The Monday raid of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s office has brought the question of exactly how the president will respond to the very much ongoing federal investigations into his team into even greater focus.
Although Cohen has himself since praised the conduct of the FBI agents who conducted the raid as professional, the president has launched into an angry rage over authorities’ decision to go after his lawyer.
One of the questions about the president’s path forward is whether he will try and fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller; the FBI raided Cohen on Monday thanks to a referral from the special counsel. The New York Times has now come out with a report that should give some an even greater cause for concern about the president’s plans.
According to the publication, last December, after the publication of a series of reports asserting that Mueller was seeking Trump financial records from Deutsche Bank, the president erupted into a rage and sought to have the special counsel dismissed. It was only after the president’s lawyers obtained clarification from the special counsel’s team that they weren’t actually seeking Trump financial records that the president calmed down and backed off.
As it turns out, the subpoena was actually targeting the Kushners and came as a part of a different federal inquiry; Jared Kushner is, of course, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. The Kushners have faced their own set of problems since Donald Trump took office; among them is their struggle to obtain funding to keep their prized building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City afloat.
As for the president’s treatment of the special counsel, the December situation involving him seeking to have the special counsel dismissed is the second such situation to come out in the press.
Back in June of last year, a short time after the special counsel’s initial appointment, the president directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to have Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein fire Mueller. The president at the time cited supposed conflicts of interest that made it impossible for the special counsel to act without bias; the train wreck was stopped when McGahn prepared to resign rather than carry out the president’s order.
In the time since, the special counsel has gone public with charges against a total of four former Trump associates; only one of those individuals, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, has contested the charges and refused to cooperate with the investigation.
The president, meanwhile, continues to rant and rave against the nation’s justice system to the point that he’s attracted widely reported scrutiny from Special Counsel Robert Mueller for possible obstruction of justice.
His ranting is so out of control at times that The New York Times concludes their Tuesday report about the matter with the following grim assessment of the situation:
‘The president’s diatribes about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Mr. Rosenstein and the existence of the special counsel have, for most of the White House aides, become a dependable part of the fabric of life working for this president.’
The president and his allies often claim that the media is obsessing unfairly over the Russia scandal, but this report from The Times is yet another good indication that such an allegation is little more than a classic case of projection.
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