Well-Known
Cast of Liars to Date
Former Team of Liars
(Flynn and K.T. McFarland)
Trump Personal Lawyer John Dowd
(Firestorm Tweet Writer)
A long but yet a very substantial post:
The original post follows this major
update from various sources that are coming out fast and furious.
Hopefully it will fill in the blanks
from several sources. Note, there may be duplicate sentences in substance since
the story has a variety of slants – please consider that.
======================================================
Related: Here
(from Mediaite) and here
(from Law and Crime – and an
excellent legal rundown). Synopsis: President Trump has known for months
that former national security adviser Michael Flynn lied to the FBI, Trump’s lawyer,
John Dowd, told The Washington Post.
Also,
Refer to the Key Point Noted Below: Wherein Dowd confessing that he drafted the tweet for Trump’s
release…
Dowd said on Sunday (December 3) that Trump likely knew about Flynn’s
erroneous reporting of his conversations with the Russians as early as January,
months before he fired then-FBI Director James Comey.
Interestingly
enough, Trump raised questions about the timeline the very day before when he
tweeted: “I had to fire General Flynn
because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those
lies.”
Note: Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to
the FBI on Friday – a day before the string of tweets and Dowd statements
clarifying that he sent the tweet, not Trump.
The
implication that Trump had known his former national security adviser had lied
to the FBI set off alarm bells. The White House had previously said Flynn was
fired over false statements he provided to Vice President Mike Pence.
Trump and
Comey met a few weeks after the president found out about Flynn, according to
the Post. It was during that meeting that Comey has said that the president
asked him to drop the investigation into Flynn.
That led to
speculation that Trump fired Comey to punish him for not giving up on his
probe, which may also constitute obstruction of justice.
Dowd
has shot down any speculation that his client obstructed justice, saying Trump is president and
therefore above the law.
Consider this startling statement from Dowd via Axios in his interview also published
Monday: “The President cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law
enforcement officer under [the Constitution’s Article II] and has every right to
express his view of any case, but [he] “did not admit obstruction. That is an
ignorant and arrogant assertion.”
Dowd when forwarding the tweet to publishing said: “I’m
out of the tweeting business. I did not mean to break news,” he quickly added.
Note: Which is also what Dowd had told NBC News; that he
drafted the tweet and sent it to W/H Social Media Director Dan Scavino to
publish.
When asked for the original email he sent to Scavino, Dowd
said he dictated it orally adding: “I'm
out of the tweeting business. I did not mean to break news.”
Also
related from Axios: John Dowd also contended on Axios to Mike Allen that the “president cannot obstruct justice because
he is the chief law enforcement officer... and has every right to express
his view of any case.”
AG Jeff Sessions would
disagree — or at
least would have during the Clinton impeachment proceedings in 1999, as Politico points out.
Back then, it was Senator Sessions who voted
to remove Clinton from office because of in his own words: “show a continuous
pattern to lie and obstruct justice.” Sessions deemed those things a “high
crime.”
Myth or Fact: “The president’s control over law
enforcement is sometimes regarded as a near-sacred principle in our
constitutional system.”
Daniel Jacob Hemel and
Eric Posner, University of Chicago Law School professors, and the question over whether a
president is constitutionally capable of obstructing justice has no clear
answer they say, but: “The claim that the
president can commit such a crime faces a powerful objection rooted in the
Constitution.”
Further they wrote in
July: “Obstruction of justice laws are normally
applied to private citizens — people who bribe jurors, hide evidence from the police,
or lie to investigators. The president’s control over law enforcement is sometimes
regarded as a near-sacred principle in our constitutional system.”
Yet this
conflicts with the constitutional principle that no person can be above the
law. That’s why, according to Hemel and Posner, Congress holds the ultimate key
to impeachment.
Historical Point: The impeachment charges for both Presidents Richard Nixon and
Bill Clinton involved obstruction of justice. However, Nixon resigned before he
could be impeached, and the Senate vote on Clinton’s impeachment resulted in a
50-50 tie.
======================================================
ORIGINAL POST STARTS FROM HERE
WASHINGTON (reported
on by The Washington Post and confirmed by NBC
News).
Key
Point:
Trump's personal lawyer,
John Dowd, has taken responsibility for a tweet that Trump sent the previous
day, in which the president said for the first time that he knew his former
security adviser, Michael Flynn, had lied to the FBI before he fired Flynn in
February.
The supposed tweet from Trump himself caused an uproar
in Washington because it implied Trump knew Flynn had committed a felony —
lying to the FBI — when he told then-FBI director James Comey to go easy on
Flynn the day after the firing.
Impact of Dowd-drafted/Trump tweet: Interfering in the FBI's investigation
could be construed as
obstructing justice, potentially creating legal jeopardy for Trump.
Then within
a few hours, Trump's personal lawyer, John Dowd, stepped in to say that he
wrote the tweet, not the president.
Refer the Dowd’s
statement above.
Trump in
true fashion, issued 10 tweets in 24 hours related to the Russia investigation,
and to the FBI, and to how federal investigators should really be looking into
Hillary Clinton.
Trump again in one tweet denied that he asked Comey to back off the investigation,
though Comey earlier testified to that effect under oath before Congress,
adding: I never asked Comey to stop
investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!”
(I insert:
Let me be clear the “Fake News” label is getting old and sick – but boy does it
stick with the Trump loyalists and he milks all the miles he can get. Indeed
what Trumpettes do not like nor accept as fact or the truth gets that label …
shame on them and shame on us for not blasting them for such a cheap stunt).
Dowd went on
say that Trump's other
tweet saying Flynn was fired in part for lying to the FBI was a
reference to a statement made by acting Attorney General Sally Yates when she
came to the White House on January 26, and when she told White House Counsel
Don McGahn that Flynn had “given the agents the same story he gave the Vice President,
and “For some reason, the DOJ didn't want
to make an accusation of lying. The agents thought Flynn was confused,” concluded Dowd, then he added: “McGahn then passed that information on to
the president. And all the president knew was that the DOJ was not accusing him
of lying.”
Last Notes: It sounds like Dowd is building a
defense strategy for Trump for down the road trial or impeachment or Mueller
interview.
The GOP and rightwing surrogates in the media are
having kittens over this story from ABC (Brian Ross was suspended and not paid
for a month for his choice of words as to when Trump knew (as candidate Trump
or president-elect Trump or in fact as we now heard from Dowd, as President
Trump).
Dowd and that ilk have caused this murky set of
stories all the while blaming ABC news and Ross.
They are to be held to account and apologize to ABC,
Ross, and the public for the what I believe was their intent all along … make
it look like “Fake News” for Trump follow up tweets – which he obliged – and taint
ABC and Ross and everyone else – when in the fact the facts were distorted and
twisted by Dowd and then of course, Trump – so, were they actually working it
that way? I think so.
How’s that for a plot?
On top of all this we are about to be consumed in one
huge legal Mumbo Jumbo back and forth long before any solution is reached that the
majority public will accept.
That is my hunch, so stay tuned. It’s far from anywhere
near being over.
Thanks for stopping by.
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