Why don’t we take a step back and contemplate what Americans, and the world, are witnessing?
arly Monday morning, F.B.I. agents raided the New York office, home and hotel room of the personal lawyer for the president of the United States. They seized evidence of possible federal crimes — including bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations related to payoffs made to women, including a porn actress, who say they had affairs with the president before he took office and were paid off and intimidated into silence.
That evening the president surrounded himself with the top American military officials and launched unbidden
into a tirade against the top American law enforcement officials —
officials of his own government — accusing them of “an attack on our
country.”
Oh, also: The Times reported Monday evening
that investigators were examining a $150,000 donation to the
president’s personal foundation from a Ukrainian steel magnate, given
during the American presidential campaign in exchange for a 20-minute
video appearance.
Meanwhile,
the president’s former campaign chairman is under indictment, and his
former national security adviser has pleaded guilty to lying to
investigators. His son-in-law and other associates are also under
investigation.
This
is your president, ladies and gentlemen. This is how Donald Trump does
business, and these are the kinds of people he surrounds himself with.
Mr.
Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and
celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He
cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most
part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush
money and his own bravado. Those methods may be proving to have their
limits when they are applied from the Oval Office. Though Republican
leaders in Congress still keep a cowardly silence, Mr. Trump now has
real reason to be afraid. A raid on a lawyer’s office doesn’t happen
every day; it means that multiple government officials, and a federal
judge, had reason to believe they’d find evidence of a crime there and that they didn’t trust the lawyer not to destroy that evidence.
On
Monday, when he appeared with his national security team, Mr. Trump,
whose motto could be, “The buck stops anywhere but here,” angrily blamed
everyone he could think of for the “unfairness” of an investigation
that has already consumed the first year of his presidency, yet is only
now starting to heat up. He said Attorney General Jeff Sessions made “a
very terrible mistake” by recusing himself from overseeing the
investigation — the implication being that a more loyal attorney general
would have obstructed justice and blocked the investigation. He
complained about the “horrible things” that Hillary Clinton did “and all
of the crimes that were committed.” He called the A-team of
investigators from the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller,
“the most biased group of people.” As for Mr. Mueller himself, “we’ll
see what happens,” Mr. Trump said. “Many people have said, ‘You should
fire him.
’”
In fact,
the raids on the premises used by Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen,
were conducted by the public corruption unit of the federal attorney’s
office in Manhattan, and at the request not of the special counsel’s
team, but under a search warrant that investigators in New York obtained
following a referral by Mr. Mueller, who first consulted with the
deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. To sum up, a
Republican-appointed former F.B.I. director consulted with a
Republican-appointed deputy attorney general, who then authorized a
referral to an F.B.I. field office not known for its anti-Trump bias. Deep state, indeed.
Mr.
Trump also railed against the authorities who, he said, “broke into”
Mr. Cohen’s office. “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” the president tweeted
early Tuesday morning, during what was presumably his executive time.
He was wrong. The privilege is one of the most sacrosanct in the
American legal system, but it does not protect communications in
furtherance of a crime. Anyway, one might ask, if this is all a big
witch hunt and Mr. Trump has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why
does he care about the privilege in the first place?
The answer, of course, is that he has a lot to hide.
This
wasn’t even the first early-morning raid of a close Trump associate.
That distinction goes to Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign
chairman and Russian oligarch-whisperer, who now faces a slate of
federal charges long enough to land him in prison for the rest of his
life. And what of Mr. Cohen? He’s already been cut loose by his law firm, and when the charges start rolling in, he’ll likely get the same treatment from Mr. Trump.
Among
the grotesqueries that faded into the background of Mr. Trump’s
carnival of misgovernment during the past 24 hours was that Monday’s
meeting was ostensibly called to discuss a matter of global
significance: a reported chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians.
Mr. Trump instead made it about him, with his narcissistic and
self-pitying claim that the investigation represented an attack on the
country “in a true sense.”
No,
Mr. Trump — a true attack on America is what happened on, say, Sept.
11, 2001. Remember that one? Thousands of people lost their lives. Your response was to point out that the fall of the twin towers meant your building was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan. Of course, that also wasn’t true.
© 2018 The New York Times Company.
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