President Donald Trump has pushed at least seven officials to put an end to investigations at various levels of government into whether his campaign helped Russia meddle in the 2016 presidential election.
On Thursday The New York Times revealed that over the summer Trump urged members of the Senate—including those leading the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation—to wrap up their investigations.
The chairman of the intelligence committee, Republican Richard Burr, said in an interview that Trump made a request “something along the lines of ‘I hope you can conclude this as quickly as possible.’”
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President Donald Trump speaks with reporters at the White House on November 28. The president has reportedly asked several officials to end the Russia investigations as soon as possible. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
However, a Republican senator who spoke to Burr told the Times that Trump had been “very forceful” in conversations with Burr. Another senator, who also remained anonymous, told the paper Trump called other congressional members, asking them to lean on Burr to end the investigation.
Burr said other members of his committee told him of similar calls they received from Trump but said he didn’t feel pressured to end the probe, chalking up the president’s actions to inexperience.
According to lawmakers and aides, Trump also approached Republican Senator Roy Blunt, who sits on the committee, and Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, with requests to end the investigations quickly.
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The news brings to seven the total number of officials Trump has asked to help end the multiple investigations moving forward in both branches of Congress and the Department of Justice.
Special counsel Robert Mueller is pushing ahead with his investigation of whether Trump obstructed justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey, who was leading one of the investigations.
Congress started its investigation early this year after key American intelligence agencies compiled a report that found Russia worked to undermine Trump’s campaign rival Hillary Clinton and assist his campaign.
The latest news is a “huge story,” wrote attorney Norm Eisen on Twitter Thursday because it “corroborates a corrupt motive” for Trump’s firing of Comey on May 9.
Eisen, a former White House special counsel for ethics and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, published a report in October arguing that Trump obstructed justice by attempting to intervene in the investigations.
In a letter written by Comey ahead of his testimony to Burr’s committee in June, he wrote that Trump had pressured him on several occasions to end the part of the investigation examining former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Writing about a rare private meeting between the president and his top law enforcement official in February, Comey said Trump tried to pressure him into “letting Flynn go.” The request came after Flynn misled Vice President Mike Pence about contact he had had with the Russian ambassador. Trump made a similar request to him in a phone call, Comey said.
During closed testimony before Burr’s committee and in separate interviews with Mueller’s legal team in June, two top Trump administration intelligence officials said the president approached them to defend him publicly against the investigations, multiple sources told CNN.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers said Trump asked them to state publicly that his campaign did not work with Russia to interfere in the election. A report by The Wall Street Journal in June cited sources who said Trump also called Rogers to state publicly that there is no evidence his campaign colluded with Russia.
Officials who spoke with The Washington Post in June said that Trump applied pressure to CIA Director Mike Pompeo in March when he kept Pompeo and Coats behind after a meeting to complain about Comey’s handling of the Russia investigation. Coats reportedly told other officials that Trump had asked for an intervention. It is not known whether Trump asked Pompeo directly to intervene.
Trump’s request came after Comey testified before Congress that the FBI was investigating whether Trump’s campaign worked with Russia during the election campaign.
“Who believes at this point he didn’t obstruct justice?” former Department of Justice public affairs director Matthew Miller‏ wrote on Twitter Thursday.
“Pressuring senators to end an investigation that impacts him & those close to him could be further evidence of obstruction of justice by the President,” wrote Noah Bookbinder‏, an attorney who co-wrote the report with Eisen, on Thursday. He called Trump’s behavior “part of a pattern of conduct.”

James S. Robbins, Opinion columnist Published 6:00 a.m. ET Dec. 4, 2017

On Friday, President Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about a perfectly legal conversation he had during the presidential transition with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn should not have lied, and why he chose to remains a mystery, but the substance of the single-count indictment against Flynn shows that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has strayed far from its original purpose.
We have come down quite a way from the hyperventilation about Russia “hacking the election” a year ago. What happened to Democratic Sen. Mark Warner’s claim, later promoted by Hillary Clinton, that there were 1,000 Russian agents planting anti-Hillary fake news stories in key swing states? Or that Russians had delivered Wisconsin to Trump? All the conspiracy theorists have so far are a few Facebook ads that can’t credibly be shown to have changed even one vote.
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Flynn was fully in his rights making the call to Kislyak. Despite the best efforts of the anti-Trumpers, it is still not illegal to talk to Russians. Even Democratic former CIA director and Defense secretary Leon Panetta said it was a “stretch” to say these contacts broke the law.
The dust-up seems mainly to be about the decorum of presidential transitions. Days after the 2016 election, the Trump team cautioned the Obama administration against pursuing new and damaging foreign policy initiatives that did not align with Trump’s priorities.
“I don’t think it’s in keeping with the spirit of the transition,” one of president-elect Trump’s national security advisers told Politico on Nov. 10, 2016, “to try to push through agenda items that are contrary to the president-elect’s positions.”
The Trump transition team feared, for good reason, that the lame-duck Obama administration was poisoning the well with Russia, and pursuing spiteful anti-Israel policies on the way out the door. Trump asked Flynn, his soon-to-be national security adviser, to open a semi-official channel to Russia through its ambassador to discuss future cooperative efforts against the Islamic State and the United Nations vote on an anti-Israel resolution. As lawyer Alan Dershowitz argued, “Not only was that request not criminal, it was the right thing to do.”
The phone call to Kislyak, and any other such contacts with foreign officials, should be viewed in that context. This was not, for example, on the level of colluding with shadowy Russian intelligence contacts to create disinformation to try to swing the election, as the authors of the Clinton-connected Trump smear dossier did.
There was ample precedent for the president-elect to put out feelers to foreign leaders.

• A memo from the Podesta files released by WikiLeaks shows that the Obama team had planned for the “president-elect and senior officials (to) begin confidential policy consultations with key actors in U.S. and abroad” between Thanksgiving and Inauguration Day.
• Obama also openly used emissaries and go-betweens to meet with foreign leaders during his transition.
• And for overwrought members of “the resistance” who think the unenforceable Logan Act is suddenly in play, recall that in 2008 then-candidate Obama arranged substantive foreign policy discussions with numerous foreign dignitaries and leaders during an overseas campaign trip before the election.

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An erroneous ABC News report that Trump had dispatched Flynn to make contact with Russia before the election appears to have caused a massive stock market selloff. The report was corrected, and reporter Brian Ross was suspended. The important takeaway of ABC’s fake news outbreak is that since the Trump team’s outreach to Russia took place after the election, it implies there were no channels to Moscow before the fact. This puts a stake in the heart of the collusion theory.
A CNN analyst speculated that instead of outright coordination, there was an implicit quid pro quo for Russia getting Trump elected. This might be called the “grasping at straws” gambit.
On Sunday, Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., resurrected the notion that Trump obstructed justice by firing then-FBI Director and Bible scholar James Comey. But again, this is a weak and constitutionally suspect narrative.
The real obstruction might be found in the Mueller investigation itself. The legitimacy of the FBI witch hunt against Trump was further damaged by reports that leading FBI investigator Peter Strzok, who had spearheaded the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s sketchy home-brew email server, was demoted because of anti-Trump texts he exchanged with co-worker Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.
This is hardly an unbiased investigation. If the type of process crime that Flynn was nailed for is all the Mueller team can come up with, it is time to move on.
James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, has taught at the National Defense University and the Marine Corps University and served as a special assistant to the secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. Follow him on Twitter: @James_Robbins.

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