WASHINGTON \u2014 For years, President Trump has used Twitter as his go-to public relations weapon, mounting a barrage of attacks on celebrities and then political rivals even after advisers warned he could be creating legal problems for himself.<\/p>\n
Those concerns now turn out to be well founded. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is scrutinizing tweets and negative statements from the president about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to three people briefed on the matter.<\/p>\n
Several of the remarks came as Mr. Trump was also privately pressuring the men \u2014 both key witnesses in the inquiry \u2014 about the investigation, and Mr. Mueller is examining whether the actions add up to attempts to obstruct the investigation by both intimidating witnesses and pressuring senior law enforcement officials to tamp down the inquiry.<\/p>\n
Mr. Mueller wants to question the president about the tweets. His interest in them is the latest addition to a range of presidential actions he is investigating as a possible obstruction case: private interactions with Mr. Comey, Mr. Sessions and other senior administration officials about the Russia inquiry; misleading White House statements; public attacks; and possible pardon offers to potential witnesses.<\/p>\n
None of what Mr. Mueller has homed in on constitutes obstruction, Mr. Trump\u2019s lawyers said. They argued that most of the presidential acts under scrutiny, including the firing of Mr. Comey, fall under Mr. Trump\u2019s authority as the head of the executive branch and insisted that he should not even have to answer Mr. Mueller\u2019s questions about obstruction.<\/p>\n
But privately, some of the lawyers have expressed concern that Mr. Mueller will stitch together several episodes, encounters and pieces of evidence, like the tweets, to build a case that the president embarked on a broad effort to interfere with the investigation. Prosecutors who lack one slam-dunk piece of evidence in obstruction cases often search for a larger pattern of behavior, legal experts said.<\/p>\n
The special counsel\u2019s investigators have told Mr. Trump\u2019s lawyers they are examining the tweets under a wide-ranging obstruction-of-justice law beefed up after the Enron accounting scandal, according to the three people. The investigators did not explicitly say they were examining possible witness tampering, but the nature of the questions they want to ask the president, and the fact that they are scrutinizing his actions under a section of the United States Code titled \u201cTampering With a Witness, Victim, or an Informant,\u201d raised concerns for his lawyers about Mr. Trump\u2019s exposure in the investigation.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for Mr. Mueller\u2019s office declined to comment.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump\u2019s lead lawyer in the case, Rudolph W. Giuliani, dismissed Mr. Mueller\u2019s interest in the tweets as part of a desperate quest to sink the president.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public,\u201d Mr. Giuliani said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Giuliani was referring to more typical obstruction cases, where prosecutors focus on measures taken in private, like bribing witnesses, destroying evidence or lying under oath. While some of Mr. Trump\u2019s private acts are under scrutiny, like asking Mr. Comey for loyalty, his public conduct is as well. That sets this investigation apart, even from those of other presidents; Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton were accused of privately trying to influence witness testimony.<\/p>\n
But as in those cases, federal investigators are seeking to determine whether Mr. Trump was trying to use his power to punish anyone who did not go along with his attempts to curtail the investigation.<\/p>\n
If Mr. Mueller opts to tailor a narrative that the president tried to obstruct the Russia investigation, he would have to clear several hurdles to make a strong case. He would need credible witnesses (Mr. Comey and Mr. Sessions have been the target of concerted attacks by Mr. Trump and allies, undercutting their standing) and evidence that Mr. Trump had criminal intent (the special counsel has told the president\u2019s lawyers he needs to question him to determine this).<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s rarely evidence that someone sits down and says, \u2018I intend to commit a crime,\u2019 so any type of investigation hangs on using additional evidence to build a narrative arc that hangs together,\u201d said Samuel W. Buell, a professor of law at Duke University and former senior federal prosecutor. \u201cThat\u2019s why a prosecutor wants more pieces of evidence. You need to lock down the argument.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is not clear what Mr. Mueller will do if he concludes he has enough evidence to prove that Mr. Trump committed a crime. He has told the president\u2019s lawyers that he will follow Nixon- and Clinton-era Justice Department memos that concluded that a sitting president cannot be indicted, Mr. Giuliani has said. If Mr. Mueller does not plan to make a case in court, a report of his findings could be sent to Congress, leaving it to lawmakers to decide whether to begin impeachment proceedings.<\/p>\n
Investigators want to ask Mr. Trump about the tweets he wrote about Mr. Sessions and Mr. Comey and why he has continued to publicly criticize Mr. Comey and the former deputy F.B.I. director Andrew G. McCabe, another witness against the president. They also want to know about a January episode in the Oval Office in which Mr. Trump asked the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, about reports that Mr. McGahn told investigators about the president\u2019s efforts to fire Mr. Mueller himself last year.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump has navigated the investigation with a mix of public and private cajoling of witnesses.<\/p>\n
Around the time he said publicly last summer that he would have chosen another attorney general had he known Mr. Sessions was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump tried behind closed doors to persuade Mr. Sessions to reverse that decision. The special counsel\u2019s investigators have also learned that Mr. Trump wanted Mr. Sessions to resign at varying points in May and July 2017 so he could replace him with a loyalist to oversee the Russia investigation.<\/p>\n
After Mr. Trump tried last July to get Mr. Sessions to resign, the president began a three-day public attack on a variety of fronts \u2014 tweets, a Rose Garden news conference and a Wall Street Journal interview \u2014 criticizing Mr. Sessions, raising the specter that he would fire him.<\/p>\n
Similarly, Mr. Trump\u2019s relationship with Mr. Comey was strained from the start by the president\u2019s encroachment on the typically independent Justice Department. In late March of 2017, the president asked Mr. Comey to put out word that he was not under investigation. Mr. Comey demurred, and when the president called about two weeks later to ask again, Mr. Comey responded that he had passed along the proposal to the Justice Department, he later testified.<\/p>\n
That request having gone nowhere, Mr. Trump issued an indirect threat the next day about Mr. Comey\u2019s job. \u201cIt\u2019s not too late\u201d to ask him to step down as F.B.I. director, he said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network. The special counsel wants to ask the president what he meant by that remark.<\/p>\n
A few weeks later, in early May, an aide to Mr. Sessions sought derogatory information about the F.B.I. director. Mr. Sessions, his aide told a Capitol Hill staff member, wanted one negative article a day in the news media about Mr. Comey, a person familiar with the meeting has said.<\/p>\n
Four days later, Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey, citing at first his management of the investigation of Hillary Clinton\u2019s use of a private email server to handle classified information.<\/p>\n
By the fall, Mr. Comey had become a chief witness against the president in the special counsel investigation, and Mr. Trump\u2019s ire toward him was well established. His personal attacks evolved into attacks on Mr. Comey\u2019s work, publicly calling on the Justice Department to examine his handling of the Clinton inquiry \u2014 and drawing the special counsel\u2019s interest.<\/p>\n
Mr. Mueller\u2019s deputies told Mr. Trump\u2019s lawyers they also wanted to question the president about similar statements at the time by the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Department of Justice has to look into any allegations of whether or not something is illegal or not,\u201d Ms. Sanders said at a press briefing last September. \u201cThat\u2019s not up to me to decide. What I\u2019ve said and what I\u2019m talking about are facts. James Comey \u2014 leaking of information, questionable statements under oath, politicizing an investigation \u2014 those are real reasons for why he was fired.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump\u2019s lawyers have pushed back against the special counsel about the tweets, saying the president is a politician under 24-hour attack and is within his rights to defend himself using social media or any other means.<\/p>\n
The president continues to wield his Twitter account to pummel witnesses and the investigation itself, ignoring any legal concerns or accusations of witness intimidation. This week, he moved to strip the security clearances of six former senior national security officials, including Mr. Comey, Mr. McCabe and some of his most outspoken critics. And he tweeted false claims about the Russia investigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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