'Nunes Memo': Trump Scrambles to Torch Threats

By Tom McCarthy and David Smith, Guardian UK

03 February 18

By seeking to discredit investigators, Trump may only deepen his predicament – ensnaring his family members and closest aides

uddled with his twentysomething communications director on Air Force One somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, Donald Trump needed a cover story. The news that the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, had hosted Russian operatives at Trump Tower a year earlier was about to erupt in the headlines.

Within a week, Trump would argue that the meeting, at which the younger Trump hoped to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton, was unremarkable: “most people would have taken that meeting”, he would say. But by then he was in a corner.

Up in the air on the way back from a G20 meeting in Germany, with Hope Hicks, a former model and one of his most trusted aides, Trump still felt he had room to move. He decided to exhale a great Trumpian smokescreen, crafting a statement depicting the meeting as “primarily” about “the adoption of Russian children”.

Whatever private fears or concerns prompted Trump to push that cover story have now probably multiplied, significantly.

As the Trump presidency stumbles into its second year, Robert Mueller, the powerful independent prosecutor investigating the president’s Russia ties, appears startlingly close to concluding a case that could offer damning evidence that Trump or his subordinates committed an obstruction of justice in the Russia affair, former prosecutors and Washington insiders say.

Such a case, which experts advise is probably only one slice of Mueller’s overall inquiry, could represent a hazard not only for Trump but also for his family members and closest aides. Those include Hicks, Trump Jr and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who may soon face a decision akin to the one taken by former national security adviser Michael Flynn to cooperate with prosecutors.

The two impeachment proceedings advanced against presidents in the last century – Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton – both included an obstruction of justice charge. Trump and his family members have denied all wrongdoing, as has Hicks through a lawyer.

While it is unclear whether Trump recognizes the gravity of his situation, the president clearly understands that he is in an increasingly breathless fight. Trump has dispatched loyalists in Congress and the conservative media to attack the investigators as biased partisans compromised from the start.

In one of his most audacious sallies yet, Trump on Friday ignored the public protests of the justice department and the FBI to approve the release of a classified memo drafted under the aegis of the House intelligence chairman, Devin Nunes.

Critics across the political spectrum have branded the so-called Nunes memo, which criticizes the FBI’s conduct of surveillance of former Trump aide Carter Page, as a flagrant attack on the bureau and on the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the Russia investigation.

Asked on Friday whether he still had confidence in Rosenstein, whom he himself appointed, Trump told reporters: “You figure that one out.”

The president is trying “to torch institutions that pose a threat,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog. “I don’t think there’s any gentle way to say that.”

But Andrew Wright, a former White House associate counsel and a professor at Savannah Law School, warned that by seeking to influence or discredit investigators, Trump was only deepening his predicament.

Obstruction of justice in the political sense, where Trump is mired now, it’s like quicksand – you can’t better your own situation by thrashing around. The only thing you can do is be still and wait for someone else to bail you out. The problem for the president is he keeps thrashing around, and he keeps sinking further into the mire and muck.

As the circle of sniping and retaliation becomes more tightly wound, close observers of Washington have warned, the risk grows that something major, finally, will break – whether that means the balance of power in government, or Trump’s backbone of support in Congress and across the country.

“I think it’s clear the president is scrambling,” said Max Bergmann, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress action fund in Washington. “The president is looking at any way to turn off this investigation to protect himself. In some ways it’s a quite natural reaction: if you committed a crime, knew you were guilty and had a prosecutor coming after you and yet you had the ability to mobilise against them, you would.”

But even if Trump manages to win a round in the fight, there appear to be many still to come. Mueller appears to be pursuing other cases with repercussions for the president in parallel with the obstruction of justice case, potentially including investigations of collusion with Russia, money laundering, fraud or making false statements.

“It seems clear that Mueller is coming to the end of the obstruction investigation, but it’s impossible to know where he stands on the collusion investigation and what his timeline would be,” Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor specializing in criminal prosecution issues, said of Mueller.

Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor for more than 20 years, warned that “we can’t read as much into what we hear about from the Mueller investigation as people like to try to do”.

“You can’t really report or even consider an ongoing investigation like it’s a sporting event, and you analyze this play or that play, because it doesn’t work that way,” she said. “There is a great deal that we don’t know.”

An interview request

A direct cause for Trump’s increasingly pugnacious stance appears to be a request by Mueller’s team to interview the president, in a setting with implicit threats for a witness not known to be overly bound by his word.

“He is a defense lawyer’s nightmare, in terms of thinking about putting him in front of Mueller’s team,” said Whiting, “because of his manner of speaking loosely, of making false statements, just making things up.”

Trump’s legal team appears to be resisting the request from Mueller, and to be exploring alternatives to an open-ended, in-person interview, such as submitting answers in writing to a narrow range of questions agreed in advance, Whiting said.

Matthew Miller, a partner at strategic advisory firm Vianovo and former Obama administration justice department spokesman, said the interview negotiation represented a “dangerous, sensitive” moment for Trump.

“Trump would have such a hard time completing that interview without telling a lie, just because he can’t seem to do anything without telling a lie,” said Miller. “He’s got to find a way to get out of the interview, and completely undermining Mueller might be the way to do it: they just throw up their hands and say, ‘Well, we were going interview but look, this thing is clearly biased, you can’t trust it, so I’m not going to it.’”

Hicks in the spotlight

This week, that flight back from Germany aboard Air Force One in July 2017 was once again in the spotlight, putting Hope Hicks under new scrutiny.

Faced with the challenge of explaining a meeting that fed the worst accusations against him, Trump turned to the aide who had been with him since he asked her to join him on a campaign trip to Iowa in January 2015.

But while her staying power in Trump’s inner circle may be unequalled outside of his immediate family, Hicks’s loyalty to the president could at some point come into direct conflict with a need to protect herself.

The New York Times reported this week that Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for Trump’s legal team, intends to tell Mueller about a conference call the day after the Air Force One flight, in which Hicks, now White House communications director, allegedly said emails written by Trump Jr before the notorious Trump Tower meeting “will never get out”.

This raised concerns for Corallo that Hicks could be seeking to obstruct justice, sources told the Times, though Hicks’s lawyer strongly denied the claims. The emails in question were later released by Trump Jr himself in an effort to pre-empt further damaging coverage.

The latest development raises the prospect that the investigation – and Trump’s entire presidency – could turn on a 29-year-old former Ralph Lauren fashion model and public relations consultant.

Hicks joined the Trump Organization in 2014 to help promote his daughter Ivanka Trump’s merchandise. A year later the now president recruited her to his election campaign and she quickly became an indispensable aide and gatekeeper, vetting all media requests for interviews. She has continued in that role at the White House, where she was named director of communications last August.

But for all her PR savvy, Hicks’s status as a political neophyte who took few legal precautions could now be her undoing if Corallo’s allegations stand up to scrutiny. There is speculation that Mueller might seek to “flip” her like George Papadopoulos, a former Trump foreign policy adviser who agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation under the terms of a plea agreement.

That could feel like a desperate betrayal for a young aide who has always shown fierce loyalty to Trump. Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury notes: “Hicks was in fact thought of as Trump’s real daughter, while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife.”