President Donald Trump is so enraged by the FBI raid of his lawyer’s office and home, The Washington Post reports, that he is leaning against sitting for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump’s lawyers are still open to the interview, but Trump is “deeply rattled” by what has been done to Michael Cohen, so his legal team “now views a Mueller sit-down as less likely.”
Here’s how Trump’s advisers describe his thinking to The Post: “Trump was infuriated by the seizure of possibly sensitive correspondence involving work that Cohen — his close friend, consigliere and personal ‘fixer’ — was doing on his behalf and believed Mueller’s team was operating in bad faith, two people familiar with the president’s frustration said. …
“The raid alarmed and angered Trump and led to a tense afternoon meeting between Trump advisers and Mueller’s team, according to one person familiar with the talks. The president viewed the raid on his personal attorney as a breach of his team’s cordial working relationship with Mueller’s investigators and swiftly turned on them, another person said.”
As always, there is a temptation to dismiss what Trump says or reportedly thinks as mere bluster, but here once again, this actually means something significant. Trump’s view that he’s being treated unfairly hints at his actual view of how the law should treat him, which is to say, that it shouldn’t apply to him at all.
Of course, it is absurd that Trump, of all people, is lodging an accusation of bad faith in this context. Trump has entertained the idea of firing Mueller and even unsuccessfully ordered his White House counsel to carry out the deed.
Trump tried to hound Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of his job while raging that Sessions had recused himself instead of protecting Trump from the investigation.
In December, Trump again told his advisers that he wanted Mueller’s probe shut down. This year, Trump released the bad-faith-saturated Nunes memo, to give himself pretext to possibly remove Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, apparently to install a loyalist to oversee the probe instead.
Trump has attacked the investigation as “corrupt” and a “witch hunt” and has relentlessly lied to create the impression that law enforcement is riddled with corruption to its core. Trump recently suggested publicly that he might fire Mueller.
On Wednesday, Trump claimed that he didn’t fire FBI Director James Comey “because of the phony Russia investigation,” even though he previously confirmed precisely the contrary on national television. The notion that Trump is the sudden victim amid what had been a “cordial working relationship” with Mueller is just delusional.
But beyond that, Trump’s belief that the raid on Cohen betrays Mueller’s bad faith is revealing in another way.
In an interview, former prosecutor Renato Mariotti pointed out that to search Cohen’s home and office, the feds needed to get a warrant — and the fact that it was awarded suggests there was good reason to conduct the search.
“What it means is that a judge found that there is good reason to believe that a crime occurred, and that evidence of that particular crime would be found in Cohen’s home and office,” Mariotti said. “The judge had to make that finding.”
Conservative legal writer Andrew McCarthy, a skeptic of the Russia probe, has similarly argued that the very fact that prosecutors sought to raid a lawyer’s office suggests that they are examining potentially serious crimes, such as “conspiracy to commit fraud and extortion” to silence “potentially compromising sources” who were in a position to discuss Trump’s alleged affairs, which could implicate Trump himself.
(As The New York Times noted, a warrant was granted to prosecutors working separately from Mueller to search for all documents relating to Cohen’s efforts to “suppress negative publicity ahead of the 2016 election.”)
Seeking a warrant is “what the law wants law enforcement to do,” Mariotti said.
“What is bad faith about going to a judge and getting a warrant?” Mariotti noted that it is possible to seek a warrant in bad faith, say, by lying to a judge, but that this hadn’t been demonstrated or even alleged.
Trump cares about the integrity of the legal process, but only as it applies to him. His rage over the raiding of his lawyer’s office betrays a double standard toward due process, given that he cheers on law enforcement abuse directed at Muslims, immigrants and African-Americans. Trump is entertaining firing Rosenstein for the express reason that Rosenstein is conducting himself by the book, rather than politicizing law enforcement to Trump’s benefit.
When Comey violated protocol to criticize Hillary Clinton while ending the probe into her emails, Trump seized on it to savage her at the time, and then recently used it as a phony pretext to fire Comey to derail legitimate scrutiny of himself.
Trump’s real objection to the raid on Cohen isn’t that law enforcement is victimizing him by abusing the process. It’s that legitimate law enforcement scrutiny is being applied to him.
Greg Sargent is a Washington Post columnist. Twitter: @ theplumlinegs.