Why Donald Trump continues to obstruct justice

The bombshell revelation that Donald Trump spoke with a Jan. 6 witness is part of an ongoing pattern of obstructing justice, according to a new analysis in The Washington Post.

"After our last hearing, President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation," Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. "A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings. That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump's call and, instead, alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us and this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice."

Philip Bump wrote that Trump has "been obstructing federal efforts to investigate his actions for years without facing any accountability for doing so."

"We can start with the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election," Bump explained. "That probe was ultimately turned over to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whose team spent months compiling a lengthy report of the ways in which Russia tried to influence the vote that year and places where those efforts intersected with Trump’s team. The report covered multiple volumes and some 400 pages — nearly half of which were dedicated to documenting Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation. Mueller’s team delineated 10 separate incidents in which it believed Trump had tried to block their work."

The Mueller probe was launched when Trump tried to obstruct justice by firing FBI Director James Comey, but then-Attorney General William Barr refused to prosecute Trump.

The second charge in Trump's first impeachment was obstruction of justice.

"In short order, the Senate acquitted Trump of the charge — reinforcing the message that he would face no consequences for, among other things, quite explicitly attempting to prevent duly charged entities from holding him to account," Bump wrote. "Without accountability, we’ve seen that Trump repeats the same patterns. The effort to hijack a presidential election is not a pattern we should want to see repeated."

Read the full analysis.