President Obama’s secret preservation of Russia evidence set an obstruction trap for Donald Trump
When attempting to decipher the actions of President Barack Obama, I’ve learned to begin with the premise that he’s smarter than I am. Once again, that’s proven to be the case. Not only did he and his team secretly preserve all the Trump-Russia evidence and deliver it to the Senate Intelligence Committee before he left office, he set a trap whereby Donald Trump and his team may have already been nailed for obstruction.
Let’s backtrack a bit. About six weeks ago, the Senate Intel Committee instructed Donald Trump and his White House not to destroy any evidence or documents pertinent to the Russia scandal (Business Insider). My gut told me that they were setting a trap for him. I ran it past someone with prosecutorial experience, and sure enough, my hunch was right. You typically tell someone not to destroy the evidence once you already have copies of the evidence, in the hope that you can send them into a panic whereby they do destroy that evidence, and then you’ve got them nailed for obstruction of justice right out of the gate. If what they turn over is less than what you have, there’s proof that they destroyed or scuttled some of the evidence.
And so this told me that, one way or another, the Senate Intel Committee already had its hands on all of the Trump-Russia documents from the White House. And now today we come to find out that the committee already had that evidence because President Obama and his White House secretly gave copies to every member before he left office (source: NBC News). And by making sure it didn’t come out publicly at the time, he helped set up an obstruction trap for Trump.
If anyone in Trump’s White House has destroyed any evidence in since they were warned not to, then the evidence isn’t really gone, but they’re now guilty of a crime and can be leveraged into giving up a bigger fish. And it’ll be because President Obama – indeed smarter than I am – set the trap months ago. Contribute to Palmer Report
