Trump Asks Attorney General To Put an End to ‘Russian Affair’
Published in El País
(Spain) on 2 August 2018
by Carlos Pérez Cruz (link to original)
The President heats up at the beginning of the trial for his former campaign manager.
He's been branding it as a "witch hunt" almost since before it began, however, last Wednesday, he attacked, more fiercely than ever before, the investigation on the Russian affair that special counsel Robert Mueller is carrying out. With a morning tweet, the American president directly told Attorney General Jeff Sessions to shut down "this Rigged Witch Hunt" and do it "right now, before it continues to stain our country any further." It remains to be seen if those tweets can, at some point, be turned against him due to obstruction of justice.
Actually, Sessions couldn't, in theory, shut down the investigation, since he recused himself from it in March of 2017 and left in charge the second-in-command in the Justice Department, Rod Rosenstein, who named Mueller to conduct the investigation, and against whom a group of Republicans are trying to advance an impeachment in Congress. Trump showed his disappointment about Sessions' decision in 2017, to the point that he told The New York Times that "if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else."
Political Collusion
Trump's enraged attack comes at a moment when the president has slightly, but significantly, changed the way he publicly speaks about his political campaign staff's presumed collusion with Russia. Having insisted for months that there was no collusion ("No collusion" is possibly the phrase he has most repeated before the press and his followers), now the president, in sync with his current lawyer Rudy Giuliani, has begun to publicly defend the idea that "collusion is not a crime."
"I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians," he said. The doubt that assails many is why Trump keeps insisting that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats colluded, given the new presidential re-evaluation of collusion's legal nature.
This is a good example of cause and effect, in which Trump is pushing for Mueller's investigation to be shut down now that the first trial linked to "Russiagate" is about to take place, in which Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager for 144 days (the president said it was only 49), will be tried. Manafort, who will face a second trial in September, is accused of 18 financial crimes, among which are tax evasion and bank fraud. By fall, he will have to appear in court to face his political crimes, including that of collusion against the United States.
He's been branding it as a "witch hunt" almost since before it began, however, last Wednesday, he attacked, more fiercely than ever before, the investigation on the Russian affair that special counsel Robert Mueller is carrying out. With a morning tweet, the American president directly told Attorney General Jeff Sessions to shut down "this Rigged Witch Hunt" and do it "right now, before it continues to stain our country any further." It remains to be seen if those tweets can, at some point, be turned against him due to obstruction of justice.
Actually, Sessions couldn't, in theory, shut down the investigation, since he recused himself from it in March of 2017 and left in charge the second-in-command in the Justice Department, Rod Rosenstein, who named Mueller to conduct the investigation, and against whom a group of Republicans are trying to advance an impeachment in Congress. Trump showed his disappointment about Sessions' decision in 2017, to the point that he told The New York Times that "if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else."
Political Collusion
Trump's enraged attack comes at a moment when the president has slightly, but significantly, changed the way he publicly speaks about his political campaign staff's presumed collusion with Russia. Having insisted for months that there was no collusion ("No collusion" is possibly the phrase he has most repeated before the press and his followers), now the president, in sync with his current lawyer Rudy Giuliani, has begun to publicly defend the idea that "collusion is not a crime."
"I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians," he said. The doubt that assails many is why Trump keeps insisting that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats colluded, given the new presidential re-evaluation of collusion's legal nature.
This is a good example of cause and effect, in which Trump is pushing for Mueller's investigation to be shut down now that the first trial linked to "Russiagate" is about to take place, in which Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager for 144 days (the president said it was only 49), will be tried. Manafort, who will face a second trial in September, is accused of 18 financial crimes, among which are tax evasion and bank fraud. By fall, he will have to appear in court to face his political crimes, including that of collusion against the United States.
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