Donald Trump, Hope Hicks and prison
Would you be willing to go to prison so that your criminal boss might go free? Hope Hicks apparently decided that her answer was “yes” when she reportedly promised her boss Donald Trump that she would help to suppress evidence that Donald Trump Jr treasonously plotted with the Russians to alter the outcome of the election. But decisions like that, when made in the moment, often have a different feel after the fact. Hicks is now getting the opportunity for a do-over, and Trump is giving her every motivation to go in the opposite direction.
Maybe Hicks didn’t realize she was committing felony obstruction of justice at the time. Maybe she just got carried away in an effort to please her boss. Maybe she didn’t think she’d get caught. In any case, Trump’s former legal spokesman now says that he witnessed Hicks vowing to obstruct justice on Trump’s behalf. If she went through with it, Special Counsel Robert Mueller surely has the evidence by now. He can send her to prison for it. Of course that’s not his goal.
As we’ve seen with everyone from Michael Flynn to George Papadopoulos to Rick Gates on down, Mueller is looking to flip Trump’s current and former advisers against him. The more they help him nail Trump for his crimes, the more lenient a deal he’ll give them. Hope Hicks can probably walk away from this with a minimal or non-existent sentence, as there’s no known evidence that she was involved in the conspiracy with Russia to rig the election, only that she tried to cover it up after the fact.
That leads us to the developments of the past week. The Rob Porter domestic violence scandal and subsequent John Kelly coverup scandal have somehow resulted in Donald Trump deciding that Hope Hicks is to blame. How did that happen? For one thing, he blames women in general for the crimes that men commit against women. But maybe there’s more to it. Perhaps Trump has figured out by now that Hicks isn’t willing to go to prison for him. She’s going to sell him out to Mueller, if she hasn’t already.
