Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump’s greatest peril could soon become a reality

Donald Trump is playing hard to get. Asked yesterday at the White House whether he would meet with Special Counsel Robert Mueller for an interview, Trump began back-pedalling on his previous and emphatic ‘100 per cent’. Now, Trump said, ‘we’ll see what happens’. For good measure, he threw in a few of his favourite terms of opprobrium such as ‘witch hunt’ and ‘Democrat hoax’. And in a tweet he lambasted ‘Sneaky Dianne Feinstein’ and said it was high time for Republicans to ‘take control’ of the Russia investigations.

Feinstein is a liberal grandee from California, whose putative sneakiness consisted of releasing a 300-page interview by the Senate Judiciary Committee with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the firm that compiled the controversial dossier on Trump’s Russia connections, real or imagined.  ‘People’, Feinstein said, ‘can make up their own minds’ about the veracity of accusations about the dossier and the contents of the interview with Simpson. Simpson himself urged Congress to make his testimony public: writing in the New York Times, he and his Fusion partner Peter Fritsch complained, ‘Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right’.

Feinstein’s move amounted to retaliation for Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham lodging a criminal referral to the Justice Department for the former British spy Christopher Steele. What his crime exactly consisted of the Senators never said. Given that the FBI talks to anyone, including mobsters, for information about crimes and plots, the referral seems wholly bogus.

But the prolonged interview with Simpson certainly makes for fascinating reading. Simpson comes across as level-headed and patient and careful in assessing the evidence, such as it is. His testimony does not exactly bolster the Republican effort to depict the dossier as concocted out of thin air; rather, it indicates that Steele’s investigations were only a part of a broader effort to examine Trump’s business dealings abroad and that abundant evidence existed of his willingness to treat with some very unsavoury characters.

So far, Republicans have mainly been able to shield Trump by refusing to hold public hearings with administration or campaign officials.

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