The Trump team’s chilling message to Mueller
For months we’ve heard President Trump’s TV lawyers, as he calls them, bandy about the argument that he — or any president, for that matter — couldn’t have obstructed justice because justice is what he says it is.
In other words, that because, they claim, a president possesses absolute power to cut short a criminal investigation, he cannot by definition be guilty of obstructing it. Or, in the famous Nixonian formulation, as Richard M. Nixon told David Frost, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
.. The precise context involved the president’s discussion with then-FBI Director James B. Comey in which, according to Comey’s testimony, Trump cleared the Oval Office of other witnesses before discussing his just-fired national security adviser, Michael Flynn. According to Comey, Trump expressed his “hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”
.. The letter disputes Comey’s version of events but says it wouldn’t matter if Trump had made those statements. And then, in a magnificently gaslighting move, the letter claims that Trump is actually the hero of any obstruction story, because he fired Flynn: “Far, far, from obstructing justice, the only individual in the entire Flynn story that ensured swift justice was the President.”
.. the notion that the president could peremptorily call off any prosecution for any reason whatsoever — no matter how corrupt — would be laughable if it weren’t so scary.