Longtime Trump advisor Roger Stone has been arrested and indicted by the special counsel on seven charges, including obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering. This is the first indictment that shows directed collusion from the top of the Trump campaign – potentially from Trump himself.
Over more than two years, story after story has demonstrated that President Donald Trump is compromised. Just in the past 10 days, it has been reported that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into the president, Trump’s campaign manager shared internal polling data with a suspected Russian agent, Trump sought to conceal details of his meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and most recently that the president allegedly directed his personal lawyer to lie to Congress. The bombshells show no signs of slowing. Nor do Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice and undermine the investigation. If anything, Trump’s attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller seem to be accelerating, as clear a sign as any that evidence of the crime he is trying to cover up ― collusion with Russia ― is finally catching up to him. It’s time to stop treating each new story as an isolated event. This is not a drill. This is an ongoing crisis.
The report that Donald Trump personally directed his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about efforts to develop Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 campaign is the clearest evidence yet that the president obstructed justice to cover up the evidence of his collusion with Russia. Of course, this just adds to a long list of examples of the president obstructing justice.
The New York Times’s report that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether President Donald Trump was acting as a Russian agent raises the prospect that the president may be a clear and present danger to US national security. It wasn’t just the FBI investigating—both the House and Senate intelligence committees opened investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia. But over the past two years, instead of trying to protect our national security, Republicans in Congress worked hard to undermine US law enforcement and protect Trump at all costs. They have been derelict in upholding their duty to protect the Constitution and the country from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Rudy Giuliani is back on his goalpost-moving game, backtracking on two years of denials that there was “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia. And he is right to backtrack—it has been obvious for a long time that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire aluminum magnate and Kremlin insider, has a business relationship with Paul Manafort that dates back more than a decade.
As a result of an improperly redacted court filing this week by former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort’s lawyers, new details emerged revealing that the Trump campaign shared private polling data with individuals linked to Russian intelligence during the 2016 election, bringing the current count of contacts between Trump campaign and transition officials and Russia-linked figures above 100 for the first time.
As the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election continues to close in on President Donald Trump and his closest advisors, there have been reinvigorated concerns that he will attempt to use his pardon power to undermine the investigation. While concerns about the lengths to which Trump will go to protect himself and his inner circle from accountability are well-founded, there are important limits to the pardon power. The president’s pardon power cannot be used to: (1) pardon state crimes, (2) remove federal civil liability, (3) pardon impeachment, or (4) pardon crimes that have not already occurred.