A former White House attorney under Donald Trump said a new report could turn out to be powerful evidence in some of the criminal cases against the former president.
“It really is Trump directly ordering obstruction,” Ty Cobb, who led the White House response to the Russia investigation in 2017-2018, said on CNN on Tuesday.
The New York Times and ABC News reported on Tuesday that Trump issued a not-so-veiled order to an aide who was going to be interviewed by federal investigators about boxes of classified documents that Trump kept after leaving the White House.
“You don’t know anything about the boxes,” Trump told the assistant, Molly Michael, who had worked for him in both the White House and his post-presidential office in Florida, according to the two reports.
Trump, Cobb said, is “speaking in the terms of a mob boss, giving a direct order to somebody that he probably should have no reason to believe would lie for him but expecting her to do so.”
He said Michael’s comments will also enhance the credibility of some of the other witnesses against the former president.
See the full interview below.