Week Four: The President Summons the Ghost of Roy Cohn

His mentor’s bruising style is one Trump studied well. This will be its ultimate test.

By JACK SHAFER June 17, 2017

Never adopt a mentor without first drafting a plan to ditch him and his influence on that day you want to become your own man—or when expediency demands abandonment. President Donald Trump, who was taught the martial arts of verbal combat by Roy Cohn, jettisoned Sen. Joe McCarthy’s former attorney in the mid-1980s when he became ill from HIV. Trump wasn’t so much emerging from the red-baiter’s shadow as he was shunning his faithful attorney due to a sense of morbid panic about the disease. Although he dumped Cohn, Trump never ceased playing the role of the dirtbag attorney’s parrot. Since inauguration, and especially since the scandal with no name has inflicted bleeding wounds all over his presidency, Trump has only become more Cohnian in his persona. He rains his fury down on his opponents, just like Cohn. He breaks rules and bullies all who get in his way. He does whatever it takes to win. When Trump’s mouth forms the words, it’s really Cohn speaking from the grave.

Trump unfurled and waved his Cohnian flag this week as a bundle of obstruction of justice stories hit the front pages. You see it most plainly in the escalating insults directed at former FBI Director James Comey. First he denounces Comey as a leaker, then a coward, then a liar and finally a witch-hunt-leading man of bad character. More of the same arrived when Trump confidant Chris Ruddy of Newsmax took to the airwaves to assert that the president had been musing about firing special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who heads the Russia collusion investigation. The New York Times added to the Ruddy claim, learning that Trump's staff had talked him out of it. But did the internal debate over sacking Mueller accurately reflect White House machination or was it just Cohnian squid-ink injected into the news stream in an attempt to escape from the no-name scandal?

By Wednesday night, the ink cloud thinned long-enough and Trump was still there. The Washington Post had that story that special counsel Mueller's Russia probe was asking whether Trump had committed obstruction of justice. The Times chased the story with a similar take. As anybody who has read crime procedurals knows, obstruction of justice prosecutions, like conspiracy charges, are the sabers that prosecutors rattle to panic the target of an investigation when they're having trouble making a “real” case stick.

But there's substance to the allegations of Trump obstruction. First, in early June, came a report that Trump had asked Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to get Comey off the case. Then came Comey's testimony that Trump asked him to drop the Flynn investigation. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal expanded a previous account that Trump pressured National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers and Coats to deny that there was any proof of collusion. According to the Journal’s story, an NSA memo exists that documents a phone call between Trump and Rogers. In that call, Trump “questioned the veracity of the intelligence community’s judgment that Russia had interfered with the election and tried to persuade Mr. Rogers to say there was no evidence of collusion between his campaign and Russian officials.”

As if singing from Cohn's songbook again, Trump battled the stories on Thursday by bellowing on Twitter that the investigation was “the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history” and that the obstruction of justice angle was a “phony story” based on the “phony collusion with the Russians story.” Who else is witch-hunting the president? A Friday tweet accused Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein of stalking him, too. “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt,” the president wrote, thereby confirming that he’s under investigation. Thanks, Donald!

more
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/17/week-four-the-president-summons-the-ghost-of-roy-cohn-215273