The entire thing is worth reading. It’s chock-a-block with news — like that Trump reportedly asked acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to install an ally to oversee the Southern District of New York investigation into Michael Cohen!! — and insights into the world (and White House) of Donald Trump.
But amid all those words, one sentence in the piece stood out to me as deeply important when it comes to thinking about Trump, the investigation and what special counsel Robert Mueller knows.
Here’s the sentence:
“The episode was among the first of multiple ham-handed efforts by the president to carry out a dual strategy: publicly casting the Russia story as an overblown hoax and privately trying to contain the investigation’s reach.”
The “episode” specifically referred to in the quote is Trump, in the midst of a meeting on how to handle the departure of national security adviser Michael Flynn, latching onto a rumor that then-Speaker Paul Ryan had said that the President had fired Flynn. No one in the meeting knew the real story and, as the Times piece makes clear, Trump didn’t shed any light on it or really seem to care what the truth was. He quickly convinced himself that the idea of him firing Flynn would put any concerns about undue Russian influence on his 2016 campaign behind him. So he instructed then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer to go sell that line to the press.
(We previously knew that Trump was convinced that firing Flynn — or telling people that he fired Flynn — would end questions about Russia, because he told former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie that very thing at lunch the day after Flynn left. And then Christie wrote about that conversation in a recently published book.)
The reason that sentence above is so important is because it reveals the conundrum at the center of Trump’s ongoing response to the various investigations into his campaign and White House: Why, if he is totally innocent — as he has declared many, many times — is he working so damn hard over such a long time to influence, obfuscate and seemingly obstruct federal investigations?
NYT: Trump asked Whitaker if he could put prosecutor in charge of Cohen probeWhy try to pressure Whitaker into putting a Trump ally in charge of the Southern District of New York investigation into hush money payments made by Cohen to two women alleging affairs with the President in the mid-2000s, as the Times report says Trump did?
Why have one of your lawyers reach out to Flynn and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort in the summer of 2017 “to discuss possible pardons,” as the Times reports?
Why lean on administration officials — including deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — to turn over sensitive materials regarding the origins of Mueller’s Russian interference probe to Trump’s conservative allies in Congress, as the Times reports Trump did?
And on and on it goes. Trump’s actions are not seemingly those of someone who is fully convinced of his innocence or unworried about what these investigations might find.
