Trump tried to block an FBI investigation. Impeachment time?

Donald Trump asked the director of the FBI to shut down the federal investigation into the Trump team’s contact with Russia, according to a bombshell report from the New York Times. Specifically, the president wanted James Comey to stop the FBI from looking into Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor who was forced to resign after it emerged he had illegally discussed US sanctions with the Russian ambassador, and then lied to the administration about it. A memo revealed by an associate of Comey to a New York Times reporter details how Trump met with the FBI director the day after Flynn resigned, and pressured him into dropping the investigation. The memo recalls Trump telling Comey:

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go… He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

If this is true, it would be a direct attempt for a president to influence an ongoing investigation into his own staff, and therefore an obstruction of justice. Remember that obstruction of justice was the first Article of Impeachment against Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal came to light.

The White House has, predictably, rejected the claims made by the New York Times. But White House denials do not count for much these days – in the last week Trump himself has twice sent his surrogates in front of the media with an official line, only to directly contradict them on television or Twitter hours later. It is telling that, this time, no individuals from the White House were willing to put their name to the statement of denial. Perhaps they felt burned by the president’s live announcement on Thursday that he had intended to fire James Comey regardless of recommendations from the Justice Department, or his boasting on Twitter yesterday that he revealed sensitive information – potentially classified – to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, despite White House assertions to the contrary.

There will almost certainly be more revelations today – from Republicans in Congress (who may finally be starting to crack under the pressure of supporting their president), from FBI sources, or from Trump himself. For now, the New York Times article is worth reading in full, but two aspects stand out in particular.

The first is that this memo is not the only evidence of Trump’s interfering in the FBI’s work:

“Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. It was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation. An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations…

…Mr. Comey created similar memos – including some that are classified – about every phone call and meeting he had with the president, the two people said.”

This note-keeping implies that Comey was aware of what the president was trying to do, and determined to document it. Some Republicans have questioned why Comey did not do more at the time, with Senator Lindsey Graham reportedly saying: “If this happened, the FBI director should have done something about it or quit”. As a reminder, at the time leading Republicans were refusing calls to launch a full investigation into Flynn’s inappropriate contact with the Russian ambassador, and instead demanding that the Justice Department look into the leaks that had revealed his transgressions. Comey would be forgiven for having doubts that these same congressional Republicans would treat the revelation that Trump was directly trying to influence the investigation with the seriousness it deserved.

The subject of leaks brings us on to the other significant point raised by the New York Times report, which has been overshadowed somewhat by the headline accusation. Here is how the meeting between Trump and Comey began:

“Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.”

Punishing journalists for doing their jobs and clamping down on the free press is one of the signature moves of an increasingly autocratic regime. This is not the first time Trump has raged about leaks, and nor is his demand an anomaly considering what we have seen so far since his election. Just days after the inauguration, six journalists were arrested and charged with felony rioting for covering the protests. In April the same thing happened to photojournalist Neb Solomon when he was reporting at a Trump rally in Las Vegas. And just last week, Daniel Ralph Heyman, who works for Public News Service, was arrested and charged with wilful disruption of governmental processes for repeatedly asking Trump’s health secretary questions about whether the proposed healthcare reform would consider domestic violence to be a pre-existing condition. Trump’s request for Comey to consider criminalising the press is yet another attempt to disable anyone who might be a threat to the administration.

Trump did not get what he wanted – the FBI investigation into Flynn continued, and as we can see the media is still publishing leaks from the White House. It is in this context that he fired the FBI director last week, an FBI director who had in this instance refused to bow to pressure.

But the president can’t fire everyone with knowledge of what he and his team were doing during the election campaign and beyond, and even if he could, the paper trails exist, the journalists are hungry, and the number of people on the inside willing to talk is growing. Already there have been calls for the FBI to hand all of Comey’s notes on Trump over to Congress. Who knows what else is in them? This is an impeachable offence. If it’s proved, Republicans will finally have to start listening.