9/17/19: Former Trump 2016 campaign
manager Corey Lewandowski reluctantly appears before Congress.
Forced to testify under subpoena, issued by the House Judiciary
Committee, Lewandowski proves combative in the extreme. He’s almost impossible
to pin down on facts, and appears dumbfounded that anyone would think Trump
ever asked him to obstruct justice, although all signs point to the fact he
did.
We can pretty much ignore almost everything Republican
lawmakers on the panel said. Boiled down to simple phrases, their argument
would be: “Democrats are mean to President Trump.” “The Mueller Report found no
collusion.” (It’s a stone cold fact: Mueller made it clear that “collusion”
wasn’t a legal term and so ignored the issue outright.) “Trump was totally
exonerated. Democrats should move on.” (Mueller specifically stated that his
report did not exonerate Trump.)
 |
Mr. Lewandowski. |
Your humble blogger is a well-known liberal and convinced the
president is a liar from weird coif to toe. So, let’s be as factual as we can.
Lewandowski did not deny any of the following points. In June 2017, the
President of the United States requested that he, a private citizen, deliver a
message to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. That message would be: Un-recuse
yourself.
Take charge of the Russia investigation – which began that
May – again.
Lewandowski reluctantly admitted under questioning that he
was indeed asked to deliver such a message.
(At best, this would be an oddity. President Trump could have
sent any White House lawyer over to see AG Sessions. For some reason he did
not.)
Questioned in detail about the matter, Lewandowski was by
turns contemptuous or unwilling to answer. Lewandowski insisted he was
acting on White House orders, to limit his responses to what he had already
said in the Mueller Report.
Again, if we stick to basic facts, we know that by the time
Trump spoke to Lewandowski about meeting Sessions, he had already asked White
House counsel Donald McGahn II to fire Special Counsel Mueller. We know McGahn
– almost surely sniffing out an attempt to obstruct justice – refused.
Two days later, Trump called in Lewandowski to help. He
wanted Corey to go to Sessions and ask him to give a speech. Trump even
dictated ideas for what he wanted Sessions to say. First, the Attorney
General should un-recuse himself. Second, he should explain that he was taking
control of the Mueller probe again. Third, he should proclaim that Donald J.
Trump had done nothing wrong. Finally, Sessions was to announce that Mueller
would be limited to investigating “election meddling for future elections.”
If Sessions would do that, everything would be cool.
He
should tell the Attorney General he was fired.
For some reason – probably because Lewandowski knew he would
have been tiptoeing the line where obstruction of justice begins – he failed to
act. Trump made this first request on June 19. Lewandowski did ask the Attorney
General to meet. Sessions refused. A month passed before Lewandowski saw Trump
again. On July 19, Trump and his former campaign manager met at the White House
again. The president wanted Lewandowski to meet with Sessions in person. If
Sessions refused to meet again, he should tell the Attorney General he was
fired.
Again: the line where obstruction of justice begins was at
Lewandowski’s feet. He appears to have known it, too.
He passed off the message to White House deputy chief of
staff Rick Dearborn, a former aide to Jeff Sessions, and left it to him to do
what Trump desired. According to the Mueller Report, Dearborn said he never
delivered the message.
The next question was obvious: Why didn’t Lewandowski or
Dearborn act on a request from the President of the United States? Did
Lewandowski know he was being asked to step over the line?
Corey sneered in response when a Democratic lawmaker asked.
He wasn’t worried about that. He didn’t carry out the president’s request, he
explained, because he had to take his kids on vacation.
He took them to the beach.
(Use sunscreen, sir, by all means.)
Lewandowski did clarify a number of points under pressure,
rather than risk a finding of contempt. Okay, he admitted, vacation lasted only
two weeks. He also said he had hoped to meet with Sessions away from the
Department of Justice, because he and Jeff were friends. He wanted to talk to the AG in a “relaxed
setting.”
*
THE MUELLER REPORT lays out a different scenario.
“Lewandowski wanted to pass the message to Sessions in person rather than over
the phone,” investigators say. “He did not want to meet at the Department of
Justice because he did not want a public log of his visit [emphasis
added] and did not want Sessions to have an advantage over him by meeting on
what Lewandowski described as Sessions’s turf.”
Despite some Democratic bumbling in regard to questioning, Lewandowski
eventually had to admit that he had received messages from campaign staff in 2016,
indicating the Russians wanted to talk.
“Shouldn’t you have contacted the F.B.I. with this news? “ a
Democratic lawmaker asked. Lewandowski admitted somebody should have done so –
it just wasn’t him. At another point, Republicans tried to make it sound like
the F.B.I. failed to alert the Trump campaign to what the Russians were up to –
and that what F.B.I. agents were the real problem. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)
suggested that the F.B.I. was “trying to trap the president.” That didn’t even
make sense.
To Lewandowski, however, it did. Someone from the F.B.I., he
agreed, should have told him the Russians were up to no good. The problem with
that line of defense was that he was fired from the campaign on June 20, 2016.
The following month the F.B.I. specifically warned the campaign that
Russians were trying to make inroads in various ways.
Rep. Jordan didn’t want to bring that up. Nor did Jordan or
Lewandowski dare mention one incontrovertible fact. Eleven days earlier, on
June 9, 2016, with Lewandowski still hard at work on the campaign, three
individuals at the top of Team Trump, namely Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr.
and Jared Kushner, had enthusiastically agreed to take a secret meeting with
Russians. Those Russians had promised to bring damaging info on Hillary
Clinton.
Yet, none of these three people told Lewandowski that
something that sounds nefarious, was afoot?
In the end, Trump’s old campaign manager stonewalled
lawmakers to good effect – assuming good to you means “avoiding getting
pinned down by the truth.” He refused to answer most questions point blank. His
conversations with the president were covered under the blanket of executive
privilege, he and his lawyer said. This, despite the fact Lewandowski was a
private citizen at the time, and – it would seem – was being asked to commit a
crime. Testimony related to criminal activity is never shielded by “executive
privilege,” if you don’t know.
Finally, a lawyer for the Democrats, Barry Berke, had 30
minutes to wrap up the hearings for the day. Mr. Berke showed a series of news
clips, during which Mr. Lewandowski told reporters he had never been asked by
President Trump to talk to AG Sessions about un-recusing himself.
“Was that a lie?” Berke asked.
Lewandowski was evasive at first. Finally, he replied that he
was under “no obligation” to tell reporters (and by extension, the American
people) the truth.
At the end of the day, pundits seemed to agree that Democrats
had failed to gain much traction in an effort to build a case for the
impeachment of President Donald J. Trump.
But if you watched Corey Lewandowski perform, you knew, if he
avoided stepping over the line where obstruction of justice begins and actions
become crimes, he teetered on the very edge of the legal cliff.
Did Trump want Lewandowski to obstruct justice? An
open-minded observer would conclude that he did.
