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The Week That Was: All of Lawfare in One Post

William Ford
Saturday, January 12, 2019, 7:52 AM

On Friday evening, the New York Times reported that in the days after President Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey, federal law enforcement officials become so concerned with the president’s conduct that they opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump was acting on behalf of Russia against U.S. interests.

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On Friday evening, the New York Times reported that in the days after President Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey, federal law enforcement officials become so concerned with the president’s conduct that they opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump was acting on behalf of Russia against U.S. interests. In response to the Times’s bombshell, Benjamin Wittes revisited the relationship between the “collusion” and obstruction components of the special counsel investigation, arguing that the two are far more related than Wittes and others previously understood. Wittes posed the following question to Lawfare’s readers: what if the president’s obstruction was the collusion?


On Tuesday, Jan. 8, Judge Katharine Parker of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment charging Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who took part in the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, with obstruction of justice in a civil asset forfeiture proceeding apparently unrelated to the Mueller investigation. Matthew Kahn posted the indictment, which details Veselnitskaya’s close ties to the Kremlin. And Wittes talked with Jaimie Nawaday, a former federal prosecutor who handled the case Veselnitskaya is charged with obstructing, about the indictment on a special edition of the Lawfare Podcast:



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William Ford is an impact associate at Protect Democracy. He previously was an appellate litigation fellow in the New York Attorney General's Office and a research intern at Lawfare. He holds a bachelor's degree with honors from the College of the Holy Cross.

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