James Comey’s book and the Meuller inquiry ensure the Donald Trump sideshows keep rolling
FORMER FBI chief James Comey’s book and the Mueller investigation are driving President Trump into fits of anxiety and fierce anger, writes Dennis Atkins.
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AN OTHERWISE mundane court case in the Federal Courthouse in Manhattan was special because of its characters, who lined up like the cast of David Simon’s 2017 HBO series The Deuce.
Everyone had a backstory, from a judge who was a former Playboy bunny and the subject of a Wall Street money man’s steamy memoir, to fabled lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who once ran an NYC Yellow Cab medallion (licence) racket, and adult film industry celebrity Stormy Daniels, who is making a career out of her alleged 2006 dalliance with Donald Trump.
We shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, yet another sideshow to the presidency of Donald J. Trump, now into his 15th month in the White House.
Every day of every one of those months has a twist or turn that’s been, more often than not, unexpected or shocking. This past week has been no exception, beginning as it did with that court case in New York.
Cohen, who’s described as Trump’s personal lawyer, is more his fixer or consigliere (Cohen once likened himself to Robert Duvall’s character, Tom Hagen, in The Godfather – the best-known consigliere).
The court case was a futile bid to freeze the seizure of material from Cohen’s office, home and hotel room by the FBI on a warrant obtained by the New York South District Attorney’s Office earlier this month. This move, supported by Trump’s new lawyer, has failed so far, although the matters are still under consideration.
Louisiana-born Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims she had an affair with Trump in 2006 after they met at a Lake Tahoe charity golf tournament. According to Clifford, Cohen negotiated a $US130,000 ($A169,000) hush-money deal that had a strict nondisclosure clause. She’s now challenging that clause in court.
This week also saw what feels like a title fight between the President and the Lawman – Trump and former FBI boss James Comey, who was summarily sacked by the leader of the free world on May 9 last year.
Comey – a rifle-barrel-straight, old-fashioned, meticulously dressed and mannered man – has been a career prosecutor since he graduated from the William & Mary research university in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1982.
He stands six foot eight (203cm), which towers over Trump’s 190cm.
Comey has written a 304-page book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership, which describes mostly his time as FBI director under Trump, but also contains some relevant reflections on the latter years of the Barack Obama presidency and encounters with former first lady and secretary of state (and 2016 presidential Democratic candidate) Hillary Clinton.
It’s a book as tough as the former mob-busting crime fighter’s past, pulling no punches about Trump, who he regards as “morally unfit” to serve as president, someone who lives like a mafia boss and has only one point of reference for making decisions – himself.
The pugnacious President hit back days before the book hit the streets, firing off a tweet calling Comey a “slimeball”, saying his book was “self serving and FAKE!” and he was the “WORST FBI Director in history, by far!”.
The genesis of all this winds its way back to the 2016 campaign when the FBI – and other US intelligence agencies – were becoming increasingly interested in apparent covert Russian involvement in that year’s presidential election.
From the middle of the year Russians were leaving their fingerprints on cyber attacks targeting electoral processes in particular American states, and there were suspicious activities by people loosely associated with the Trump campaign.
The FBI was also probing the controversial use of a private email server by candidate Clinton which Trump was using on the stump to attack his opponent – calling her “crooked” and urging crowds to shout “lock her up!”.
The Clinton investigation was shut down by Obama attorney-general Loretta Lynch in July, but reopened by Comey in late October, just days before the election. Democrats said this was aimed at cruelling Clinton’s bid for the presidency.
Comey was criticised savagely at the time and his new book has reopened the debate because of his rationalisation that he’d spoken about looking at the email case again due to his belief Clinton was about to win and he didn’t want to have her start her term with her legitimacy open to question.
However, it’s Comey’s relationship with Trump that has set the Washington gossip circuit alight this week.
After Comey was sacked he leaked some memos he’d kept about his conversations with the President, which sparked immediate controversy. His agenda was clear – he wanted a special prosecutor appointed to investigate the Trump campaign/Russia claims.
It worked and Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein appointed Comey’s predecessor as FBI director, Robert Mueller, to probe any Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and related matters, including any links between the Russian Government and the Trump campaign.
During the past 11 months, Mueller and his star-power team of investigators – including many mob busters he’d worked with in New York and forensic investigators who had a long list of successful prosecutions for money laundering and fraud – have been working their way through every avenue of the 2016 Trump campaign.
Charges have been laid against five American citizens, 13 Russian individuals, and three associated companies.
Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn – sacked days after the new president was sworn in last year – has lodged a guilty plea for lying to the FBI. He is co-operating with investigators.
Two Trump campaign officials from 2016 have been charged. Former campaign director Paul Manafort is charged on multiple counts, including conspiracy against the US and money laundering. He is pleading not guilty, despite facing protracted jail time.
Manafort’s offsider, Rick Gates, faces similar charges but he is co-operating with the Mueller probe and is suspected of wearing a surveillance wire as recently as last June during White House visits. Two smaller fish on Mueller’s radar are George Papadopoulos, a low-level foreign policy guy who tried six times to set up meetings with the Russians and is now co-operating with investigators, and lawyer Alex van der Zwann, who is charged with making false statements to the special prosecutor’s staff.
Mueller’s investigation, which is branching out from what the White House believed and hoped would be a narrow look at “collusion” with any Russian Government officials, is driving President Trump into fits of anxiety and fierce anger.
Every now and then he muses about firing Mueller, saying he could do it any time. His spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, insists he has the power to sack the special prosecutor.
Alarmed by the suggestion the President might sack Mueller, members of Congress were preparing to lodge a Bill next week blocking any move to do so. A bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans have been agitating about it for the past few weeks – including airing some televisions spots which have hit hard.
This follows Trump ramping up his criticism of the Mueller investigation, saying it was “an attack on our country” and “corrupt”.
However, the Bill will be going nowhere. Senate Republican majority leader and Trump ally Mitch McConnell – who controls what does and doesn’t move in Congress – says he’s having none of it.
“We’ll not be having this on the floor of the Senate,” said McConnell this week.
However, members of Congress know that if Trump did sack Mueller, there would be a political firestorm and, some legal scholars say, a constitutional crisis.
The last time a president sacked a special prosecutor was when Richard Nixon fired the man probing the Watergate affair, Archibald Cox, in what is still known as the Saturday night massacre.
Nixon demanded his attorney-general, Elliot Richardson, sack Cox but this was refused. Richardson resigned immediately, which prompted the president to call on the deputy AG, William Ruckleshaus, to do it. He also refused and quit on the spot.
Next, Nixon went to the solicitor-general, Robert Bork, and asked him. He thought about refusing but did as he was told. It was, at the time, the biggest legal controversy since Andrew Johnson defied Congress and sought to sack his secretary of war, who was loyal to Abraham Lincoln. Johnson was impeached and went within one vote of being hounded out of the White House.
As with these historical parallels, a putsch against Mueller by Trump would take the US into the unknown. None of these acts are the same, and they develop their own rhythm and direction.
Mueller’s security appears to be linked, as much as anything else, to Trump’s moods and his early-morning thumbs.
His tweets – which his Republican colleagues are united in saying he should stop sending – are often volcanic and are either just letting off steam or point to something more deadly.
Mueller’s probe has recently gone into areas that clearly trouble the President. He hates action being taken against his lawyer, Cohen – the man who is reputed to know as much as anyone about the President and his dealings and those of his family – and has become more excited about this than anything else the special prosecutor has done.
Washington observers believe this is because there are skeletons aplenty to be found in the closets of Cohen and his family, and whether it might relate to the Russia part of the inquiry.
There’s apparent evidence that in 2016, Cohen went to Ukraine, where he is said to have met with Russian Government officials in a bid to neutralise a 35-page dossier that contains claims about Trump and prostitutes – the now infamous “pee pee tape”.
This tape allegedly features Trump watching two prostitutes urinating on each other while frolicking on the bed Obama slept in at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow.
Trump denies this vehemently, saying it couldn’t have happened because he’s a famous germaphobe.
In his book, Comey says he was shocked when Trump said to him he couldn’t have it if there was even a “1 per cent chance” his wife, Melania, might believe this to be true.
Until the Mueller probe plays out – the White House wanted it ended by last Christmas but it looks like running at least until the end of 2018 – or Trump lights up Washington by sacking the special prosecutor, the big show in town is Comey’s book tour.
The former FBI director has been on so many TV shows this week, one commentator said he wouldn’t have been surprised if Comey turned up in the waiting rooms of local dentists.
He is a confident television performer and obviously has a healthy ego of his own, which has added fuel to criticism from the White House and Trump allies that he’s “bitchy” and focused on gossip about Trump’s hands and face.
Time magazine’s television critic, Daniel Paul D’Addario, ran through the major Comey interview with George Stephanopoulos on America’s ABC network this week, commenting early on the former FBI chief’s “flashy” dress sense for the occasion.
“Throughout, Comey seemed blessed by the same terse certitude as the man he now derides (Trump), along with the same ease with promoting wares for sale in the midst of doing other business,” said D’Addario.
One telling moment in which D’Addario addressed Comey’s ego, he remarked on Stephanopoulos’s question as to whether the one-time crime buster had fallen “in love with his own virtue”. Comey said he hadn’t but “worried about it constantly”, which is a luxury of hindsight.
The one part of Comey’s book that has more serious potential to damage his reputation is the retelling of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email affair – why he dropped the investigation in mid-2016 and then reopened it in the shadow of the election.
This week Stephanopoulos asked Comey if he’d been influenced by the preponderance of polls which said Clinton was headed to an easy victory.
“It must have been … because I was operating in a world where Hillary Clinton was going to beat Donald Trump,” Comey said.
“She’s going to be elected president and if I hide this from the American people, she’d be illegitimate the moment she’s elected, the moment this comes out.”
This is one aspect of this still-evolving affair that Comey must surely regret.
Dennis Atkins is national affairs editor of The Courier-Mail.
dennis.atkins@news.com.au
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