Mueller’s Case Against Trump & The Current Direction Of The Russia Investigation
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | APRIL 5, 2018
“Mueller is going to make whatever case may exist against Trump for obstruction of justice, and for any other wrongful conduct by Trump, in his Special Counsel reports.”
A Washington Post article this week broke the news that President Trump’s attorneys were told last month that Trump is currently a subject, but not a target, of the criminal investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The article also said that the Special Counsel’s office is considering writing reports on their findings in stages, with the first report focused on the obstruction of justice issue. Mueller is required to file his reports confidentially with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who then makes the decision on whether to release them to the public.
The Post article points us in the direction of how the investigation is going to end for President Trump.
Special Counsel Mueller is not going to indict Trump.
To do so, he would have to ignore two Justice Department legal memos issued in 1973 and 2000 that concluded that a President cannot be indicted while in office. He would also have to ignore Justice Department regulations providing that a Special Counsel is required “to comply with the rules, regulations, procedures, practices, and policies of the Department of Justice.” This would include the two DOJ legal memos.
While there are reasonable arguments on the other side, as a Justice Department employee, Mueller is not going to challenge the legal memos and the DOJ Special Counsel regulations.
However, Mueller is going to make whatever case may exist against Trump for obstruction of justice, and for any other wrongful conduct by Trump, in his Special Counsel reports.
The reports will go to Rosenstein and then be released to Congress and the public. It is inconceivable that Rosenstein will fail to make the reports public, provided he is still in office.
These reports will become the basis for possible impeachment proceedings in the House, particularly if Democrats win control of the House in November.
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Fred Wertheimer is the Founder and President of Democracy 21, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen our democracy and ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections.
