This is from reporter Murray Waas, and it is a frickin’ bombshell:
Previously undisclosed evidence in the possession of Special Counsel Robert Mueller—including highly confidential White House records and testimony by some of President Trump’s own top aides—provides some of the strongest evidence to date implicating the president of the United States in an obstruction of justice. Several people who have reviewed a portion of this evidence say that, based on what they know, they believe it is now all but inevitable that the special counsel will complete a confidential report presenting evidence that President Trump violated the law.
You may remember that on Feb. 14, 2017, Trump asked then-FBI director James Comey to let former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn off the hook. Flynn ultimately pled guilty to lying to the FBI, and is cooperating with the Mueller investigation into Trump and Russia. Comey has stated under oath that Trump said: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”
Back to Waas:
I have learned that a confidential White House memorandum, which is in the special counsel’s possession, explicitly states that when Trump pressured Comey he had just been told by two of his top aides—his then chief of staff Reince Priebus and his White House counsel Don McGahn—that Flynn was under criminal investigation.
[snip] In arguing in their January 29 letter that Trump did not obstruct justice, the president’s attorneys Dowd and Sekulow quoted selectively from this same memo, relying only on a few small portions of it. They also asserted that even if Trump knew there had been an FBI investigation of Flynn, Trump believed that Flynn had been cleared. Full review of the memo flatly contradicts this story.
There’s far more detail in the article. Waas explains the memo’s acknowledgment that Trump knew Flynn was still in the investigative crosshairs of the FBI, and thus that his ‘request’ to Comey likely represented obstruction of justice. This is backed up by Reince Preibus’s own notes, which he wrote just after he talked to Trump about it, as well as by what McGahn told his subordinates. Waas has seen all this material with his own eyes. He also states that other sources of his have told him that both Preibus and McGahn “confirmed in separate interviews” with Mueller’s team that they informed Mr. Popular Vote Loser that Flynn was being investigated by the FBI prior to the February 14, 2017 conversation with Comey.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).