According to a new report from the Washington Post, Donald Trump is privately seething about the Russia probe in a way that even his Twitter timeline has not yet indicated.
It’s a bit of a precipice for the President, who has been apparently dictating his own methods of attempting to discredit Special Counsel lead investigator and chief prosecutor Robert Mueller. The balance between the appearance of simply “expressing his opinion” and outright obstruction of justice has been a tightrope that Trump is learning to walk even as he gathers speed.
His dubious legal advice, dispensed by an evangelical Republican sycophant and a disgraced former mayor, has led him to believe that Mueller has no evidence of any wrongdoing by Trump, with one insider saying “Rudy’s told him the other player is bluffing with a pair of 2’s.” That is a bit of a double-edged sword: It makes him confident enough to swagger his way through social media, but uninformed enough to believe that even if crimes were committed around him, he’ll never be held accountable for them in any way.
That’s at the center of the WaPo article from today, in which it is revealed that Trump has worried to his confidantes about the fates of “innocent and decent people” who may be drawn into legal jeopardy by their association with the investigation — his namesake, for example, who Trump doesn’t think purposely broke the law, but fears “that Trump Jr. inadvertently may have wandered into legal Âjeopardy.”
That seems laughable on its face. If Trump thinks that there may have been a law broken in the Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, then the recent revelation that he knew about the meeting in advance and approved of it would belie his fear that “somebody else” may have committed a crime unless he really is vacant enough of critical thinking to think that he actually is above the law.
With the Manafort trial dominating the news and his name all over that coverage, it’s no wonder that Trump was seemingly getting his story straight with his former communications director Hope Hicks in a little pre-rally witness tampering session aboard Air Force One before his Ohio rally this evening.
Whether he believes that he has committed a crime or that his son has done so, the fact is that Trump now understands the family is in legal jeopardy, and that’s at least one step closer to seeing his fate in the distance.
Featured image via screen capture
