Friday, March 30, 2018

Why President Trump Should Play Hardball With Robert Mueller

At one point, Trump's lawyers even publicly hinted the president might voluntarily submit to an interrogation by Mueller.

The day after Trump decided not to name Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him special counsel to investigate Trump.

Out of the thousands of eminently qualified and conflict-free lawyers available, Rosenstein picked Mueller, Comey's good friend and former colleague whom Trump had just rejected, to decide whether Trump or Comey is telling the truth about their conversations.

After the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General unearthed their rabid anti-Trump text messages, Mueller quietly sent them back to the FBI. He must have known of their virulent hatred of Trump when he brought them on board.

By laying that legal banana peel at the president's feet, Rosenstein encouraged Trump to take the action that has afforded Mueller the specious basis for investigating Trump for the legally and constitutionally impossible "Crime" of a president terminating a member of the executive branch.

If Trump declined to voluntarily submit to questioning, Mueller would have to issue a subpoena to compel him to appear before the grand jury.

That would afford Trump's lawyers the perfect opportunity to move to quash the subpoena based on, among other things: Rosenstein's illegal appointment of Mueller to conduct a counterintelligence operation with no jurisdictional limits, Team Mueller's glaring conflicts of interest, Trump's overwhelmingly justified firing of Comey, the legal impossibility of a president facing criminal charges for discharging a member of the executive branch, and, as appears increasingly likely, the special counsel's furtherance of the plot hatched during the presidential campaign to destroy Trump by any means necessary.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/30/president-trump-play-hardball-robert-mueller/ 

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