Perspective: How the Mueller report can still threaten Trump’s legitimacy
By Walter Dellinger Walter Dellinger Bio Follow Walter Dellinger, a partner at O’Melveny & Myers and the Douglas Maggs emeritus professor of law at Duke University, was assistant attorney general and head of the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration. March 29 at 8:57 AM President Trump and his allies are ridiculing the critics who anticipated that the report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III would reveal devastating information.
If Mueller believed it was inappropriate to pronounce on the president’s guilt — after all, the Justice Department has a long-standing policy against indicting a sitting president — he could still be following the example of Leon Jaworski, the Watergate independent counsel who decided against indicting President Richard Nixon, but instead submitted to Congress an extensive accounting of all the facts surrounding his efforts to shut down the investigation.
What in the report might challenge Trump’s claim that he has been “exonerated”? The initial portion could document the intervention by military agents of a hostile foreign power in an American presidential campaign. Yes, we already know the outlines of this attack from the allegations in Mueller’s grand jury indictments of Russian operatives. But it would nonetheless be startling to read a coherent account of this brazen attack on democracy.
The most damaging aspect of the report would be a thorough account of Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice. The known facts are all bad enough. The report probably contains others. Don’t forget the allegation that Trump asked the CIA director and the director of national intelligence to push the FBI director to end his investigation of former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn.
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