The ongoing Russian email scandal has been center stage in the news recently (to the point where it has its own section on CNN). The latest development, after Donald Trump Jr.’s tweeted emails and the scheduled Senate hearing, is the launch of an official government investigation. Former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and his team of special counsel will be looking into Trump’s dealings with Russia and determining whether they were 100 percent legal.
Trump’s legal team has allegedly launched a counter-investigation of their own to compile any potential conflicts of interest Mueller might have that would prevent him from participating in this probe. According to The Washington Post, conflicts of interest can be cause for an attorney general to remove special counsel from office.
Trump reportedly has asked his advisers about his abilities to pardon people involved in the investigation, such as family members, aides and even himself. The new White House Press Secretary Anthony Scaramucci confirms the president was curious about how far his pardoning powers go, but told CNN that Trump is “thinking about pardoning nobody.” Trump, of course, weighed in on Twitter and seized the opportunity to reassert his own innocence.
While all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us.FAKE NEWS
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017
Sources also say Trump is annoyed by the prospect that the investigation could involve his personal finances, especially since he’s refused to publicly release his tax returns. “The president’s making clear that the special counsel should not move outside the scope of the investigation,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a news briefing on Thursday. As Bloomberg reported on Thursday, Mueller intends to expand the probe to include Trump’s business dealings as well, but Trump told The New York Times that digging too deep into his bank statements would be crossing a “red line,” describing his finances as “extremely good.” But Mueller clearly wants all the evidence at his disposal for this investigation, and sent the White House a “document preservation request,” instructing them not to destroy any documents that might be relevant to the investigation. Since Donald Trump Jr.’s first meeting with a Russian lawyer was last summer, that’s a lot of documents.
As the investigation gets underway with Jared Kushner’s Senate testimony Monday morning, Trump and his administration continue to claim there was no collusion with Russia. According to Scaramucci, Trump believes, “maybe they did it, maybe they didn’t do it.”