The president has proven happy to use his newfound power to bully and attempt to bully the government and society as a whole into doing as he pleases. As it has turned out, that task is harder than it looks, but that has not deterred the president.
Vox has now come out with a report adding yet another item to the list of obstruction of justice allegations against the president. According to two sources speaking to the publication, during a pair of meetings earlier this year, the president ripped into Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray over the fact that FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page still had jobs.
Anti-Trump text messages between the two of them were discovered during an internal Department of Justice review of the handling of the Clinton email scandal, and in the aftermath of that, Strzok was transferred away from the DOJ’s Russia investigation. Page had worked on it but had already been transferred.
Evidently, however, this development was not enough for the president, who seems eternally paranoid about who is and isn’t out to get him. Page and Strzok can be added to the list of figures whom the president has either fired or sought to fire in an effort to bend the nation’s justice system to his wishes.
The president first pressed Sessions and Wray over the job statuses of Page and Strzok during a meeting on January 22, according to the sources speaking to Vox, following that up the very next day with a one-on-one meeting between him and Sessions during which he harped on the same topic.
Concurrently, during that January 22 meeting, the president pressed Sessions and Wray to uncover “dirt” on Strzok and Page and send it to Congressional Republicans in a remarkable instance of the president attempting to rope in the nation’s justice system, which is supposed to be impartial, with his political party.
Making all of this reporting look even worse for the president is the fact that, according to Vox, the president’s now-departed lawyer, John Dowd, told him last summer that Page was a likely witness against him in the ongoing inquiry into whether or not he’s guilty of obstruction of justice. Thus, not only was the president using his official position to advocate against members of the nation’s justice system, but he was also using that position to try and discredit a potential witness against him.
Page served as lead counsel for the now former Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, and it’s in that position that she could have found herself in a position to testify against Donald Trump. Former FBI Director James Comey has said that he regularly kept McCabe in the loop about his questionable interactions with the president, adding that he occasionally also kept lower level officials like Page informed.
Jeff Sessions proved open to the president’s lobbying to get this issue worked out in his favor, while Christopher Wray did not. As one example of this development, Sessions fired Deputy Director Andrew McCabe last month after Wray refused to do so.
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