Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort walks the floor at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 21, 2016. (Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
It’s always risky to write a recap of the week’s latest events in the Russia scandal on a Friday morning, since more often than not all hell breaks loose on Friday night. But this week’s been so full of news, what with a horrible earthquake in Mexico, another devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico, a disastrous speech by Donald Trump speech at the UN and a calamitous health care bill poised to pass the Senate, that Russia news seems almost anti-climactic. But in any other week, the information that has emerged in the last few days about the investigation would be dominating the front pages of papers all over the country.
There are a number of threads to the story to pull together. The first is that special counsel Robert Mueller has sent requests to the White House asking for various documents pertaining to Trump’s actions as president. These include the firing of James Comey and Michael Flynn, as well as requests for telephone records from Air Force One on the day the president helped draft the false statement about Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a purported representative of the Russian government, in hopes of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton. Even the White House lawyers are compelled to cooperate, thanks to Ken Starr and the Republicans’ obsessive pursuit of Bill Clinton’s sex life back in the 1990s. At that time, courts held that the president’s attorneys had to reveal any information they might possess about potential crimes implicating him.
There is no longer any doubt that Mueller’s office is investigating the president for possible obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation, and it doesn’t seem to be limited to events surrounding the Comey firing.
We’ve known the outlines of this before, but the details of Mueller’s requests show that he’s stepping up the…