President Trump, in clumsy responses to interview questions, has warned Special Counsel Robert Mueller that he’d best not expand his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election too far. It is strange, to put it no more strongly, to read such threats against the investigator by a president whose adminisitration is being investigated. It carries weight, for Trump has the authority to fire Mueller, but to do so would do incalculable damage to his presidency.
Perhaps the only way for Trump to prevent an ever-expanding investigation, to keep things focused narrowly on questions of alleged collusion with Russia, and to make sure nobody gets dragged into side matters, is for all the president’s men to tell the whole truth rather than either to invite perjury investigations or to give technically true answers that actually conceal the real story and thus invite futher probing.
Trump needs to instruct his son, his former campaign aides, and everyone in his orbit to tell the truth unsparingly and to make sure the most embarrassing or damaging information comes out soon rather than later. For it will come out one way or another.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has called Donald Trump Jr. and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort to testify on Wednesday, July 26. Jared Kushner, Trump’s advisor and son-in-law, will testify in a closed session. Under oath, and after intensive coaching by counsel, these men will doubtless be tempted to offer lawyerly answers that cast shade rather than light.
Trump Jr. has been stingy with the truth. When asked about his June 2016 meeting with Russian officials, he originally it was about American adoption of Russians. This is true to the extent that this was the topic that appeared in the event to be his interlocutors’ real purpose. But Trump Jr.’s answer was deceptive because that partial truth was used to conceal the more important fact that he accepted the meeting thinking the Russians would give him campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Bit by bit, leaks have revealed that much more went on at that meeting, and that Trump’s original representation of what it was about was not honest. He knew he was meeting someone mixed up with Kremlin officials.
This was not illegal, as far as we can tell, although seeking dirt from such a source was politically boneheaded and morally compromising. Nor is it illegal, unseemly though it is, to veil the truth in one’s public statements. Trump Jr. could even argue that he said nothing clearly false.
But he was, nevertheless, deliberately misleading. He concealed the whole truth, eroding public trust of the entire Trump inner circle, and all but inviting urgent investigation.
Paul Manafort has proved himself unworthy of the public’s trust. He only belatedly registered as a foreign agent, for work he’d been paid to do for interests in Ukraine tied to the Russian regime. Only this week did Americans discover that Manafort was some $17 million in debt to companies tied to a Russian oligarch, tied to Vladimir Putin, and tied to a pro-Putin Ukrainian politician. Dirty laundry of this sort are what background checks are designed to discover. Big debts giving a hostile foreign power leverage over a man close to a presidential candidate raise the biggest red flags possible.
President Trump must put the weight of his office behind an insistence that both men be fully forthcoming when they testify. If they give narrow, evasive answers, if they continue to give incomplete versions of whatever happened, everyone will rightly wonder what they are hiding. Assuming he’s as innocent of wrongdoing, as he says, it is in the president’s interest to get everything out into the open as quickly as possible.
Republicans on the Intelligence Committee must not be satisfied with less than the whole truth, and must not protect their president with diversionary lines of questioning during the hearing. They should serve their country, not their party.
The various foreign contacts of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the unmasking of Team Trump members in foreign surveillance, are interesting topics in their own right, but they should not be allowed to distract and divert attention away from any wrongdoing by the men now in power or from the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Republicans must be just as dogged as Democrats in demanding not only the truth but the whole truth. They must give no quarter when incomplete or evasive answers are offered. We hope they will not shirk their duty to the public.
