John Dowd Has The BEST Explanation For How Trump Didn't Admit To Obstruction

Trump's lawyer keeps making things worse.

Actual picture of presidential attorney John Dowd (screencapped from CNBC)

Smart people, represented by smart attorneys, keep their public-facing mouths shut while law enforcement hounds circle. Running your mouth off not only makes you look guilty, it just builds potential inconsistencies that prosecutors can exploit. President Trump does not follow this blueprint.

Saturday morning, Donald Trump’s Twitter account tossed out this gem, which will likely be remembered decades from now the same way we remember “the Missing 18 Minutes” or “the Blue Dress”:

Most legal observers responded to this Tweet — a Tweet positing that Trump knew Flynn committed a federal crime before he fired James Comey for (as he told Lester Holt in an interview) investigating that crime — with shock that someone would provide a paint-by-numbers indictment like that:

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But as bizarre as that Tweet was, it only got weirder when John Dowd, one of the Trump “Legal Nightmare Team,” claimed that he wrote the Tweet, not Trump.[1] I guess the theory was that if Trump didn’t write it himself, it wouldn’t be a damaging admission? That… doesn’t make much sense. It’s also way worse for Trump than just owning the Tweet and saying he wrote some nonsensical covfefe that he can’t be held to.

But this all assumes Dowd jumped on this grenade as part of some sort of brilliant legal strategy and not because Trump started hearing from cable news that he’d done something stupid and he just ordered someone else to take responsibility for it.

In any event, as Dowd’s alleged effort to protect Trump turned into an Albatross of its own, he retreated to the only defense that wouldn’t appear as manifestly terrible lawyering. Per Axios:

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The “President cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution’s Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case,” Dowd claims.

THIS IS THE BEST!!!

To recap:

  1. Trump said he knew about Flynn’s crime prior to, apparently, telling the FBI to stop investigating.
  2. People point out that this is proof of obstruction.
  3. Dowd claimed he really wrote the Tweet.
  4. People point out that this is even more damning proof of obstruction.
  5. Dowd declares that obstruction isn’t a crime.

Beautiful. And to think, I thought Sekulow was the worst one.

The logic, as far as it goes, is that Trump allegedly telling Comey to drop the Russia investigation was akin to a DA exercising prosecutorial discretion and therefore not obstruction.

As one might expect this theory doesn’t have a lot of support. The Axios article reminds us that the planned Watergate impeachment opened with claims that Nixon “obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice.” If you’re making claims about executive authority that Nixon shied away from pushing, you’ve probably gone too far.

Nor is this really a thread the Republicans want to pull. While the “scandals” of the Obama administration exist almost entirely in the tin-foil-covered heads of the far right,[2] to take Dowd at his word now means that any future Democratic president could be shielded from responsibility for any future cover up. If you accept that for presidents — sitting atop a vast executive organization — the crime is almost always the cover up and not the initial act, then Dowd’s interpretation of the law means that the most powerful person in the world can always act with impunity to squelch investigation into anything their administration does.

On the other hand, having just watched gravely concerned deficit hawks pass this tax bill, maybe nothing really matters.

War is peace. Obstruction is discretion. We’ve always been at war with North Korea.

Exclusive: Trump lawyer claims the “President cannot obstruct justice” [Axios]

Earlier: Hey Y’All, Jay Sekulow May Have No F**king Clue What He’s Doing

[1] The Atlantic contends that the use of “pled” instead of “pleaded” might reveal the true author. It seems like a stretch to me, but it’s an interesting argument.
[2] There were actual scandals that people like Glenn Greenwald covered, but those mostly accused Obama of being too much like a Republican, so no one really talked about them.


HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.