If Intel Officials Could Have Testified to Trumps Obstruction Innocence, They Would Have

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http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/06/07/if_intel_officials_could_have_testified_to_trump_s_obstruction_innocence.html


June 7 2017 2:22 PM
If Intel Officials Could Have Testified to Trump’s Obstruction Innocence, They Would Have
By Michelle Goldberg


On Wednesday morning, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats; Adm. Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency; acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe; and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Officially, the hearing was about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But all the Democratic senators, and some of the Republican ones, used the opportunity to question the men under oath about whether Donald Trump had tried to quash the investigation into his administration’s Russia ties, as the Washington Post and others have reported.

To the senators’ mounting frustration, the intelligence officials repeatedly refused to answer their questions. Those refusals, however, tell us a lot. It appears they couldn’t defend Trump without committing perjury. Nor could they tell the truth without dramatically undermining Trump’s administration. So, in a series of increasingly contentious exchanges, they simply defied the lawmakers tasked with overseeing their agencies.

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In an extraordinary moment, a stumbling Coats replied, “I’m not sure I have a legal basis.” He then said he’d answer the questions during a closed session. King pressed him for a commitment to answer the questions “in a direct and unencumbered way” in closed session later on Wednesday. Coats said he first needed to talk to the general counsel in the White House. Faced with the same question, Rogers also said he needed to consult the White House. (The chairman of the committee, Sen. Richard Burr, later said that the classified Wednesday briefing was going to be with lower ranking officials on technical matters. A closed-door session on the crucial question of whether or not the President of the United States asked intelligence officials to intervene to shut down an investigation into his campaign and its possible collusion with Russia could take place at a later date)

“It is my belief that you are inappropriately refusing to answer these questions today,” King concluded. He’s clearly right. Nevertheless, their unwillingness to testify to Trump’s innocence already answers a great deal.