’s retirement was announced that morning in a statement from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And the Times reported that Trump has indeed decided to hire Flood to replace him.
In mid-March, Trump lashed out at the Times and reporter Maggie Haberman for reporting that this exact move was in the works.
“The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out,” Trump tweeted. He insisted that he was “VERY happy” with his team of lawyers, which included Cobb, John Dowd, and Jay Sekulow.
And he called Haberman a “Hillary flunky [who] knows nothing about me and is not given access.” In fact, Haberman was a persistent critic of Hillary Clinton, and she herself laughed off that line of attack.
Ten days after Trump’s outburst, Dowd abruptly quit the legal team, reportedly because Trump refused to follow the legal advice he was given.
Since then, at least a dozen lawyers have refused to represent Trump.
The move to replace Cobb with Flood comes as pressure from the Mueller investigation mounts. Questions from the special counsel to Trump’s legal team were leaked this week. Experts have suggested that Trump’s legal team may have been behind that leak.
On Tuesday, news of Mueller’s March subpoena threat broke for the first time. And on Wednesday, Trump issued a strong threat to “get involved” with the investigation.
Notably, CNN reports that Cobb quit over Trump’s tweets about Mueller and the investigation, which ramped up starting in March.
There is every indication that Trump knows he is in deep trouble. And now that he’s done precisely what the Times said he would by hiring an impeachment lawyer, he can hardly brush it all off as “fake news.”
Donald Trump urged his aides to orchestrate a plan to discredit specific FBI officials after learning that they were likely to testify against him in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing Russia probe, according to an explosive new report by investigative reporter Murray Waas in Foreign Policy.
The report, published Friday evening, details a series of events that took place in June 2017, following the testimony of former FBI Director James Comey. Those events are now being investigated as potential obstruction of justice, Foreign Policy reported.
According to the new report, that warning prompted Trump to take matters into his own hands, telling aides they needed to “fight back harder” and ordering them to orchestrate a smear campaign targeting the specific FBI officials named by Comey, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Since Dowd gave him that information, Trump — as well as his aides, surrogates, and some Republican members of Congress — has engaged in an unprecedented campaign to discredit specific senior bureau officials and the FBI as an institution.
The FBI officials Trump has targeted are Andrew McCabe, the current deputy FBI director and who was briefly acting FBI director after Comey’s firing; Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff and senior counselor; and James Baker, formerly the FBI’s general counsel. Those same three officials were first identified as possible corroborating witnesses for Comey in a June 7 article in Vox. Comey confirmed in congressional testimony the following day that he confided in the three men.
The Foreign Policy report comes just one day after the New York Times published a bombshell report revealing that Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller last June — the same month that Trump called on his aides to devise the smear campaign.
While it’s no secret that Trump and his allies have engaged in coordinated attacks against the FBI and the officials who work there, Friday’s report reveals that the targets of that campaign were not random. Rather, they were the specific people who were most likely to testify against Trump and corroborate what Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
McCabe, who has been the target of frequent and vicious attacks by Trump and his Republican allies, confirmedlast month that he could corroborate Comey’s testimony about Trump pressuring him to pledge his loyalty by shutting down the Russia probe. This allegedly resulted in the firing of Comey when he refused Trump’s request.
This series of events could prove crucial in Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump — and those around him — engaged in a cover-up.
Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, is among the few other witnesses with inside knowledge about Trump’s reported attempts to pressure Comey to end the Russia investigation. In December, Baker was quietly and unexpectedly reassigned to another position within the FBI. He told colleagues he would be “taking on other duties at the FBI.”
Like McCabe, Baker has been targeted by attacks launched by Trump’s allies, including right-wing media outlets like Circa (operated by the pro-Trump Sinclair network) and Breitbart (until recently, run by Trump’s former campaign manager and chief strategist Steve Bannon).
Clearly, Trump wanted to discredit officials like Baker and McCabe because he views their testimony as a threat — which is telling, given that a person with nothing to hide would have no reason to fear the truth. But fearing that they could be key witnesses in an obstruction of justice case, Trump took matters into his own hands and tried to undermine them before they could give their testimony.
Now, though, Mueller is investigating those very efforts to undermine the three FBI witnesses as a potential act of obstruction by Trump.
As Foreign Policy noted, proving obstruction of justice hinges on whether a prosecutor can show the intent of the person under investigation. The fact that Trump was reportedly motivated to attack specific FBI officials because they were likely to testify against him “could demonstrate potential intent that would bolster an obstruction of justice case,” the report concluded.
It’s hard to imagine anything backfiring more spectacularly than Trump’s attempt to undermine the obstruction case against him by trying to impugn the integrity of these three FBI officials — only to find out that the smear campaign against the officials is now being investigated as an act of obstruction. But if anyone can top this failure, it’s Trump.
Caroline Orr is a behavioral scientist, political analyst, and freelance journalist. Follow her on Twitter: @RVAWonk.
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