Every time Mr. Trump tried to stop the investigation, the president was stymied by his own subordinates.
The strongest pushback against President Trump came instead from a source never contemplated by the founders: his own branch of the government.
The president thought that he could quash this inquiry by dismissing James Comey, the F.B.I. director, but as the president's strategist Steve Bannon reportedly cautioned, "You can't fire the F.B.I." Mr. Trump's appointee as deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, initiated the special counsel inquiry and appointed Mr. Mueller to lead it, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions - an early Trump backer - refused to "Unrecuse" himself from the Russia investigation.
What makes the pushback to President Trump unique is that it has trumpeted its existence in the open.
First, the aides who bucked the president's efforts to interfere with the Mueller investigation had political and professional fates separate from Mr. Trump's.
The people before whom Mr. Trump dangled the possibility of a pardon could not be sure that the volatile president would follow through.
As Mr. Trump himself has shown, presidents may try to undermine these people by publicly humiliating them, and - as we know from the history of the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover - law enforcement may try to undermine presidents or other elected officials it disapproves of.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/mueller-report-trump-white-house-resitance.html
The strongest pushback against President Trump came instead from a source never contemplated by the founders: his own branch of the government.
The president thought that he could quash this inquiry by dismissing James Comey, the F.B.I. director, but as the president's strategist Steve Bannon reportedly cautioned, "You can't fire the F.B.I." Mr. Trump's appointee as deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, initiated the special counsel inquiry and appointed Mr. Mueller to lead it, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions - an early Trump backer - refused to "Unrecuse" himself from the Russia investigation.
What makes the pushback to President Trump unique is that it has trumpeted its existence in the open.
First, the aides who bucked the president's efforts to interfere with the Mueller investigation had political and professional fates separate from Mr. Trump's.
The people before whom Mr. Trump dangled the possibility of a pardon could not be sure that the volatile president would follow through.
As Mr. Trump himself has shown, presidents may try to undermine these people by publicly humiliating them, and - as we know from the history of the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover - law enforcement may try to undermine presidents or other elected officials it disapproves of.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/mueller-report-trump-white-house-resitance.html
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