I/II. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/16/15649914/trump-comey-flynn-russia-investigation-holt
Trump sure seems to have lied about Comey and Flynn The White House has another crisis on its hands. Updated by Alex [email protected]@vox.com May 16, 2017, 7:15pm EDT Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn answers questions in the briefing room of the White House February 1, 2017 in Washington, DC. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images President Donald Trump’s interview last Thursday with NBC’s Lester Holt seems so long ago at this point. But the latest news has brought it back into the spotlight. That’s because what Trump told Holt just five nights ago is now being contradicted by the latest reporting in New York Times and the Washington Post. Here’s the Times’s lead with the explosive revelation: President Trump asked the FBI director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting. “I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. And the Washington Post confirms the story, claiming that Comey’s own notes reveal that Trump “pressured” Comey into ending the Flynn probe. That reporting completely contradicts what Trump explained to Holt last week. The key part is below: [Screenshot] Trump told Holt that he wanted the investigation to go faster. Instead, it now appears that not only did he try to slow it down but he tried to end the portion that looked into his ol’ pal Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump reportedly said to Comey. “He is a good guy.” Good guy or not, it now seems Trump personally tried to influence the outcome of the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between an associate of the president and Russia. As Vox previously reported, Flynn and three other Trump associates feature prominently in that investigation. Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Flynn to get documents related to his communications with Russian officials. The committee also asked the Treasury Department to look into Flynn’s finances. While subpoenas are normal parts of investigations, for them to continue the investigation means there is something to look into. In other words, the investigators think there’s a there there. The White House has responded to the New York Times story, denying it completely: View image on Twitter [Screenshot] Follow Shane Goldmacher ✔ @ShaneGoldmacher No one at the White House willing to put their name on this statement 3:07 AM - 17 May 2017 421 421 Retweets 489 489 likes That denial is going to be hard to substantiate, especially if the paper trail of what Comey deemed to be the “president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation” does in fact exist. If that’s the case, Trump may want to bust out those “tapes” he claims to have of his and Comey’s conversations. That’s probably the only way he’s going to refute a paper trail now. When Trump fired Comey (last week!), my colleague Matthew Yglesias wrote that “a whiff of obstruction of justice is in the air.” That whiff just became a much stronger scent. II. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/15/15627284/trump-comey-firing-obstruction-justice-nixon-watergate Donald Trump has committed the exact offense that forced Richard Nixon to resign Updated by Dylan Matthews@[email protected] May 16, 2017, 6:20pm EDT Javier Zarracina / Vox We don’t actually know if Richard Nixon ordered the break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. That, to me, is still the most remarkable feature of the Watergate crisis. A president was forced out of office for the first time in American history by a scandal centering on a single crime, and we still don’t know if he actually ordered it. In his memoirs, Nixon denies it, though he smugly adds, "I could not muster much moral outrage over a political bugging." Jeb Magruder, a dirty tricks operative for Nixon, revealed three decades later that he had overheard Nixon and his reelection chair John Mitchell planning the burglary. But as historian David Greenberg notes, “Mr. Magruder had [previously] discussed that same meeting without noting Nixon's participation.” Dirty tricks operatives aren’t the most reliable of sources. We don’t even know why it happened — if the burglars were looking for evidence that the DNC was receiving money from the North Vietnamese or Cuban governments (as conspirator Howard Hunt insisted), or information embarrassing to White House counsel John Dean (as G. Gordon Liddy, who planned the break-in with Hunt, claimed), or, as another popular theory has it, trying to find out how much DNC chair Larry O'Brien knew about Nixon’s financial dealings with billionaire tycoon Howard Hughes. But what we do know, the “smoking gun” that eventually forced Nixon out of office, was that Nixon ordered his chief of staff to get the CIA to force the FBI to abandon its investigation into the break-in. That was enough. Some Republicans had stood by Nixon through his firing of the independent counsel investigating the matter, through multiple aides and Cabinet officials resigning, through the White House’s effort to resist subpoenas for documents and tapes. But when the “smoking gun” White House tape was released on August 5, 1974, Nixon’s remaining support from Republicans evaporated. Two days later, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-PA), House Minority Leader John Jacob Rhodes (R-AZ), and former presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) went to the White House and informed the president that he had no support left in Congress. They were shocked and horrified that Nixon had personally participated in the cover-up; before then there was still a sliver of a chance that the president himself wasn’t part of the conspiracy. They told Nixon that, now that his role in the cover-up was known, the votes were there to impeach him and remove him from office. The day after that, the president announced his resignation. Similarly, there’s a lot we don’t know about Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. We know that the FBI and other agencies have been looking into any contact Trump's campaign advisers Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Roger Stone might have had contact with the Russian government during the election. We know that intelligence agencies suspect those three might have worked the Russian officials to coordinate the release of hacked emails. We know that disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, White House senior adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions all lied about or failed to disclose communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. We don’t know how all these pieces fit together. We don’t know exactly what Donald Trump Sr.’s direct involvement is, or how aware he was of his advisers’ efforts, or the nature of his business relationship with Russia. That’s provoked a lot of very valuable investigative journalism, as well as a lot of outright conspiracy theorizing. But focusing too granularly on the details of Trump’s personal involvement risks setting the bar too low for him. It risks suggesting that unless we find undeniable proof of collusion between Trump and the Russian government, he’s in the clear. The fact of the matter is that without any more information than we already have, we already know Trump’s conduct is at lest as outrageous as what Nixon acknowledged in the smoking gun tape. In Nixon’s case, what crossed the line, moving top leaders from his own party to go to the White House and tell Nixon that his presidency was over, was Nixon’s attempt to hamper the FBI’s investigation into Watergate. And we now know that before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, he asked Comey to stop investigating former National Security Adviser Flynn. This is exactly the same kind of FBI investigation interference that forced Nixon out of the White House and shocked his Republican allies out of defending him. As of this writing, Trump’s Republican allies in Congress are standing by him and not demanding a independent prosecutor, let alone impeachment. But this is not a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” situation. We don’t need to know much more to know that the president has committed conduct that was once thought sufficient to warrant removal from office. The Comey firing isn’t smoke. It’s fire. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
