![]() ![]() One Maryland district court cited a particularly offensive Trump tweet when rendering his decision: “Particularly where, in August 2017, President Trump tweeted a statement that a method hostile to Islam - shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood - should be used to deter future terrorism, there is no record of public statements showing any change in the president’s intentions relating to a Muslim ban,” he concluded.Įven if you believe a president should be afforded wide latitude in matters involving national security and immigration, it is obvious that Trump’s tweets complicate his own stated goals. This is a pattern.įederal judges have cited Trump’s tweets about a “Muslim ban” as an excuse to challenge his original travel ban executive order. It is, perhaps, worth restating the obvious: This potentially damning information wouldn’t even be known had Donald Trump not voluntarily injected it into the public sphere. Is it just me, or would Trump be better off if John Dowd quit talking? Honestly, I’m not sure which constitutes the greater potential liability, John Dowd’s comments to the media or Trump’s Twitter feed. Perhaps this is why Dowd is now telling Axios that “the president cannot obstruct justice.” (Or, as Richard Nixon said, “ When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”) I’m no legal scholar, but the distinction that Trump believed something as opposed to knowing it might not quell the allegations that he obstructed justice. That didn’t stop Trump from pressuring then-FBI director James Comey to go easy on him-or from firing Comey when he didn’t. ![]() Even with this new explanation, we are left with the impression that Trump assumed Flynn had committed a felony. ![]() Pardon me if I don’t see how this latest revelation helps Dowd’s client. But now, according to The Washington Post, Dowd is also saying that “Trump knew generally that Flynn’s account to the FBI and Pence (his claim to have never spoken with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions) were similar…” Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, had already taken the blame for drafting the tweet. It is meant to clean up a much less nuanced tweet Trump sent, saying he had to fire Flynn “because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI.” In journalism, we are taught to avoid using too many words like “believed” and “probably,” but this is the only way to describe the latest spin coming from Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. President Trump believed that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn probably told the FBI the same lies that he told Vice President Mike Pence. ![]()
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