Over just a few days last week, President Trump and his allies stepped up attacks on Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the campaign’s connections to Russia. They tried to push Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of office. They thought out loud about whether the president can pardon himself.
This all points to the same conclusion: Mr. Trump is willing to deal a major blow to the rule of law — and the American Republic — in order to end an independent investigation into his Russia ties.
.. In their first years in office, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orban in Hungary claimed that they wanted to fix, rather than cripple, democratic institutions. Even as it became clear that these strongmen sought to consolidate power, most of their opponents told themselves that they were saving their courage for the right moment. By the time the full extent of the danger had become incontrovertible, it was too late to mount an effective resistance.
.. But in other respects the United States is already well on the way to what I have, in my academic work, called “democratic deconsolidation.” Mr. Trump is increasingly emulating the playbook of popularly elected strongmen who have done deep, lasting damage to their countries’ democratic institutions.
.. around 40 percent of voters — and some 80 percent of Republicans — approve of his performance. A number of Republican senators and congressmen have reportedly objected to Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Sessions and voted against parts of his legislative agenda, but most have yet to oppose him publicly.
.. If Mr. Trump fires Mr. Mueller, Congress can ask him to continue his investigation under the auspices of the legislative branch.
And if Mr. Trump pardons himself, disregards court rulings or blatantly oversteps the boundaries of his legitimate authority in some other way, Congress should impeach him.
.. There may never be a time when we know for sure that this decision, today, will determine whether the American republic lives or dies.
President Trump’s Really Weak Week
In his speech, Trump encouraged police brutality and said he was “the big, big believer and admirer of the people in law enforcement, O.K.?” He said that he’s protecting the backs of law enforcement “100 percent.” Except for Sessions, Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and Robert Mueller.
As two people close to Trump told The Times’s Maggie Haberman when asked why he was tormenting Sessions instead of firing him: Because he can.
.. And in his paranoid, aggrieved isolation, he’s even thinking about nixing Steve Bannon, nemesis of the Mooch, and mulling firing the one who could get him fired, Mueller, and pardoning himself for possible charges.
.. Trump learned his technique of publicly criticizing and freely firing from George Steinbrenner, one of the ruthless, towering characters he modeled himself on when he started hanging out at Yankee Stadium in the ’70s.
.. Trump had always resented Priebus for advising him to get out of the race after the Billy Bush “Access Hollywood” tape story broke — known as Priebus’s “scarlet A.H.,” according to The Washington Post — and for not understanding that Trump is not a mere Republican; he’s the head of his own “beautiful,” us-against-them movement, “the likes of which the world has never seen.”
.. As The Post reports, Trump’s delighted demeaning of Priebus included this incident: “At one point, during a meeting in the Oval Office, a fly began buzzing overhead, distracting the president. As the fly continued to circle, Trump summoned his chief of staff and tasked him with killing the insect.”
.. After torturing Reince for months, Trump happily gave him the final humiliating shove. As the tweets hit the White House cellphones, Priebus’s colleagues Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino jumped out of the Suburban they were sharing with Priebus, leaving the jobless man in a driving rain on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, the weakest link tossed off the sled for the press wolves.
.. You’re a killer and a king or a loser, as Fred Trump liked to say. And anyone who doesn’t understand that Trump is more important than the G.O.P. or the institution of the presidency is, in his mind, a loser. Anyone who doesn’t get that the loyalty should be for him personally, rather than the country, is, to Trump, a loser.
.. With Priebus, The Post reported, the president obsessed on impotence. “The word was ‘weak’ – ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘Can’t get it done,’” an official told the paper.
.. But after all his bragging about being a great negotiator and closer, it is President Trump who can’t get it done. He couldn’t even close the deal on a pathetic, bare-bones health care bill, ineffectually bullying Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, and failing to win over John McCain, who gleefully had his revenge for Trump’s mockery of him as being a loser because he was captured in war.
.. Trump can’t get it done for his pal, Putin, either. In fact, the biggest legislative accomplishment before Congress leaves for August will have been passing new sanctions on Russia because lawmakers don’t trust their own president. Talk about weak.
.. Congressional Republicans are losing their fear of Trump, making ever more snarky comments about him. North Korea is shooting off missiles and the White House is flustered. The generals are resisting Trump’s tweet edicts. The mortified leader of the Boy Scouts had to apologize for the president’s suggestive and partisan speech.
And what could be weaker than that?
Trump Has Himself, Not Sessions, to Blame for the Limitless Mueller Investigation
His misstatements and accusations made it difficult to limit the special counsel’s scope.
.. Trump is the one who hired Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
- It is Rosenstein whose order appointing Robert Mueller fails to set limits on Mueller’s investigative jurisdiction, thereby authorizing the fishing expedition that has Trump so ballistic.
- Moreover, it was Trump’s own botching of the firing of FBI director James Comey that spooked Rosenstein, inducing him to appease furious Democrats by giving Mueller free rein.
.. Sessions’s overly broad recusal meant that there were no Trump appointees in the Justice Department to push back against then-director Comey’s desire to make sensational public disclosures about the Russia probe in his March 20 House testimony
.. The question was whether the FBI should make public comments about ongoing investigations.
.. I continue to believe that if the director had either said nothing (which would have been the right thing to do) or simply said publicly the same thing he was saying behind the scenes (which would have avoided creating a scandalous misimpression), he would still be FBI director.
.. I continue to believe that if the director had either said nothing (which would have been the right thing to do) or simply said publicly the same thing he was saying behind the scenes (which would have avoided creating a scandalous misimpression), he would still be FBI director.
.. Then, in a lapse of judgment that stands out even by Trump standards, the president decided to host Russian diplomats at the White House the day after firing Comey, and to berate the former director for the consumption of these agents of a hostile regime. In addition to describing the former director as “crazy, a real nut job,” Trump told Putin’s men that by getting rid of Comey, he had “taken off” the “great pressure” he faced “because of Russia.” Thus did the president, with both hands, feed the Democrats’ narrative that Comey had been removed in order to obstruct the FBI’s probe of Trump-campaign collusion in Putin’s election-meddling.
.. Thus the problem with the assignment Rosenstein has given Mueller: As we have repeatedly observed, a counterintelligence investigation has no discernible jurisdictional limits. Its purpose is to collect information, and from an investigator’s point of view, you can never have enough information. The reason the regulations controlling special-counsel appointments call for a criminal investigation is that crimes have knowable parameters; therefore, when the Justice Department specifies the crimes a special counsel is authorized to investigate, there are obvious jurisdictional limits.
.. I believe that Rosenstein, having been bitterly criticized by people whose opinions he cares deeply about, decided to make amends by giving Mueller free rein to take the investigation in any direction he chose to take it. Rosenstein wanted Mueller to be effectively independent of Justice Department control.
.. Sure, the regs instruct the Justice Department to set limits on a special counsel’s jurisdiction. Rosenstein, however, figured that if he followed the regs, Democrats would again inveigh against him for supposedly shielding Trump from an investigation. Under the regs, the special counsel is to be overseen by Justice Department superiors, reflecting the Constitution’s vesting of all executive power (including prosecutorial power) in the president — that’s why there is no such thing as an “independent” prosecutor. But Rosenstein determined that Mueller would be independent — as if he were a separate branch of government, outside executive control.
President Trump accomplished only one thing by railing at Attorney General Sessions: He added to the growing disinclination of quality people to work in his administration. No one with self-respect wants to work in a place where the boss not only won’t back you up when the going gets tough, but will turn on you with a vengeance — especially when there’s a need to divert attention from his own shortcomings.
The Coming Trump-Mueller Collision
You only do this much preparation to discredit an investigator if you think it’s likely he will find something disparaging. If there’s this much simmering animosity between the White House and Mueller’s investigative team already, how likely is it that the man who fired James Comey will resist the impulse to order Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to fire Mueller? And if Mueller refuses, will Trump fire Rosenstein?
.. thousands of dollars of political donations to Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, made by Andrew Weissmann, a former senior Justice Department official who has expertise in fraud and other financial crimes.
..Another lawyer Mr. Mueller has hired, Jeannie Rhee, represented the Clinton Foundation.
.. The Justice Department has explicit rules about what constitutes a conflict of interest. Prosecutors may not participate in investigations if they have “a personal or political relationship” with the subject of the case. Making campaign donations is not included on the list of things that would create a “political relationship.”
.. Those Justice Department rules are convenient for federal prosecutors eager to build relationships with officeholders and with political ambitions. Back in 2012, I pulled all the donation records for the 93 U.S. Attorneys and found that 46 had donated a cumulative $235,651 to President Obama, the DNC, and Democratic candidates since January 1, 2007. Not one had donated to any Republican candidate, which isn’t all that surprising, because the president selects the U.S. Attorneys.
.. Back then, Hans A. von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and formerly a senior lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told me, “I don’t have a problem with political donations from U.S. Attorneys, because these positions are ultimately political appointments. However, any time a U.S. Attorney’s office gets a case where the target is someone they’ve given funds to, clearly and obviously that attorney needs to recuse himself and hand over the reins.” How about when you’ve donated to the political opponent of the subject of your investigation?