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Just a day after President Donald Trump warned the Justice Department investigating possible ties between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia not to cross a red line and start looking into his family business, a report suggested the U.S. special counsel leading the probe did just that.
Trump told the New York Times that he would not accept an investigation into his family businesses. But today a source revealed that the special investigator is looking into a variety of Trump businesses, and their interactions with Russian banks and tycoons.
The areas of investigation, according to an unnamed source who spoke with Bloomberg, include: Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump's involvement in a SoHo hotel with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump?s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch.
He has lashed out at Attorney General Jeff Sessions and signaled there could be repercussions. What happens next is anyone's best guess. Trump's mercurial decision-making process is hard to predict and somewhat dependent on how successful his political advisors are at convincing him that to get rid of more people would constitute political suicide. But constitutional lawyers reached by Newsweek say the President could fire or sideline Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and at least temporarily impede special investigator Robert Mueller if not actually make him go away.
Trump has found himself now painted into a corner and it's a very dangerous position for the country, says Norm Eisen, a lawyer with Brookings Institution. But the jam he finds himself in is one that's familiar to others - going all the way back to Nixon's Saturday night massacre - who have tried to control the operation of the American system of checks and balances from oval office. The system is resilient even with the abdication of Republican oversight from Congress."
But there is a mechanism by which Trump could legally impede the investigation, at least temporarily, according to constitutional lawyer Richard Painter. This is the risk: Sessions quits or is forced out or fired, Painter said. Then he puts in another acting Attorney General, a crony who didn't work on the campaign, and who wouldn't recuse on Russia. Things sit for two or three weeks and then the acting AG fires Mueller or, more probably, starts to just meddle in his business and looks for an excuse to impede it.
It's really dangerous territory now, Beyer said. The biggest question with Russia is not so much that he's on the same page philosophically with Putin, but that when American bankers would not bail him out, the Russians came in. He might not have lost his hotels, but only thanks to their money. This is where he must be somewhat panicked. Not about election collusion but the role of Russian money in the Trump businesses.
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