If President Trump is indeed guilty of some sort of obstruction of justice, he should be particularly worried at the news that former White House communications director Hope Hicks is cooperating with the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation of her former boss.
This is not to say that Hicks is anything but loyal to Trump. But if there’s anyone whose truthful testimony or production of documents might inadvertently snare the president, that someone is Hicks. She was so well ensconced in Trump’s inner circle, and so trusted, that if, repeat, if, anything was legally amiss, she likely would have witnessed it or been a part of it, whether with any ill intent on her own part or not.
According to multiple reports about the subjects of committee Democrats’ interest in Hicks, one of the most prominent items on their list, sometimes the very first subject mentioned, is “the drafting of a 2017 press statement about a 2016 meeting in Trump Tower involving Donald Trump Jr. and some Russian officials.”
We have been told, from public statements of a key player in that episode, that Hicks made statements easily construed as suggesting that key evidence be withheld.
Longtime Washington public relations veteran Mark Corallo, who was handling communications for Trump’s outside legal team, has told special counsel Robert Mueller that Hicks suggested, in Trump’s presence, that emails involving that Trump Tower meeting “will never get out.” As described by the New York Times, “that left Corallo with concerns that Ms. Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice.”
Corallo reportedly cut off the conversation right there, saying that Hicks must not realize the legal jeopardy the discussion might put the president in. Through her lawyer, Hicks denied Corallo’s account. But Corallo, known as a stickler for proper procedure, was so bothered by the White House’s handling of the matter that he resigned from the Trump account three days later.
As Corallo has told the story, the impression is that Hicks, whose background was in public relations for fashion companies rather than in politics, may have spoken out of naivete about the legal standards pertaining to ongoing investigations rather than with corrupt intent. What that could mean, though, is that in Trump’s famously unstructured White House, Hicks or even Trump himself could have stumbled into violations rather willy-nilly.
According to CNN, the committee has demanded from Hicks “documents from ‘any personal or work diary, journal or other book containing notes, a record or a description of daily events’ about Trump, the Trump campaign, the Trump Organization and the executive office of the President.”
That is potentially a lot of raw material, if she cooperates fully, which is what she apparently plans to do. Trump is so mercurial, and so apt to change his stories as the mood strikes him, that one can easily imagine Hicks taking notes that, in hindsight, show Trump improperly hindering the investigation.
This is not to make any assumptions that Trump is guilty. It is to say that if he is guilty of something, Hicks’ testimony is probably the most likely to reveal it, even if she doesn’t intend to implicate him in wrongdoing.
As we now know for a fact, the Trump team’s original statements about the now-famous Trump Tower meeting were false. Hicks was intimately involved in drafting that statement, and then in trying to clean up after that original hiccup. If the modus operandi, then or in any other instances, was as sloppy as Corallo has described, that’s where Democrats trying to nab Trump will seek evidence of malfeasance.
