Trump Can’t Be Indicted. Can He Be Subpoenaed?
Its claims that the president can “order the termination of an investigation by the Justice Department or F.B.I. at any time and for any reason” is unprecedented and far exceeds even Harry Truman’s brazen and rejected attempt to take over the steel mills to blunt labor unrest in the 1950s.
.. We also responded in the negative — but it was not a simple, categorical no. The presidential subpoena is a valid legal tool, as Chief Justice Warren Burger made clear in United States v. Nixon, but a president may find case-specific reasons to resist it.
.. The authors of the letter think the question is answered by a lower-court ruling, United States vs. Espy, decided in 1997 during the presidency of Bill Clinton. The letter claims that to overcome a privilege claim, special counsel must show that evidence is obtainable from no other source than the president.
.. The letter’s position also draws anachronistically upon an early theory of Thomas Jefferson — that each branch determines its own constitutional meaning. In United States v. Burr (1807), Thomas Jefferson argued that while a court can issue a subpoena to the president, it is the president who decides how it is enforced.
To drive home his point, Jefferson submitted the subpoenaed material with portions blotted out. Somewhat surprisingly, the presiding judge, Chief Justice John Marshall, did not object.
.. John Marshall’s non-objection was anomalous; he is revered for the proposition that ultimately it is the Supreme Court that says “what the law is.”
.. Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, has written, “even if courts lack power to enforce a subpoena against a president, presidential defiance of a lawful court order might, in sufficiently serious circumstances, constitute an impeachable offense.”
.. About the only thing one can say for sure about the enforceability of a presidential subpoena is that, should the Trump and Mueller sides fail to agree on a setting for presidential interview, both sides have a basis to litigate the matter tenaciously.