The whistleblower complaint over Donald Trump’s call to the Ukrainian president, and the unfolding scheme in which Trump not only asked Ukraine to manufacture dirt about Joe Biden, but launched William Barr onto a round-the-world quest to find support for a variety of conspiracy theories, comprise a scandal that started huge and is still growing. At first that scandal seemed to be distinct from the actions that led to the earlier Russia investigation. For many, including many members of Congress, that wasn’t just an issue—it was a feature. After all, “Donald Trump asked a foreign government to ‘do me a favor’ by interfering in the 2020 election” is plenty on which to base a demand for impeachment, and doesn’t require nearly the amount of explanation as the events chronicled in the Mueller report.
But there are not two Trump scandals. Or two hundred. There’s just one ongoing scheme in which Trump believes he can ignore laws, attack opponents, and cover up his actions without ever suffering the consequences. So it seems almost inevitable that the Ukraine issue would peel back even more actions that Trump took to cover up the Russia phase of the scandal.
On Monday, staff attorneys for the House of Representatives filed a new request for access to grand jury materials related to the special counsel investigation into the Trump campaign. What’s striking about this request is that it states that the lawyers have reason to believe that some of the material redacted from that report shows that Donald Trump directly lied about contacts between his campaign and WikiLeaks. As the letter states, hiding the information would not just demonstrate another instance of Trump lying to investigators and attempting to obstruct the investigation; it would speak directly to motive.
Trump and Trump surrogates have repeatedly hammered the idea that Trump could not have committed obstruction because there was “no underlying crime.” That’s not true. It’s absolutely possible to be guilty of obstruction even if prosecutors are unable to gather enough information to charge someone with a crime. In fact, making it impossible for prosecutors to lodge charges is the very definition of a successful obstruction. It’s the whole purpose of obstruction.
As the House letter says in this case, “Not only could those materials demonstrate the president’s motives for obstructing the special counsel’s investigation, they also could reveal that Trump was aware of his campaign’s contacts with WikiLeaks.” Which would make Trump’s own written responses to the investigation a crime.
Politico notes that it’s received a note from Trump attorney Jay Sekulow calling the accusations in the letter absurd. But in a week in which fresh Trump scandals seem to be falling like rain, the idea that there could still be bombshells lurking in the Mueller report seems extremely believable.
The core allegation here also suggests that Donald Trump was aware that his campaign was cooperating with WikiLeaks to distribute information stolen by Russian agents, and that William Barr acted directly to cover up that knowledge in order to protect the public from seeing evidence of Trump’s crime.
All of which is starting to sound very much like a repeating pattern.