President Donald Trump can run, but he can’t hide. He’s relentlessly pushed for the ongoing partial federal government shutdown via refusing to approve any further funding without billions of dollars for a border wall, but the Russia scandal is continuing to rage — and according to Vanity Fair‘s Gabriel Sherman, his team is freaking out. The reporter shares that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani fears that an initial “installment” of Special Counsel for the Russia investigation Robert Mueller’s final report could come “within the month” covering obstruction of justice. The lawyer, who’s often tried to maintain a public about-face on behalf of his high profile client, apparently believes the report will have “horrific” implications.
Concurrently, the former New York City mayor apparently doesn’t even particularly care for the job he’s currently handling. An unnamed Republican who’s been “briefed on Giuliani’s thinking” told Sherman:
‘Rudy hates the job. Trump is very hard to deal with.’
Notably enough, Trump has driven away a key member of his legal team before, although neither Sherman nor apparently whomever he was speaking to go as far as to say Giuliani will be resigning anytime soon.
Still, John Dowd left the president’s employ early last year as previous efforts to keep him from launching personal attacks on Mueller and continuing to seek to undercut the legitimacy of the entire Russia investigation failed. As the heat has built up from the probe, so have Trump’s attacks and efforts to redirect it in his favor. Dowd concluded behind the scenes that Trump was so committed to his personal political line he couldn’t even be trusted to speak with the special counsel’s office face-to-face and not blatantly lie.
Trump has, in the time since, submitted written answers for Mueller’s team that Giuliani helped deal with and that have been seen as one of the final major pieces of Mueller investigation.
Giuliani has suggested in the past that the Trump team would try and keep details of the final report from making it to the public, considering Mueller reports to senior staff at the Justice Department including the currently serving Trump appointee, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. In an age when Democrats as the majority in the House have subpoena power, however, it would be short-sighted to suggest that those efforts would actually ensure that we don’t know the full extent of the president and his associates’ guilt.
The signals indicating there’s a great deal left to understand continue to pile up. Just recently, The New York Times shared that the president’s behavior while in office was so concerning that FBI officials opened a counterintelligence investigation meant to determine to what extent he was working as an agent of the Kremlin while in office.
Meanwhile, more recently, Mueller has secured the continued cooperation of key former Trump associates like Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen. The public will get a glimpse into what Cohen has told Mueller — and what might be in that final report — when he testifies publicly before Congress early next month.
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