Evidence is amassing that President Donald Trump used his position to obstruct an FBI investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia.
Whether Congress chooses to act on that evidence is an open question.
Former FBI Director James Comey, fired by Trump last month, will tell Congress on Thursday that the president asked him for his loyalty during a Jan. 27 dinner and then, in a Feb. 14 Oval Office meeting, pressured Comey to abandon the FBI’s investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor.
“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy,” Comey recalls Trump as saying. “I hope you can let this go.”
Legal experts say that if his account is true, Comey’s statement looks a lot like evidence that Trump obstructed justice.
“That is the president pressuring the FBI director into ending an investigation,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a former Senate counsel who co-directs the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at NYU School of Law. “That on the face of it looks like obstruction of justice.”
Peter Zeidenberg, a partner in the Arent Fox law firm in Washington D.C., said Comey’s statement, released in advance of his scheduled testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, adds to evidence that Trump attempted to shut down the Russia investigation. Trump, he noted, told NBC anchor Lester Holt on May 11 that he was thinking “of this Russia thing” when deciding on Comey’s firing.
“Combined with a lot of other information we are hearing, this statement (by Comey) makes a plausible case for obstruction,” said Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who assisted in the successful prosecution of Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s adviser. “It’s not a slam dunk, but it is plausible.”
But so what if it is? While the president takes an oath to uphold the nation’s legal statutes, the U.S. Constitution is unclear whether federal prosecutors can charge one with breaking the law. For decades the Justice Department has concluded it would be unconstitutional to haul a sitting president into a criminal courtroom.
“An impeachment proceeding is the only appropriate way to deal with a president while in office,” Assistant Attorney General Robert Dixon stated in 1973, the first year the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion on the matter.
Some Democrats in Congress have called for Trump’s impeachment, with U.S. Rep. Al Green, a Texas Democrat, saying his week that he would formally start the process for impeachment in the House. But with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, it is unlikely such proceedings would advance in the near term, especially since Senate and House investigations are still in their early stages.