Donald Trump is a keyboard gangster, and Twitter is his gun. He wields his personal Twitter account like a weapon, using it to attack the press, foreign dignitaries and leaders, members of his own administration and anyone else who does not fall in line and do exactly what he wants them to at any given moment.
Since becoming president, Trump’s tweets have contained veiled threats of violence and doom and gloom; the public has openly called for the powers that be at Twitter to shut his account down. Unfortunately, aside from that from that one fleeting moment last November when an exiting Twitter employee deactivated it “inadvertently,” those cries have fallen on deaf ears.
Perhaps it is for the best, after all. Sources have told the New York Times that special counsel Robert Mueller is combing through the president’s tweets and looking for evidence that Trump attempted to obstruct the Russia investigation by intimidating witnesses and pressuring former FBI director James Comey and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to stop or otherwise slow down the inquiry into it.
Mueller is reportedly looking specifically at negative comments Trump has made about Comey and Sessions. He is said to have already been looking into Trump’s private interactions with the two men as well as the lies the White House told about a meeting that took place at Trump Tower in the summer of 2016 between Russians and members of Trump’s campaign. The purpose of the meeting was to get political dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government, but the White House claimed it was about a Russian adoption policy.
Mueller is also looking at public attacks Trump has made against his political opponents as well as any possible pardon offers he has made to potential witnesses in the case.
According to the Times, Trump’s lawyers publicly claim that none of this adds up to obstruction, but privately, they are shaking in their boots.
Former New York City Mayor and lead Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani told the Times that Mueller’s interest in the tweets is just the latest in his “desperate quest to sink the president.”
“If you’re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public,” Giuliani told the Times.
If only Giuliani’s client were actually that smart.
In any case, we are still waiting to see what—if any—fruit the Mueller investigation is going to yield.
At this point, it’s not as if we are looking for impeachment. We are just looking for ... something.
Stay tuned.