Timeline of Deceit: From Trump's Draft to Rosenstein's Cover Story
June 26, 2019, 6:00 am
Murray Waas
In a confidential draft of a letter that President Trump wrote, firing James Comey as FBI director, the president repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s covert interference in the 2016 presidential election. That the FBI’s inquiry was the president’s main complaint in the original four-page May 2017 draft provides new and previously unreported evidence that Trump’s primary motivation in firing Comey may have been to impede the Russia investigation, a potential obstruction of justice. Although the existence of the draft was first disclosed by The New York Times in the fall of 2017, and it was discussed at some length in the Mueller Report, the text of the letter itself has remained secret; also previously undisclosed is the fact that President Trump so directly linked the firing of Comey to the FBI’s Russia investigation.
In the letter, President Trump railed against the Russia investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated.” He complained about then Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s involvement in the investigation, claiming bias since McCabe’s wife had run for state office as a Democrat. The letter also expressed frustration that Comey had refused to issue a public statement saying the president was not under investigation. In part because of these things, the draft letter said, morale was at an all-time low at the FBI.
Finally, as I have previously reported, Trump claimed that shortly after he became president, he had told Comey that he was only allowing him to stay on in his job as FBI director on a probationary or trial basis; he had then decided to fire Comey when he failed to improve his performance—a claim that Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded was likely concocted by Trump. By the time a final version of the letter was made public, the president’s advisers had intervened and the letter was cut from four pages to only five sentences, with all of the president’s aforementioned references to the Russia investigation removed.
These new disclosures of what Trump said in the draft termination letter highlight the central parts played in the affair by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Even though Trump had provided them copies of the draft letter, the nation’s two top federal law enforcement officials agreed to assist the president in his effort to fire Comey. Notably, Rosenstein has said he had no reason to believe that Trump fired Comey to undercut the FBI’s Russia investigation until after Comey’s firing. The draft letter appears to directly contradict that claim.
Contemporaneous notes made by then White House Counsel Don McGahn and then Deputy White House Counsel Uttam Dhillon indicate that both men had concerns at the time that the president’s firing of his FBI director could be considered an obstruction of justice. According to the Mueller Report: “McGahn and Dhillon said the fact that neither Sessions nor Rosenstein objected to replacing Comey gave them peace of mind that the President’s decision to fire Comey was not an attempt to obstruct justice.”
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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/06/26/timeline-of-deceit-from-trumps-draft-to-rosensteins-cover-story/
