It’s clear that special counsel Robert Mueller has been carefully constructing an obstruction case against Donald Trump. Much of the attention around that case has focused on Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey and the cascade of items that surround it: Trump’s efforts to get a personal oath of loyalty from Comey, attempts to get Comey to end the Russia investigation, Trump’s original rant-filled dismissal letter, the meeting at which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was ordered to create a cover story, and Trump’s on-air brag that he’d fired Comey because he wouldn’t drop the Russia investigation.
But Republicans have already previewed their plans to dismiss all of these issues: Trump is allowed to fire anyone he wants, at any time he wants, for any reason—or no reason. So what does it matter that he fired Comey, or why he fired Comey? Sure, there may be a tradition that the president keeps hands-off from the DOJ and FBI, but that’s a tradition, not a law. The line between the DOJ and the White House was made explicitly to keep the legal apparatus from becoming a personal instrument of vengeance, but …. Republicans are ready to shrug that off. Sure, they’ll admit Trump may have broken precedent, it may seem distasteful, it may even be a threat to the legal process, but there’s nothing that says he can’t lay waste to the Justice Department on a whim.
But there’s another point of obvious obstruction that’s just a little harder to defend.
Aboard Air Force One on a flight home from Europe last July, President Trump and his advisers raced to cobble together a news release about a mysterious meeting at Trump Tower the previous summer between Russians and top Trump campaign officials. Rather than acknowledge the meeting’s intended purpose — to obtain political dirt about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government — the statement instead described the meeting as being about an obscure Russian adoption policy.
Creating a lie in order to explicitly provide cover for a direct example of collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government … doesn’t have a handy get-out-of-obstruction-free excuse.
But as the New York Times reports, it does have a spokesperson.
In the plane’s front cabin, Mr. Trump huddled with Ms. Hicks. During the meeting, according to people familiar with the episode, Ms. Hicks was sending frequent text messages to Donald Trump Jr., who was in New York.
Hope Hicks is the White House communications director. That may seem odd, considering how rarely Hicks appears to … communicate. Previous holders of that title in the Trump administration—Anthony Scaramucci and Sean Spicer—might have been inveterate liars, but they were also visible to the human eye.
From the outside at least, Hicks’ role appears to be less shaping the White House message and more acting as Donald Trump’s phone and email filter. But that role has made it hard for Hicks to claim ignorance of some pretty tricky conversations.
[Former spokesman of Trump’s legal team Mark Corallo] is planning to tell Mr. Mueller about a previously undisclosed conference call with Mr. Trump and Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, according to the three people. Mr. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Ms. Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr. before the Trump Tower meeting — in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians — “will never get out.” That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms. Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.
Hicks attorney is prepared to say that Hicks never said what Trump’s attorney heard her say.
And it’s not as if Corallo’s hands are squeaky clean from conspiracy. On the day that news broke about the Trump Tower meeting, he was on hand to suggest the whole thing was, of course, Democrats’ fault.
He suggested that the meeting might have been set up by Democratic operatives, connecting one of the Russians in the meeting, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, to the research firm that helped produce an unverified dossier that contained salacious allegations about Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia.
Veselnitskaya demonstrated her apolitical lawyer skills just this week as she brought her concern for Russian orphans to Switzerland.
One of Switzerland’s top investigators has been fired after allegations of bribery, violating secrecy laws, and “unauthorized clandestine behavior” in meeting with the very same Russian actors linked to the Trump Tower encounter.
Hicks helped craft one false cover story. Corallo broadcast another. And the Trump White House ended up in the position of pushing two conflicting lies.
Which is one of the problems with lies—they’re so much harder to handle than the truth.
The real story: Trump’s senior campaign staff eagerly met with Russian government operatives who promised “dirt” about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian effort to help Trump. At the time, Trump’s team already had advance knowledge that Russia had hacked into the DNC and were aware that Russia was in possession of stolen emails. And while the results of that meeting are still unknown, within weeks Trump was happily shouting “I love WikiLeaks!” But that’s not the obstruction case … that’s the conspiracy case.
That Mueller would want to talk to both Hicks and Corallo seems more than reasonable. That they are busy pointing fingers at each other … is just a nice bonus.