President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election.
Public pressure was building for Mr. Sessions, who had been a senior member of the Trump campaign, to step aside. But the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.
Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him.
Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama. Mr. Trump then asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986.
Smelling more and more like obstructionism all of the time, don't you think?
The president is absolutely NOT supposed to interfere in an investigation, especially one directed at himself.
And yet here we have Trump trying to force Sessions to stay in control of the Russia probe, and then firing James Comey for continuing forward with the FBI investigation.
The reason that Trump feared an expanded investigation into his dealings with Russia is becoming increasingly clear.
Courtesy of CNN:
The Trump Organization has provided documents on a range of events, conversations and meetings from President Donald Trump's real estate business to investigators probing Russian election meddling, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The bulk of the information is focused on the period between June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy, and his January 2017 inauguration.
The information provided in 2017 to special counsel Robert Mueller's team and congressional investigators so far involves the activities of the company's executives as well as meetings and events, including emails and calendar entries, mostly connected to campaign-related matters, according to two of the sources.
The Trump Organization produced records that include information related to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, the billionaire Agalarov family of Russia, head of the US-based Russian American Chamber of Commerce Sergei Millian, a paid speech Donald Trump Jr. gave in October 2016 to a Russia-friendly policy think tank in Paris, Trump's foreign policy address in April 2016 at Washington's Mayflower Hotel and communications regarding WikiLeaks, two of the sources said.
Yeah, I BET he wanted Jeff Sessions to maintain control over all of this.
Source http://ift.tt/2CEtPSj
