Part One – Trump Muller Interview Being Pondered

President Trump on Wednesday for the first time called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to shut down special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and Trump’s obstruction of the probe. “This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further,” Trump tweeted. Trump continued to fume on Twitter about the probe, reviving his long-held complaints about former FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, as well as the controversial dossier prepared by British spy Christopher Steele. “Russian Collusion with the Trump Campaign, one of the most successful in history, is a TOTAL HOAX,” the president tweeted. “The Democrats paid for the phony and discredited Dossier which was, along with Comey, McCabe, Strzok and his lover, the lovely Lisa Page, used to begin the Witch Hunt. Disgraceful!”

Reportedly what set Trump off on his tweet-storm against Mueller was a letter from special counsel he did want to ask the prez questions during testimony about obstruction, despite a previous request coming from Rudy that obstruction questions should remain off the table.  With Trump’s legal minds balking at such questions, Mueller replied with another request that a possible interview be confined to roughly half the original obstruction questions.  So these negotiations on a Trump Mueller interview are being bantered about.  Word is in the next week, Trump & Rudy will decide whether to submit to an interview, with the threat if they don’t agree of a subpoena hanging over their heads.  

For a look at how Special Counsel Robert Mueller could tie Russian election interference to American citizens, watch the C-word. Not coordination or collusion, but conspiracy. One charge in particular — conspiracy to defraud the U.S. — has cropped up in several of the Mueller team’s major cases. The allegation shows up in filings against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, as well as in indictments of Russian nationals accused earlier this month of hacking into Democratic Party organizations and election infrastructure. Conspiracy charges are significant because they’re building blocks: Once prosecutors allege a conspiracy, they can add more individuals later.

Donald Trump and his circle have long focused on a different buzzword, saying that there was no collusion with Russians, and subsequently that if there was collusion, Trump wasn’t aware of it. Now comes Trump attorney-cum-spokesman Rudy Giuliani. ”I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Giuliani told CNN this week. Trump echoed that in a tweet: “Collusion is not a crime.” That is at once technically correct and, according to former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah, beside the point.

“To say there’s no crime of collusion means nothing,” said Rocah. “That label isn’t in the criminal statutes. But that doesn’t matter because the conduct that underlies collusion can be, under certain circumstances, conspiracy to defraud the U.S.” The statute — Title 18 U.S. Code 371 — makes it a crime for two or more people to “conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.” The maximum penalty is five years. It’s among a list of similar charges that Mueller’s prosecutors have brought in their investigation, including conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to obstruct justice, which can lead to longer sentences.

Chuck Rosenberg, a former FBI chief of staff under former Director James Comey, on Monday said collusion is “absolutely a crime,” a day after President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said it was not a crime. “Collusion is a crime,” Rosenberg said on MSNBC’s “MTP Daily.” “We just happen to call it something else, we call it conspiracy, but it is absolutely a crime.” “You probably won’t find the crime bank heist in the criminal code but bank robbery is a crime too, and so I am sort of perplexed that it has come down to synonyms,” said Rosenberg, who once headed the Drug Enforcement Administration. “If these folks don’t know that collusion and conspiracy are synonyms for one another and this is a legal strategy, then they might want to consider changing horses in this race,” Rosenberg added.

In several interviews on Monday, Giuliani asserted that collusion is not a crime. “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime,” Giuliani said on “Fox & Friends.” “Collusion is not a crime.” In a later interview on CNN, Giuliani again said that collusion was not a crime. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Giuliani told CNN. “You start analyzing the crime — the hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay them for hacking.” Trump himself on Tuesday tweeted that collusion was not a crime, adding that it didn’t matter any way because there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia, which intelligence agencies have concluded meddled in the 2016 election. “Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

In the days after the 2016 presidential election, Donald J. Trump’s advisers had an unequivocal message about contacts between Russians and members of the campaign team: There were none. In the ensuing months, as numerous such communications were revealed, the message changed: There was no collusion with Russia’s effort to disrupt the election. On Monday, President Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani consistently presented a third line of defense: Even if Mr. Trump did collude with the Russians, he committed no crime. Mr. Giuliani insisted during numerous television interviews that no evidence of collusion existed, but the evolving narrative is a sign of how much Mr. Trump and his aides have had to recalibrate their public message in the face of considerable evidence of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign, and with the special counsel investigating what — if anything — Mr. Trump knew about them.

But some experts said the difference between “collusion” and “conspiracy” is semantic. “It’s just a word choice,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a criminal law professor at Georgetown University. “I’m sure nobody in the Justice Department has ever investigated collusion, but they’ve certainly investigated conspiracy. “And Rudy,” she said of Mr. Trump’s lawyer, a former associate attorney general and United States attorney in Manhattan, “knows better.” The question of what Mr. Trump knew of the Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election has come up most recently after reports that Michael D. Cohen, his former lawyer, was willing to tell the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that Mr. Trump knew in advance of a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that was set up for campaign officials to get dirt about Hillary Clinton from Russians. It is not clear whether Mr. Cohen has firsthand knowledge of what or when Mr. Trump was told about the meeting.

As the whole world knows, CNN reported last Thursday that Michael Cohen was prepared to testify that Donald Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Russian emissaries supposedly bearing dirt on Hillary Clinton. And ever since then, the atmosphere around the Russia scandal has changed. If there is any real evidence that Trump knew about that meeting and approved it, it goes a long way toward proving one element of a criminal conspiracy that includes the president of the United States and confirms many other suspicions surrounding that event. Rudy Giuliani appeared on “Fox & Friends” and then on CNN, in response to the Cohen allegations. Then he had to call in to both networks by phone later, to try to explain what in the world he had said in his earlier appearances. In the course of all this, Giuliani suggested that Cohen had doctored the tape in which Cohen and Trump discuss paying for Karen McDougal’s silence — and then went on a tear explaining that collusion is not a crime, as if he had suddenly decided to abandon Trump’s tiresome mantra of “no collusion!” That last bit seems to be a crafted talking point, since Trump defenders, including Chris Christie, had gone on the Sunday talk shows to make that argument.

Nobody has ever claimed that “collusion” is the technical legal term for what Trump and his minions are suspected of doing. It’s simply a description of their behavior. The legal term is “criminal conspiracy.” I would guess that Trump’s team has now ensured that the media will use that latter term from now on, which may not be the outcome they were looking for. Giuliani claimed that the crime was the hacking of Democratic Party emails, which Trump didn’t personally do and didn’t pay for, which seems like an awfully specific  denial. But all that craziness was only the half of it. Giuliani spoke at length about Cohen’s supposed accusation that Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting. That’s when it emerged that there were rumors about another meeting on June 7, 2016, two days before the one with the Russian emissaries. Giuliani characterized that earlier gathering as some sort of pre-strategy meeting that included Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Deputy Campaign Manager Rick Gates and one other person he couldn’t remember.

Giuliani later called in to both Fox and CNN to “clarify” what he was trying to say. The upshot (I think) is that Giuliani believes Cohen will say that he was in the room with Donald Trump when Don Jr. popped his head in to tell his father about the upcoming meeting with the Russians. Giuliani says this never happened and Cohen is a liar. Then he said that the press had also inquired about this earlier meeting on June 7, which he indicated was being shopped around by Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis even though Cohen wasn’t reported to have been present. Giuliani said the press wasn’t going to publish anything on this supposed meeting because it couldn’t be corroborated. This is, of course, ludicrous. Giuliani would not have brought this up if he didn’t believe it was going to come out. At one point he even admitted that he was trying to get ahead of the story. He did it clumsily, but the significance of this alleged earlier meeting is clear enough. June 7, 2016, was the day when Donald Trump won the California primary and said this in his victory speech: I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting. I wonder if the press will want to attend, who knows?

Anyone who’s been following this story has known that the odds of Trump not knowing about this meeting with visiting Russians were nil. If there is now some corroboration of a “pre-strategy” meeting to discuss this matter, and that later that night Trump went out and telegraphed that he knew about it, it only adds to the suspicions. Moreover, if that meeting happened with the people Giuliani named, there is almost certainly corroboration: Manafort’s former deputy, Rick Gates, is cooperating with Robert Mueller. Whether Gates can say for sure that Trump was told about the Russian meeting is unknown. But something has Giuliani and Trump jumping out of their skin. Giuliani says that Cohen’s team has been shopping this June 7 meeting to the press. But former Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman has another theory. He believes that Manafort’s lawyers have now seen Gates’ testimony and have given the Trump team a heads-up: If, as Goldman suspects, they’re now privy to everything Gates has told Mueller, it would certainly explain the sense of barely contained panic we’ve seen these past few days. Remember, Gates remained part of the Trump team well into 2017.

A bit more than a week before the election of 2016 — a week before Trump won the election — one of the few people on earth who’s really and truly studied Donald Trump up close and personal, Tony Schwartz, granted an interview to the British newspaper the Independent. Schwartz, who wrote Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” and spent months with Trump to gather information for the book, predicted that Trump would declare martial law.Not as a possibility, but as a near-certainty. Schwartz predicted that Trump would do three specific things, although not necessarily all at once or in any particular order: He’d attack the free press; he’d compile an enemies list and begin getting revenge on those he thinks slighted him; and he’d declare martial law to solidify his power. “When I said that,” Schwartz told the Independent, “I got a lot of rolling of the eyes from people in the media and other people to whom I was making that case. I think today, people do really begin to understand that this is a volatile man with very low self control.”

For example, imagine that Trump, his family members, and numerous Republicans are indicted for actual crimes, and, particularly with the Nunes faction of Congress, for conspiring to conceal or obstruct investigations of those crimes.And the indictment comes right after the election in November when Democrats have won control of one or both houses of Congress, but Republicans are still in charge until January. This combination would present Trump and his GOP with both a problem and an opportunity. The problem, of course, is that Trump, Jared, Don Jr., and the Republicans who’ve conspired with Trump like Devin Nunes (for example) might all be heading toward jail, and possibly even impeachment after the first week of the New Year. The opportunity is to create a constitutional crisis and grab even more power and immunity for themselves, possibly even “temporarily suspending” the 2020 presidential elections.

Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, and early in the Trump presidency, it was nearly impossible to imagine the things that he would later do and get away with. That failure of imagination has cost us dearly. While the time for freak-out is hopefully far in the future, imagining and gaming out our response to some of the worst-case and most extreme possibilities is not at all a hysterical reaction. If anything, it’s the essence of prudence. What do you think he could do? And how should we best react? An entire generation of Germans, Italians, and Spaniards are aging into their twilight years right now wishing they’d had such imagination in the early 1930s. It’s time for a conversation.

A former Trump Organization executive said late Monday that it is “impossible” President Trump would not have known about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and a Russian lawyer offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton. “Impossible, in my opinion, based on my experience working with Trump and everybody that worked with Trump,” Barbara Res said on “Anderson Cooper 360” when asked if it was plausible that Donald Trump Jr. would not tell his father about a message he received regarding the Kremlin’s support for his presidential campaign. “Something major, something newsworthy, something press-worthy would always go before Trump.” Res, who was in charge of construction at Trump Tower and left the Trump Organization in the 1990s, added that Trump always wanted to be “on top of things.” Her comments came just days after CNN reported that the president’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, claims Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting in 2016 ahead of time. 

For months, I have been suggesting that cable news networks stop giving air time to Rudolph W. Giuliani, who often makes patently false statements, doesn’t appear to be doing any real lawyering for President Trump and intentionally misstates the law (unless he’s forgotten everything he learned as a prosecutor, in which case he is unfit to represent the president). Now, Trump and his real lawyers might agree that Giuliani should go away. The problem with (Rudy’s) approach is three-fold. First, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the Justice Department could reverse course and decide that the president is indictable, or file a sealed indictment to be opened when he leaves office. Second, Trump’s children and close relatives are facing their own potential liability for soliciting something of value from the Russians, and possibly lying about their activities. If Trump tries pardoning them, the impeachment train will leave the station. And finally, it just might be that when Mueller finishes his report and Trump has driven the GOP into the ground (with huge losses in the midterms), Republicans do start insisting he go. If Trump lied about collusion and, in fact, approved collaboration with Russia, at the very least, reelection becomes an uphill climb. In short, Giuliani is a font of lies, misstatements and calamitous omissions. What’s not clear is whether, aside from making himself look exceptionally inept, what he says matters. If it doesn’t matter and isn’t true, then why is he constantly on TV?

This latest revelation, modest though it may seem in the grand scheme of things, may be yet more evidence that Russia continues to work to infiltrate and manipulate the 2018 election. In addition to using Facebook to exacerbate social divisions, it has allegedly targeted Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and probably other politicians and candidates as well. While we don’t yet know if Russian operatives have targeted state voting systems for infiltration in the same way they did in 2016, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats recently said “the warning lights are blinking red” on all kinds of cyber-attacks aimed at our country. And as NBC reported last week, “there is no coherent Trump administration strategy to combat foreign election interference — and no single person or agency in charge.”

While it might be unfair to say that the Trump administration wants Russia to interfere in the 2018 elections, it isn’t too much of a stretch to say that the president himself isn’t too concerned about it. You’ll notice that whenever he grudgingly reads a prepared statement saying that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, he immediately raises doubts by saying something like “Could be other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.” Whenever he does this, he sends a clear message to Vladimir Putin: I have to say I’m unhappy about this, but you just go right ahead and keep doing what you’re doing. The great thing about platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is that they can be used to manipulate our elections at almost no cost and with only minimal effort. Hacking into state election systems is harder, but far from impossible. Which is why, unless our government imposes some real costs, there’s no reason to think Russia is going to stop trying. Last week, Trump tweeted that “I’m very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election. Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don’t want Trump!” It was surely greeted with laughter over at the Kremlin — and a signal to continue their work.