Donald Trump just stepped into the trap that Elijah Cummings set for him
Even as the House Judiciary Committee seeks documents from dozens of Trump-related people, and even as the House Democrats advance a criminal referral against Jared Kushner, a different House committee is waging a different battle. Elijah Cummings and the House Judiciary Committee are seeking specific information from Donald Trump about Jared Kushner’s security clearance – and Trump just took the bait.
Elijah Cummings is savvy enough to know that Donald Trump is unlikely to voluntarily turn over evidence that incriminates himself and exposes his son-in-law Kushner’s loyalty to foreign governments. Sure enough, the Washington Post is reporting this afternoon that Trump and his White House are indeed refusing to turn over the requested documents. That’s the entire point, of course.
Now the media is going to seize on the narrative that Donald Trump and the House Democrats are fighting over documents that expose Jared Kushner. The media loves nothing more than covering a political fight of this kind. The more they cover it, the more people will hear about why Kushner’s security clearance was denied. It’s not a coincidence that House Democrats just made a criminal referral against Kushner at the same time they demanded these documents about Kushner: they’re pushing him front and center.
The kicker is that if John Kelly and Don McGahn were so worried about Donald Trump’s abuses with regard to Jared Kushner that they wrote memos distancing themselves from it, you can bet they didn’t merely hand in the memos to the White House. They surely kept copies of their own, in order to protect themselves. By all accounts, Kelly and McGahn are both cooperating with investigators.
So it’s likely that Elijah Cummings already has their Kushner memos. He sent the document request to the Trump White House specifically to bait Donald Trump into refusing to cooperate. Now it’s a much bigger scandal. House Democrats are playing Trump like a fiddle.
