Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were both in the news this week amid a special counsel investigation and a New York attorney general inquiry into the Trump Organization.
Summary
America seems unable to escape the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s legal issues both made headlines this week as a special prosecutor made a new filing in the FBI-Clinton-Trump-Russia investigation and a judge compelled Trump to testify in the New York Attorney General’s inquiry into his company.
- Earlier this week John Durham, the special counsel investigating the FBI’s conduct during its Trump-Russia investigation, published a new court filing that alleged the Clinton campaign may have legally exploited Donald Trump’s publicly available internet traffic for political purposes.
- Durham indicted Michael Sussman for lying to the FBI about his role in the scheme, but not the scheme itself. Sussman requested the presiding judge dismiss the charges on Thursday.
- Hillary Clinton called the investigation a “fake scandal” and dismissed the allegations from Joe Biden’s Justice Department as a “conspiracy theory” during a speech to New York Democrats Thursday.
- Meanwhile, a New York judge compelled Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump to testify or plead the Fifth in a New York attorney general civil inquiry into the business practices of the Trump Organization.
- New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating whether Trump used inaccurate financial statements “to improperly inflate the value of his assets so he could receive favorable loans.” The Manhattan district attorney is running a parallel criminal investigation on the same matter.
- Earlier this month, the Trump Organization’s longtime accounting firm parted ways and retracted its financial statements from 2011-2020. Eric Trump has already testified in the inquiry and the ex-Trump Organization CFO was indicted in July 2021 for avoiding federal and state taxes.
- The New York Times called Trump’s legal woes “a perilous exclamation point to years of wealth inflation.”
- The Washington Post reported in more detail on the Trump Organization’s tangled finances and other financial and legal troubles facing the former president.
- CNN asks a question that may be more difficult to answer that it first appears: how rich is Donald Trump, really?
- National Review and Fox News legal analyst Andrew McCarthy has “that old Mueller feeling” about the Durham investigation. McCarthy believes Durham’s investigation, like the Mueller probe into Donald Trump, will underwhelm and not result in any substantial indictments.
- The Washington Examiner has another blast from the past: indicted Democratic lawyer Sussman is using legal advice from Peter Strzok, the FBI agent fired for his conduct in the Trump-Russia probe, in his attempt to dismiss the charges brought against him by Durham.
- The New York Post said the Durham filing proved Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump was actually “Putin’s puppet” as she likes to call the man who defeated her in 2016.
Author’s Take
With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the headlines simultaneously, one may feel a bit like Michael Corleone in the underrated The Godfather: Part III. The United States has had exactly one presidential nominee born after 1947: Barack Obama.
By comparison, the United Kingdom, France, Canada and others have elevated politicians born in the age of color television, let alone cell phones. The 2016 election is going on six years in the rearview mirror, yet neither the retired Secretary of State or the former President seem willing to cede the stage to a new generation.
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© Dominic Moore, 2022
