January 25, 2018
Trump wanted Mueller fired back in June, reports say
President Trump gave the order to fire the man leading the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but he backed down after the top White House counsel told him the firing would decimate public confidence in the presidency, the New York Times and Washington Post reported Thursday.
The revelation is the first hint that Trump, hounded by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's probe into the Russian fiasco, took steps to have Mueller removed. Such a firing would have set the Russia probe back months, and possibly could have silenced it altogether.
Reaction has already been vitriolic, particularly among Democrats. U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called for a bipartisan rebuke of the president's actions.
“I’ve said it before, and I am saying it again: Firing the Special Counsel is a red line that the President cannot cross," Warner said in a statement Thursday night. "Any attempt to remove the Special Counsel, pardon key witnesses, or otherwise interfere in the investigation, would be a gross abuse of power, and all members of Congress, from both parties, have a responsibility to our Constitution and to our country to make that clear immediately.”
Trump gave the order for the firing in June, the Times reported. Mueller learned about the episode in recent months as his investigators interviewed current and former senior White House officials in his inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice, the Times reported, citing unnamed officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
According to the Times:
— Amid the first wave of news media reports that Mueller was examining a possible obstruction case, the president began to argue that Mueller had three conflicts of interest that disqualified him from overseeing the investigation, two unnamed sources said.
— First, he claimed that a dispute years ago over fees at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., had prompted Mueller, the F.B.I. director at the time, to resign his membership. The president also said Mueller could not be impartial because he had most recently worked for the law firm that previously represented the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Finally, the president said, Mueller had been interviewed to return as the F.B.I. director the day before he was appointed special counsel in May.
— After receiving the president’s order to fire Mueller, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.
— McGahn disagreed with the president’s case and told senior White House officials that firing Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Trump’s presidency. McGahn also told White House officials that Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own. The president then backed off.
McGahn did not deliver his resignation threat directly to Trump, but was serious about his threat to leave, according to a person familiar with the episode, the Washington Post reported.
Trump was initially calm when Mueller was appointed, surprising White House aides, the Post reported, citing a senior administration official.
But in the weeks that followed, the president spoke with a number of friends and advisers who convinced him that Mueller would dig through his private finances and look beyond questions of collusion with Russians, according to the Post. The advisors warned that the probe could last years and would ruin his first term in office.
Mueller is spearheading the probe into whether Trump obstructed federal investigators during the Russia inquiry.
Congressional investigators are heading into 2018 with no immediate end in sight to their probes into Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
Mueller's inquiry appears to be gaining steam. It has also produced guilty pleas and pledges of cooperation from ex-campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI.
White House special counsel Ty Cobb has expressed optimism that Mueller's investigation is winding down, indicating earlier this month that all interviews that investigators requested of White House staffers have been completed.
Yet some analysts cautioned that there are no obvious signs of a finish line in sight.
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'Trump tax': MSNBC host Chris Hayes shows how Trump winning would increase costs
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'Some prosecutor should be looking into' Trump's latest legal defense scam: expert
Mar 28, 2024
Former President Donald Trump's sprawling network of ostensibly independent political groups raising money for him, much of it in service of paying legal expenses, seems to walk right up to the line of breaking the law, former prosecutor Kristy Greenberg told MSNBC's Alex Wagner — and may in fact cross it."Kristy, how is this legal?" asked Wagner. "How can he keep saying this one thing and doing another?""Well, I think the big question here will be looking behind all of this as to who is coordinating it," said Greenberg. "If Donald Trump is coordinating between his campaign and these PACs that are supposed to be third parties and independent — the Save America PAC is independent, even though he directs it, independent third-party — if there is sufficient coordination, you could prove that, then maybe you would have something to say these expenditures are not purely personal, these are really campaign contributions. And therefore they should be subject to the limits of $5,000 that campaign contributions are subject to."ALSO READ: ‘Don't have enough’: Wealthy Trump allies balk at helping Donald pay legal billsWhat it looks like, Greenberg went on, is that Trump and his allies are "just trying to do an end-run around these various regulations, and it seems so transparent.""[Special counsel] Jack Smith ... had served some subpoenas in connection with that nonexistent, as it turns out, election defense fund," Greenberg said. "He served some subpoenas and then he withdrew them and it was unclear why, because that seemed like such a clear-cut fraud. I questioned why that happened. Perhaps it was optics. Perhaps he thought like he had such strong cases, the January 6 case and the national security case, that he didn't want to seem as though he was trying to drain Trump of the ability to legally defend against those cases. Hard to say. But I questioned it at that time because that seemed like such a clear wire fraud case that it seemed like it should be looked into, but maybe they just had limited resources and didn't like the optics of it.""But I agree with you, this raises a lot of questions," she added. "Someone, somewhere, even if not the special counsel's office, because they are pretty busy — some prosecutors should be looking into this."Watch the video below or at the link. Kristy Greenberg on the legality of Trump's PACs www.youtube.com
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