"The tweet could signal the president took part in the obstruction of justice. If Trump did fire Flynn for lying to the FBI, that would mean the president knew Flynn had committed a serious crime when, according to the Comey, the president asked Comey the next day to halt an FBI investigation into Flynn.
Dowd, the lawyer who said he had written the tweet, told Axios on Monday: “The president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the constitution’s article II] and has every right to express his view of any case.”
Any suggestion the Trump tweet had admitted obstruction of justice, whoever wrote it, would he said be “an ignorant and arrogant assertion”...
In his original attempt to contain the fallout from the Saturday tweet, Dowd told Reuters “the mistake was I should have put the lying to the FBI in a separate line referencing his plea. Instead, I put it together and it made all you guys go crazy. A tweet is a shorthand.”
Dowd said the first time the president knew for a fact Flynn lied to the FBI was when he was charged. It was the first and last time he would craft a tweet for the president, he said.
“I’ll take responsibility,” he said. “I’m sorry I misled people.” Talking to NBC, he added: “I’m out of the tweeting business. I did not mean to break news.”
The suggestion that Dowd wrote the tweet was met with incredulity by Democrats and legal experts. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, wrote: “Anyone who buys Trump’s lawyer’s alibi for his corruptly treacherous client is a complete fool.”
Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer in the White House of George W Bush, said: “A lawyer who writes a tweet like that incriminating a client should be disbarred. He can tell Mueller he wrote it.”
To some critics, Dowd’s denial that the president can obstruct justice carried echoes of Richard Nixon’s assertion, to David Frost in 1977, that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal”. Others pointed out that the articles of impeachment against Nixon opened with the charge that he “obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice”.
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