President Cover Up
By: William B. Turner
Tags: Congressional Subpoenas, Politics, Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump

Cover Up Trump

President Trump invited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to visit him to talk about money for infrastructure, which all rational observers agree the U.S. needs to spend badly.

Not long before the visit, however, Pelosi said publicly that “we believe the President of the United States is engaged in a cover up.”

Trump stormed out of the meeting to a press conference in the Rose Garden, where he stated, “I don’t do cover ups.” Isn’t that a hoot?

President Cover Up

It is possible that he is just too stupid to know what a cover up is. But he is engaged in a cover up right now. His whole presidency has been nothing but one long cover up.

To begin with, Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had multiple conversations with Russian agents and undertook work on behalf of the government of Turkey without registering as the agent of a foreign government, then lied about it to the FBI, then ended up pleading guilty to lying to the FBI.

Then James Comey reports that, in his capacity as director of the FBI, Trump asked him over dinner to stop the agency’s investigation of Flynn and demanded loyalty from Comey. Comey wrote memos of those conversations to make a record of them and their contents. Mueller’s team would later ask a judge not to disclose the contents of those memos to the public because they were afraid of tainting the memories of other witnesses to the surrounding events. They interviewed multiple people about those events.

But Trump himself refused to allow anyone from Mueller’s team to interview him.

That’s a cover up.

Suspicions around Trump’s reasons for firing Comey, which itself looks like a ham fisted attempt at a covering up Flynn’s crimes, were the reason why the Mueller investigation began in the first place. Comey and Trump gave different accounts of their private conversations, but Mueller’s report indicates that Comey is more credible than Trump, which is only stating the obvious.

A leit motif of the Mueller investigation was the notorious meeting Donald, Junior, Trump’s eldest son, took with a Russian lawyer after she offered him information that she claimed would damage the Clinton campaign. Junior expressed his eagerness to have that information. Mueller decided not to charge Junior with violating the statute that prohibits such activity because he doubted he could prove that Junior acted willfully and that he knew his conduct was illegal — the stupidity defense.

The question that emerged, which was factually subsidiary, but legally more important, was whether Daddy knew about the meeting before it occurred. Junior and Rudy Giuliani (!) both asserted that he did not, while Michael Cohen said that he did. When Trump found out that the New York Times was preparing a story about the meeting, Trump himself jumped into the task of deciding how to respond, dictating a version of the story to a White House aide, which she then conveyed to the Times. Mueller concluded that this conduct was not criminal because lying to the press is not illegal.

That’s a cover up.

Since Mueller submitted his report to Attorney General Barr, Barr has issued his own summary of the report, which Mueller himself objected to and various others have criticized as misrepresenting the findings of the report on the basis of the heavily redacted version Barr has given to Congress. Barr has offered to allow more members of Congress to see a less redacted version of the report, but only under various absurd conditions.

That’s a cover up.

Since the submission of the Mueller report, various House committees have demanded that several members of the administration staff, current and former, testify, and have issued subpoenas for a large quantity of documents, including Trump’s tax returns for a specific period, and records from both Trump’s banks and his accountants. Trump has so far refused to comply with any of these demands. The House has now won two federal court decisions on questions of whether companies that have records of Trump’s financial transactions, one involving his accounting firm, the other involving Deutsche Bank, which has loaned large sums of money to Trump.

That’s a cover up, or an attempted one.

Trump is definitely too stupid to realize that refusing to comply with subpoenas only makes him look more guilty. What is he hiding?

The ultimate proof of how guilty Trump must be is that he has resorted to his favorite tactic to prove his innocence, the favorite tactic of spoiled children the world over — he just tells a barefaced lie and hopes people will believe him.

Trump has claimed that he has offered “total transparency” in the Mueller investigation, which is a bad joke.

No, Trump doesn’t do cover ups. Trump is a walking cover up. All cover up all the time.