Trump’s strategy to save his own skin: Fight like a criminal

The New York Times reports the “America First” president is becoming a “dodging imprisonment” president as Democrats prepare to take Congress and fulfill the legislative body’s role of scrutinizing the White House.

“In his first term, President Trump approached congressional investigations with a strategy of resisting and stonewalling, hoping to stall the inquiries until Democrats ran out of time,” reports the Times. “But in anticipation of Democrats’ return to control of Congress in his second term, Mr. Trump has embarked on an even more aggressive maneuver: threatening to treat some legislative oversight as a potential crime.”

This tactic, said the Times, is expected to be “part of an all-out effort by the White House to block Democratic congressional oversight over the next two years.”

The top lieutenant protecting Trump’s backside will be Trump’s new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said the Times, “a political brawler with extensive experience on Capitol Hill.” His effort “will be bolstered by a Justice Department and a White House Counsel’s Office that have been quietly laying the groundwork” for a protracted war. Rather than being the leader of a nation, the Times said Trump and his allies will adopt the nearly full-time role of preventing Democrats “from getting access to its decision-making and scrutinizing the actions of top officials and powerful people, in and out of government.”

Trump, according to reports, is hotly concerned that some of his biggest financial supporters who helped enrich his family in the last two years or helped finance his prized construction projects “will be targeted, according to aides and his public statements.”

“The White House is bracing for a spate of investigations, and officials say they are ready to punch back,” according to the Times. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel quietly published an opinion a few months ago telling staff that even communications by those outside government could be covered by executive privilege if they concerned Trump and his top aides.

And The Times reports staff for GOP lawmakers who survived the midterm bloodbath will likely be acting as deputies of the Trump DOJ to help the department respond to Democrats’ subpoenas, records requests and accusations. Rachel Jag, a former staff member to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) “is overseeing a large staff, but the department is seeking experienced lawyers to fill out what are expected to be high-workload jobs,” reports the Times.

But good luck with that, said the Times, because the DOJ has been hit by a wave of departures in the aftermath of Trump’s politicization of the department.

White House spokesman Lauren Bis, meanwhile, has already hit a scathing tone before Democrats even assume their majority in January, telling the Times: “If Democrats choose to pursue sham investigations and radical left policies, they are choosing to work against the American people.”

But top Democrats are hungry to take on the policing role that the Republican Congress abdicated, said the Times, and they have “shown no indications they are intimidated or plan to slow down.”

Rather, they have “already sent letters to scores of potential targets of investigations, on everything from cuts to scientific research to donors for Mr. Trump’s White House ballroom,” the Times said. And the White House anticipates “an unrelenting pace of oversight.”