In the midst of stonewalling multiple congressional investigations and with his lawyers fighting desperately in various courts to keep his tax returns and bank records under wraps, President Donald Trump told reporters assembled in the Rose Garden Wednesday that he is the “the most transparent president, probably, in the history of this country” and seemed to expect everyone there to agree with him. Those unfamiliar with the man’s ways might have assumed that he was joking. Weirdly, he was not.
This is not the first time Mr. Trump, the only president of the modern era who hasn’t released his tax returns, has made the case for transparency — as in he’s got the transparent thing bigly. It’s mostly been in the context of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. His point is essentially this: Look at all the Trump administration people who provided records or spoke to investigators for months and months. There were lots of them (the president not included). That makes me transparent.
Of course, in reality, it mostly means he complied with the law. Or, in some cases, chose not to exercise executive privilege. You know who else chooses to cooperate with investigations into wrongdoing? Innocent people. They do it all the time. They are, however, less likely to dangle pardons, or label an investigation a “witch hunt,” or seek a loyalty pledge from the FBI director or fire said FBI director and then misrepresenting their reasons for doing so, or order top intelligence officials to clear them, or pressure the attorney general to limit the scope of the investigation (and un-recuse himself from overseeing it), or dictate a misleading statement about a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer at Trump Tower, or try to fire the special counsel. Surely, we all know the basic facts behind an obstruction-of-justice case against Mr. Trump by now.