Can’t stand heat? Then stay away from the roasted orange.
Personal bodyguard and informal gatekeeper Schiller was the bagman for the letter firing Comey, and probably doesn’t want to get caught up having to testify about the details of Lord Dampnut’s more personal moments aside from the now more certain obstruction of justice by Trump.
The reality could simply be that he discovered that Hope Hicks makes a fatter paycheck.
Today there’s tactical spin and counter-spin over letter drafts which go to Trump’s intent to obstruct justice in the firing of James Comey,
This was a response to the claims made by Trump’s lawyers that the whole affair needs to go away because they have a lawyer who’s traded on his nominal relationship to a famous baseball player. Nice try boys, but Mueller seems to have the trump cards.
And some GOP senators are currently fronting a weak yet ironic meme about Comey being pro-Clinton, because of some “exoneration” drafted by Comey, (with) emphasis on responding to the Mueller possession of a “draft”. Kabuki.
And like a fair-use troll, Trump tries to disguise his hate with a deflection. Lord Dampnut replies... Wow
Mueller in response, lets the BS smolder in its flaming paper bag, reveals nothing.
Legal experts agree the president can fire the FBI director at will. That doesn’t mean Mr. Trump could act with impunity if his intention was to interfere with the FBI’s Russia investigation, some said.
[...]
As his lawyers make their arguments to Mr. Mueller, Mr. Trump has used his Twitter feed for what people familiar with the matter describe as an effort to persuade Americans that the investigation is unfair, and to minimize any political fallout in the 2018 midterm elections or his own re-election campaign two years later.
Because reasons...
Mr. Trump has given conflicting reasons as to why he dismissed Mr. Comey.
- At first, he said it was in response to advice from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had concluded in a memo for the president that Mr. Comey was an ineffective leader.
- Two days after the firing, Mr. Trump told NBC News that the decision to fire Mr. Comey was his alone and that when he did it, “I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”
The obstruction-related memo advanced other arguments beyond the matter of the president’s executive powers, citing case law that the lawyers believed buttressed the contention that Mr. Trump had not obstructed justice.
www.wsj.com/...
First, simply because Trump has the power to do something doesn’t mean he can do so with corrupt intent. That is the essence of bribery and other corruption statutes. Trump has the power to veto a bill, but not if it is a quid pro quo for a bribe. Jed Shugerman of Fordham law school explains, “Even if the president has the power to do something, he can’t exercise that power for an illegal purpose. A president can order a military strike, but if his intent was to kill a person who slept with his wife, he is guilty of murder.” He continues, “And if he fires someone in order to impede a valid investigation into his own campaign, which Trump has essentially confessed on national TV, he is guilty of obstruction of justice. If they were debating only that basic point with Mueller, then their client is in serious trouble.”
Second, firing Comey isn’t the half of it. Trump first tried to shut down the prosecution by asking Comey directly, then by imploring his director of national intelligence Dan Coats and his NSA director Mike Rogers to intervene. When that did not work he not only fired Comey but concocted a phony cover story, sent his vice president out to misrepresent the reason for the firing, tried to intimidate Comey when he hinted at the existence of White House tapes and then retaliated against him with his attempt to call off prosecution.
www.washingtonpost.com/...