Witness Tampering, Trump-Style

Eyebrows are being raised over Trump's Twitter attacks on former Acting Attorney-General, Sally Yates, hours before she was scheduled to appear to testify about Trump's former National Security Adviser, ret. gen. Mike Flynn.

Appearing on CNN to talk about the president’s tweet — in which he said that someone should “ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Council (sic)” — legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said that Trump’s behavior crosses the line of what we consider to be normal behavior for a politician in the United States.

“It just shows how much the norms of behavior have changed,” Toobin said. “The idea of the President of the United States essentially threatening a witness, he’s basically accusing her of leaking, we have never had that before. We’ve never had presidents who did this kind of thing. The idea that the president — the guy who’s in charge of the Justice Department — is threatening a witness is really kind of disturbing.”

Yates is expected to testify that she warned the Trump administration that Flynn might have been compromised by the Russians.

In November then president Barack Obama also warned then president-elect Trump about Flynn. Obama says he tried to warn off Trump because of Flynn's conduct as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a post from which Flynn was fired.

Trump, true to his greaseball form, appears to be blaming Obama for the entire Flynn fiasco, claiming it was Obama's fault for giving Flynn a top security clearance in the first place. And, of course, it's also the fault of the Fake News.