Mueller Examining Whether Trump Sought to Slow Flynn Probe
by Chris Strohm
15 June 2017, 10:36 am AEST
The special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election plans to interview two top U.S. intelligence officials about whether President Donald Trump sought their help to get the FBI to back off a related probe of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, according to three people familiar with the inquiry.
The move expands the scope of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. It had initially focused on Russia’s election meddling and whether any of Trump’s associates colluded with the effort. Now it appears Mueller is examining the president’s own conduct, which may include whether Trump tried to obstruct justice.
Mueller is seeking to interview Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers, according to the people, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Separately, Coats is scheduled to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed session Thursday.
A spokesman for Trump’s outside lawyer reacted angrily Wednesday, accusing the Federal Bureau of Investigation of breaking the law by disclosing the information.
‘Outrageous’ Leak
“The FBI leak of information regarding the President is outrageous, inexcusable and illegal,” Mark Corallo, the spokesman for Trump’s legal team, said in an email.
Corallo didn’t elaborate on why he singled out the FBI as the source of information. Mueller’s decision to talk with the two officials was reported earlier by the Washington Post.
At a hearing last week of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Coats and Rogers refused to say whether they were asked by Trump to help impede an FBI investigation and suggested any response in a closed hearing would require consultations with White House lawyers on whether executive privilege should be invoked.
“To the best of my recollection, I have never been directed to do anything I believe to be illegal, immoral, unethical or inappropriate,” Rogers said at the hearing, without answering whether he was asked -- but not directed -- to back off.
Mueller’s plans emerged just a week after former FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Trump pressed him in February to ease up on an investigation into Flynn. Flynn was forced to resign for misleading administration officials about his contacts with Russia’s U.S. ambassador.
Comey also said Trump repeatedly sought assurances that he wasn’t a target of the Russia investigation. Comey said he told the president on three occasions that he wasn’t personally under investigation.
But Comey suggested he expected Mueller would look into whether Trump’s efforts to intervene in the FBI inquiry amounted to obstruction of justice.
Trump said when he dismissed Comey on May 9 that the reason was the former FBI chief’s handling of the investigation into Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. He cited the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein.
But days later he said in an NBC interview that he had decided to fire Comey before getting their input and he was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he did it.
“Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it,” Trump told Lester Holt of NBC News in an interview broadcast May 11. “And 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.”
Shifting Reasons
Comey told senators on June 8 that Trump’s shifting explanations for dismissing him were “lies, plain and simple.” Trump and the White House disputed Comey’s description of the events.
Mueller was appointed special counsel after Comey’s firing. He’s been building a team of investigators for a wide-ranging inquiry into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
He met with the two top members of the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday to discuss preventing conflicts in their separate investigations into Russian election interference, and he’s set to meet with House Intelligence panel leaders in coming days.
Despite suggestions by a Trump friend in a television interview that the president was weighing dismissing Mueller as special counsel, the White House declared late Tuesday that there was no such plan.
“While the president has the right to, he has no intention to do so,” Trump spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters.
A White House ethics waiver that allows chief strategist Steve Bannon to talk to his former employer Breitbart News is “problematic,” the top federal ethics official said in a letter Tuesday.
President Donald Trump’s appointees are required to sign an ethics pledge saying they’ll avoid particular matters involving former employees for two years. But the waiver, one of several pertaining to its staff members that the White House released May 31, allows staffers to “participate in communications and meetings with news organizations regarding broad policy matters.”
The unsigned, undated waiver could be applied retroactively -- essentially allowing staff members who violated an ethics pledge to avoid disciplinary action, wrote Walter Shaub, the director of the federal Office of Government Ethics.
Bannon ran Breitbart, a conservative media site, before he joined Trump’s campaign in 2016. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
OGE doesn’t know whether there were any violations of the ethics pledge based on communications with news agencies -- by Bannon or anyone else, Shaub wrote in a June 13 letter responding to inquiries from four Democratic senators. The agency is preparing a full report about waivers Trump’s administration has granted, he said.
“As part of preparing that report, OGE will follow up with the White House and other agencies to request additional information, including whether they are aware of any violations of the ethics pledge,” Shaub wrote.
Overall, federal disclosures show that the Trump administration has issued 14 waivers for White House staff members, along with waivers or partial releases from ethics rules for at least 10 executive-branch officialsacross five agencies.
OGE published the waivers for all the agencies except the White House after Shaub issued a government-wide call for them on April 28. Earlier that month, he had complained to the New York Times that because of a lack of transparency, he had “no idea how many waivers have been issued.”
He tested the presidential waters for Donald Trump and then served as a campaign guard dog, threatening a reporter that he would “mess your life up.” Before long, he was swept up in the questions swirling around the administration and Russia.
Michael Cohen, an integral part of Trump world for a decade, says he’s preparing to testify before the House intelligence committee on Sept. 5 about its investigation into Moscow’s interference in the U.S. election -- and he’s already fighting back.
“The liberal media has painfully learned that they cannot get under the skin of Donald Trump,” he said in an interview. “To continue this fake Russian narrative, they attack anyone and everyone who is close to the president who knows someone who has a connection to or is involved in any way shape or form to someone from the former Soviet Union. I still cannot figure out why they are obsessing over my relationships that existed in the Ukraine when the Ukraine and Russia are two separate countries who presently don’t even get along.”
For those who suspect that the Trump campaign and the Kremlin colluded, Cohen offers an alluring target. New York business filings list him as an officer of two family financial companies in Ukraine incorporated in 1998, and he and his younger brother were directors of International Ethanol of Ukraine, according to 2006 filings. Cohen visited Georgia in 2010 with the aim of building either a Trump hotel or residential tower on the Black Sea. His wife of 23 years is of Ukrainian extraction, he was long involved with a Ukrainian businessman in the rough-and-tumble New York City taxicab business and he was named in an uncorroborated dossier about Russian interference compiled by a former British spy.
Cohen has been quick and absolute in his denial of any inappropriate activity. He said his role in all three companies was to file legal paperwork for family members; none of the businesses got off the ground. And after the spy dossier was published, including a claim he had gone to Prague to meet a Russian, he tweeted a photo of his passport and said he’d never been to Prague.
Cohen, 50, resembles his boss with his in-your-face style, legions of Twitter followers and real estate deal-making history (he says he personally owns 115 apartments in New York City). For years, he held the title of special counsel to Trump. Today, he’s Trump’s “personal lawyer,” separate from White House counsel and from attorneys, including Marc Kasowitz, Trump has hired to handle Russia inquiries. To those who know the Trump cast of characters, Cohen fits a pattern.
“There’s a definite type that Trump has been drawn to through the years, and they’re people who share his kind of street sensibility,” said Marc Fisher, co-author of the recent biography “Trump Revealed” and senior editor at the Washington Post. “He likes tough guys, he likes people who he thinks shoot from the gut and are direct and don’t hold back in any way.”
Cohen grew up on Long Island and has the accent to prove it; after American University in Washington, and law school at Western Michigan University, he returned to New York to practice law. He married into a Ukrainian family and began buying taxi medallions. By 2003, campaigning for New York City Council, Cohen listed his occupation as “Businessman, Attorney and Community Activist” and ran a fleet of more than 200 taxis, according to a voter guide. (He lost.)
Cabs were a good investment: Legal filings in a contractual dispute with his long-time partner, a polo-playing Ukrainian émigré named Simon Garber, show that he and his wife were pulling in $90,000 a month from their medallions in 2011. Other ventures weren’t as lucrative, like an unsuccessful $1.5 million investment in a Miami gambling cruise boat.
His enthusiasm for high-end real estate brought him to Trump. Over the years, Cohen and his family have owned apartments in Trump World Tower near the United Nations, as well as in Trump Palace on 69th Street and Trump Park Avenue. Trump’s oldest son, Donald Jr., recommended Cohen to his father after getting to know him through his investments, Cohen told The Real Deal in February.
The Apprentice
Cohen joined Trump on the upswing, as “The Apprentice” was turning the developer of troubled Atlantic City casinos into a world-wide reality TV phenomenon. His title at the Trump Organization was executive vice president and special counsel, and he served on the boards of the Miss Universe Organization and Trump Productions, as well as the Eric Trump Foundation. His legal work in-house hasn’t left much of a trace in the public record. But he has played a very public role in promoting Trump as a politician.
Cohen scouted in Iowa for Trump in 2011, and started a website to drum up interest in yet another makeover for the political candidate. He defended even his boss’s most controversial utterances in the 2016 race, including the suggestion that Mexicans crossing the border were “rapists.” Cohen called that “potentially and partially true.”
Not long after, he threatened a Daily Beast reporter trying to get a comment for a story about rape allegations Trump’s first wife, Ivana, made during their divorce and later retracted: “You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up ... for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet ... you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” the Daily Beast quoted him as saying.
‘I Apologized’
Cohen later partially apologized. In the interview with Bloomberg, he elaborated: “I apologized for my inarticulate statement, but I didn’t apologize for my reaction to a query that is disgraceful. I have tremendous admiration and affection for Mr. Trump and the family. To accuse him of such a heinous act was nothing more than a feeble attempt to malign his good name, reputation and thwart his presidential ambition. Clearly, it did not work.”
In February, The New York Times linked Cohen to a proposed peace plan for Ukraine aimed at getting the U.S. to lift sanctions against Moscow. The plan involved leasing Crimea to Russia for 100 years and was developed by Trump business associate Felix Sater and Ukrainian legislator Andrii Artemenko. The paper said Cohen delivered the proposal to the office of Michael Flynn’s, days before the former national security adviser was forced to resign over his own Russia contacts. Cohen says this account is wrong. He said he suggested in a brief encounter with Artemenko that Flynn might be an appropriate conduit, but he himself never read the proposal or delivered it to anyone.
At the end of May, he said House and Senate investigators requestedthat he voluntarily provide information to Congress on Russia. He refused, saying the whole issue was fake. After he was subpoenaed, he said he would cooperate.
The Russia cloud has not prevented Cohen from capitalizing on his Trump ties. In April, the law firm Squire Patton Boggs announced a strategic alliance with Michael D. Cohen & Associates, to continue building a “pre-eminent global public-policy offering.” Also in April, the Republican National Committeeannounced Cohen’s appointment as one of three new national deputy finance chairmen.
A group of almost 200 Democratic lawmakers sued to block President Donald Trump from taking any money from foreign states at his global businesses without getting Congressional approval first, claiming his acceptance of such benefits violates the Constitution.
It’s the latest shot at the Trump administration from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who on Tuesday pressed his Attorney General Jeff Sessions for information about his role in the probe into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia. It’s an issue the Democrats also brought up in the lawsuit.
As Trump “decides how to shape U.S. policy toward Russia, he may be influenced by his long-standing, though yet unrealized, desire to build housing and hotels in Russia,” the Democrats said.
Trump has stepped down from running his $3 billion empire but retained his ownership interests, a decision the lawmakers say violates the Foreign Emoluments clause in the U.S. Constitution that forbids the president from receiving payments or gifts from foreign governments without Congress’s approval.
The lawsuit lists a slew of such alleged benefits that the president has already received, including China’s approvals of Trump-business-related trademarks in the country, payments for hotel rooms and events and payments he gets from leases at Trump Tower, whose tenants include the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority, both of which are government-owned.
A White House official said Trump’s business interests don’t violate the constitutional clause and called the lawsuit politically motivated. The White House will review the complaint, but the official, who asked not to be named, said officials expect the Department of Justice will ask the judge to throw it out.
In a similar lawsuit filed in January by a Washington government-watchdog group, lawyers for the Justice Department said history shows the emoluments clause doesn’t apply to fair-market transactions, including hotel bills, golf club fees and office rents, like those in which Trump is engaged. The government’s response to that lawsuit cited business activity with foreign countries by presidents going back to George Washington.
“My skepticism borders on disbelief,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School who has argued that Congress should have a greater right to sue over constitutional questions than courts generally allow. He also represented House Republicans in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law.
The fact that Congress hasn’t attempted to get information on the alleged emoluments "dramatically undermines the legal action," Turley said. “This is off-the-map in terms of a legally cognizable claim.”
Precedent generally holds that individual legislators can’t sue to enforce a law unless they’ve somehow been deprived of a vote. The Democrats say that’s happened because Trump failed to seek Congressional approval to keep the foreign payments.
Courts have rarely had the opportunity to define emoluments -- a key question in the debate over whether any aspect of Trump’s businesses activities might constitute violation of the clause.
Maryland and the District of Columbia sued earlier this week, claiming the president is violating both foreign and domestic emoluments clauses of the constitution with his businesses benefiting from his position.
The Democrats claim in their lawsuit that Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns -- he’s the first president in 40 years not to have done that -- and the complicated interconnections between the hundreds of business entities and shell companies in which he has a stake “makes it impossible to determine the full scope of the benefits he is currently accepting from foreign states.”
Tax Returns
If the lawsuit is allowed to proceed, the Democrats would likely press for the release of those returns as part of a document exchange ahead of trial.
Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal and Michigan Representative John Conyers led the lawsuit, backed by 29 other senators and 165 House members.
The Constitutional Accountability Center, a think tank and law firm “dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of our Constitution’s text and history,” represents the Democrats in court.
Trump has put his assets in a trust and put his two oldest sons in charge, but he has retained an ownership stake, prompting an outcry from the director of the Office of Government Ethics. Walter Shaub Jr. called the move “meaningless.”
Trump’s family business had said it would donate any profit derived from foreign government sources to the U.S. Treasury, but softened that pledge last month when it said it’ll just estimate the profit its hotels earn from foreign governments.
The company said in a pamphletshared with members of Congress that its effort might not capture every dollar spent by foreign officials at Trump’s hotels because looking into all patrons’ backgrounds would invade their privacy.
The Democrats’ complaint lists examples of several former presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, who took steps to comply with the Emoluments Clause. In the case of Kennedy, he declined to accept the honor of Irish citizenship in 1963 from the government of Ireland.
The Democrats also noted cases in which the activities of U.S. government employees or retirees were found to have fallen within the scope of the clause, including ’a NASA employee’s receipt of a $150 consulting fee for reviewing a Ph.D. thesis’ and ’a gift of photographs to U.S. military and civilian officers by a foreign prince.”
The case is Blumenthal v. Trump, 17-cv--01154, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
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