Now about these tweets…

Jul 26th, 2018 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Mueller has reached the tweets phase of the investigation.

For years, President Trump has used Twitter as his go-to public relations weapon, mounting a barrage of attacks on celebrities and then political rivals even after advisers warned he could be creating legal problems for himself.

Those concerns now turn out to be well founded. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is scrutinizing tweets and negative statements from the president about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to three people briefed on the matter.

Goes to intent, m’lud.

Several of the remarks came as Mr. Trump was also privately pressuring the men — both key witnesses in the inquiry — about the investigation, and Mr. Mueller is examining whether the actions add up to attempts to obstruct the investigation by both intimidating witnesses and pressuring senior law enforcement officials to tamp down the inquiry.

Now how could tweets sent out by the president of the United States himself possibly intimidate anyone?

Mr. Mueller wants to question the president about the tweets. His interest in them is the latest addition to a range of presidential actions he is investigating as a possible obstruction case: private interactions with Mr. Comey, Mr. Sessions and other senior administration officials about the Russia inquiry; misleading White House statements; public attacks; and possible pardon offers to potential witnesses.

In other words all that stuff we’ve been seeing for the past year and a half that looks like obstruction is in fact going to be investigated for obstruction. Fancy that.

The special counsel’s investigators have told Mr. Trump’s lawyers they are examining the tweets under a wide-ranging obstruction-of-justice law beefed up after the Enron accounting scandal, according to the three people. The investigators did not explicitly say they were examining possible witness tampering, but the nature of the questions they want to ask the president, and the fact that they are scrutinizing his actions under a section of the United States Code titled “Tampering With a Witness, Victim, or an Informant,” raised concerns for his lawyers about Mr. Trump’s exposure in the investigation.

The exposure that he created for himself by not ever shutting up for one second.

Giuliani scornfully brushed it off.

“If you’re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public,” Mr. Giuliani said.

If you’re a normal rational functioning person. Trump is not that.

Investigators want to ask Mr. Trump about the tweets he wrote about Mr. Sessions and Mr. Comey and why he has continued to publicly criticize Mr. Comey and the former deputy F.B.I. director Andrew G. McCabe, another witness against the president.

What can he say? “Because I’m an out of control rage-addled narcissistic goon who can’t stop himself?”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have pushed back against the special counsel about the tweets, saying the president is a politician under 24-hour attack and is within his rights to defend himself using social media or any other means.

That seems like a silly way to push back. No doubt in general he is “within his rights to defend himself” in legitimate ways, but that doesn’t mean he gets to obstruct justice.

It would be quite satisfying if his Twitter habit helped bring him down.

8 Responses to “Now about these tweets…”