The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is being investigated for obstruction of justice as part of the Russiagate. This is the same crime hypothesis for which Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, avoiding a certain impeachment. And to publish the news (or rather, the scoop) is once again the Washington Post, the same newspaper that 43 years ago, thanks to the investigation by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, shed light on the Watergate scandal.
“The special prosecutor (Robert Mueller, ed), who is leading the investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election, will question senior intelligence officials as part of a broader investigation that now includes examining whether Donald Trump attempted to obstruct justice,” writes WP.
According to five sources informed about the facts, the head of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, the director of the NSA Mike Rogers and his former deputy Richard Ledgett have agreed to be heard from Mueller in the next few days.
The three will appear voluntarily but it's not clear whether they will fully describe their conversations with Trump or if the president will use his executive privilege to keep them secret. This faculty was questioned by some experts, who recalled that the Supreme Court ruled during Watergate that executives cannot use this privilege to block evidence in criminal investigations.
The reaction of Marc Kasowitz, the private lawyer who defends Trump in the Russiagate, was immediate: "The leak of news from the FBI concerning the president is scandalous, unjustifiable and illegal", commented Marko Corallo, a spokesman for him.
The hypothesis of obstruction of justice emerged after Trump unexpectedly fired the then FBI chief, James Comey, who was investigating Russiagate. Furthermore, the hypothesis took shape after the testimony of Comey himself in the Senate, who accused Trump of having pressured him to drop the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The President disputed this version, calling Comey a liar, and said he was ready to testify under oath.
The move of the Muellers suggests, according to the Wp, that the prosecutor wants to go beyond the dispute between the two, looking for evidence against (or exculpatory) with other witnesses. According to press reports in recent days, the president telephoned Coats and Rogers asking them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion between his campaign and the Russians. Coats also allegedly told some of his collaborators that Trump had asked him to intervene on Comey to let go of Flynn.
In their public hearing in the Senate, both intelligence chiefs denied having ever been pressured by Trump, but also specified that they did not want to reveal the content of the conversations with the President. Will they do it with Mueller? As for Ledgett, he allegedly wrote the internal NSA memo documenting the president's call to Rogers. In the meantime, the special prosecutor has already acquired Comey's memos on his talks with the tycoon.
