President Donald Trump reportedly tried to pressure acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker to "control" federal prosecutors in New York -- where his longtime attorney had implicated the president, his family and his business in a criminal conspiracy.
Trump issued a narrow denial of the CNN report, which he attacked as "fake news," but a pair of legal experts writing for The Daily Beast called on the incoming Congress to fully investigate this "astonishing" incident as obstruction of justice.
"We don’t know how Mr. Whitaker reacted to the president’s actions, but it’s clear this is an active attempt to thwart an ongoing investigation, so time is of the essence," wrote Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman, and Mimi Rocah, a former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. "Every Justice Department official with any knowledge of the president’s conversations with Mr. Whitaker needs to be called to testify and turn over any relevant documents in their possession."
The pair of legal experts, who are also MSNBC contributors, called on prosecutors in the Southern District of New York -- where former Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty -- to expand their campaign finance investigation involving Trump and his children to examine obstruction of justice.
"It is clear from the charging documents against Mr. Cohen that the Trump Organization, which was owned and controlled by Mr. Trump and his children at the time of the conduct, is likely implicated in this criminal scheme as well," Miller and Rocah wrote. "Taken together, these facts make clear that President Trump, the Trump Organization, and ... likely one of Mr. Trump’s sons ... are subjects and possibly targets of the Southern District’s investigation."
Miller and Rocah called on Whitaker to recuse himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation now that he's a witness -- and "irretrievably compromised."
"Mr. Whitaker is an accidental attorney general, there only because the president plucked him from relative obscurity to first serve as his eyes and ears inside the department as Mr. Sessions’ chief of staff, and later to oversee – and perhaps thwart – the various probes into the president," the pair wrote. "He can’t afford to anger the president, and the president knows it."
The legal experts also called on the Republican-majority Senate to insist that attorney general nominee William Barr commit to recusing himself from any investigation of the president before he is confirmed.
"We know what the president is looking for in an attorney general," Miller and Rocah wrote, "and Mr. Barr’s secret assurances to the White House mean the Senate must ensure Mr. Trump doesn’t get it."