THE SPEAR OF DESTINY
Earlier this week, the New York Times published a list of 49 questions that it claims Robert Mueller wants to ask Donald Trump. The provenance of these questions is in dispute. Trump himself groused via Twitter that they were leaked by Mueller’s team, but that seems highly unlikely.
Informed sources suggest that the list originated with Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s attorneys, who drafted the questions based on a conversation with Mueller’s team back in March. Since the list was drafted by Team Trump, it must have been leaked by Team Trump.
Why did Trump’s legal team think this was a good idea? Several possibilities come to mind. Maybe it’s a signal to Fox & Friends to spend hours talking about how unfair the questions are. Maybe it’s an attempt to give potential future witnesses a chance to align their stories. Maybe it’s a signal to witnesses who have already testified to give Trump’s new lawyers details of their testimony to Mueller. Maybe it’s a step in persuading Trump not to submit to an interview with Mueller. And since none of those things are mutually exclusive, maybe it’s all of those things.
Is there even a ghost of a chance that Donald Trump could get through these questions without perjuring himself? I say no. He’s been a liar all his life. At the age of 71, Trump’s lying is a habit too deeply ingrained to reverse, particularly for a man in obvious cognitive decline.
The leak of the so-called “Mueller” questions is just one more example of Team Trump’s lack of a long-term strategy. Wednesday brought the news that attorney Ty Cobb, an advocate of minimizing further damage by cooperating with Robert Mueller, has been replaced by Emmet Flood, a veteran of the Bill Clinton impeachment fight. That looks like a concession by the Trump camp that they expect the mid-term elections to go badly for Republicans, and that they’re gearing up for an impeachment trial.
Meanwhile, we heard from another Republican political strategist who’d had a chat with Robert Mueller’s team. Michael Caputo worked on the Trump campaign and was one of the voices in support of replacing Cory Lewandowski with Paul Manafort. Caputo is one of the legion of Trump people with close connections to Russia, having lived and worked there for several years at the turn of the century.
Caputo was neither cocky nor defiant after his interview with Team Mueller. He told CNN’s Manu Raju that “It’s clear they are still really focused on Russia collusion. ... They know more about the Trump campaign than anyone who ever worked there. The Senate and the House are net fishing. The special counsel is spearfishing. They know what they are aiming at and are deadly accurate.”
The reason Mueller’s team knows so much about the Trump campaign is that they’ve got emails, wiretaps, and the testimony of cooperating witnesses who have filled in most of the blanks. They ask each new witness questions about things they already know to test their honesty. Lie to them, and you’ll have a perjury charge added to whatever else you may have done wrong.
If Donald Trump is dumb enough to testify under oath, he’s screwed, over and above all those high crimes and misdemeanors he’s committed. Trump’s problem is that he couldn’t answer 49 questions about anything – his family, his business, his golf game – without lying. He can’t help himself. He’s a perjury indictment waiting to happen.
Finally, this week marked the return of Rudy Giuliani to the spotlight, this time in the role of the public face of Trump’s new legal team. He did not delay in dropping a couple of bombshells. On Fox Wednesday night, Giuliani admitted to Sean Hannity that Trump did in fact reimburse Michael Cohen for the $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels.
On the surface, that seems like a big oops, since it contradicts the earlier Trump/Cohen narrative, but there are those who suggest that there’s method to Giuliani’s madness. In the course of the Hannity interview, Giuliani also claimed that it was common practice for attorneys to take care of minor stuff for their clients without bothering them with the details. Any attorney reading this can comment on whether this is true or not.
As a line of defense for Trump, though, it makes a certain amount of sense. Trump claims he was accustomed to getting un-itemized bills from Michael Cohen and paying them without asking questions. That way he can admit that the money for the Stormy Daniels payoff came from him, but that he didn’t know what it was for. If he didn’t know he was buying Stormy’s silence, the argument goes, it wasn’t a campaign violation.
Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, suggests that Giuliani inadvertently gave away Trump’s modus operandi for greasing the palms of local officials who had approval authority for his hotel and casino projects. Marshall speculates that Trump would signal Cohen when it was time to pay off crooked bureaucrats, and Cohen got the money to them. They pocketed the bribes and helped remove the impediment to the project at hand. Sometime later, Cohen would present Trump with a bill, and Trump would reimburse his attorney. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has all the records, paper and electronic.
The un-itemized billing thing is an interesting theory. I can believe that Trump and Cohen might work out that kind of a nudge-nudge wink-wink sort of arrangement. But how did Cohen know who to pay, and how much they were worth? I have a hard time believing that Trump didn’t approve the $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels beforehand.
Of course, what I think doesn’t matter. Cohen’s testimony is what will matter. And if he pleads the Fifth Amendment? No less an authority than Donald Trump said, “If you are innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
And after all that, Rudy Giuliani had one more bomb to drop. He told Sean Hannity that the whole country would turn against Mueller if he went after Ivanka Trump. Ivanka’s husband, though? Not so much. Giuliani said that Jared Kushner was “disposable.” That seems like a big deal.
My guess is that Giuliani was paraphrasing something he heard directly from Trump himself – something like, “I don’t care what happens to Jared, but they better leave Ivanka alone.” The question is whether Giuliani’s comment was a calculated signal that Trump was ready to throw his son in law under the bus. Like Donald Trump, Rudy isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and he may have just been running his mouth.
Whatever the explanation, it must have made for some awkward dinner table conversation around Chez Kushner.