Will the president try to nobble the Russia inquiry?

If anyone thought last week’s midterm
elections would have a chastening
effect on Donald Trump, it didn’t take
long for him to disabuse them, said
Dana Milbank in The Washington Post.
The day after the elections, the president
gave a press conference that made it
clear that “he’s determined to be even
worse in defeat”. Trump hailed the
election results as “very close to
complete victory”, despite the fact that
Democrats won control of the House
of Representatives for the first time in
eight years; he mocked Republicans who
lost, blaming them for not embracing
him enough; he threatened to retaliate
against prospective Democratic probes by adopting a “warlike
posture”; and he renewed his “enemy of the people” charge
against the press. Then, soon after the conference, Trump
delivered his “coup de grâce” by announcing that he had
ousted his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and replaced him
with a Trump loyalist, Matthew Whitaker.
Trump had been gunning for Sessions for ages, said The New
York Times. He never forgave his top law official for recusing
himself from overseeing the Justice Department investigation
into Russian election interference, rather than shutting it
down. He publicly described Sessions as “VERY weak” and
“DISGRACEFUL”, and in private referred to him derisively
as “Mr Magoo” after the befuddled cartoon character. Now
that Sessions is out of the way, the Russia probe could be
living on borrowed time. The “good
news” – at least for those who believe
in accountability – is that nobody can
stop the prosecutions or litigation
already in progress against various
Trump aides and associates. The courts
will have the final say on those. But the
loyalist Whitaker will be in a position
to undermine the ongoing investigation,
led by special counsel Robert Mueller,
and to block the final report being
passed to Congress. Whitaker has
previously described the probe as a
“witch-hunt”, and suggested that it
should be starved of funding in order
to make it grind almost to a halt.
The ironic thing about Trump’s grudge against Sessions,
said Jonathan Turley in USA Today, is that nobody has done
more than Sessions to advance the president’s policies on
immigration, criminal justice and other issues. And Sessions’
decision to recuse himself from the Russian probe was also
in Trump’s interests. Mueller is “clearly winding down his
investigation”, and it seems unlikely that Trump himself will
be “indicted or even implicated in collusion or obstruction”.
It would benefit Trump in that case for the report to be seen
to be “untainted by questions of improper influence”. But if
Whitaker now interferes with Mueller’s investigation, it will
be seen as evidence of Trump’s guilt and could prompt new
charges of obstruction. Whitaker’s appointment, in short,
“could still snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory”.