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In his congressional testimony after his investigation, Republican Rep. Ken Buck asked Robert Mueller, “Could you charge the president with a crime after he left office?” Mueller replied, “Yes.” Buck continued, “Do you think he got engaged? Could you charge the President of the United States with obstruction of justice after he left office?” Once again, the answer was: “Yes.”
The special counsel’s report on whether Donald Trump was the Moscow candidate for the White House found that Trump may have committed obstruction of justice on at least 10 occasions. But Mueller had decided that a 1973 Justice Department decision that a sitting president cannot be indicted meant that charging Trump with a federal crime would be “unconstitutional.”
The 47-year ruling on presidential privilege has also shielded Trump, to varying degrees, from a series of investigations and lawsuits, including a year-long battle over his tax returns.
But with his impending departure from the White House, he is now quite vulnerable. You will soon have lost the security of the post and the service of your loyal attorney general, William Barr. Some prosecutors were concerned about confronting not only the president but also his friends. After Barr slashed the prison sentence of Trump’s friend Roger Stone, they expressed private concern to the media that the attorney general would not back them. That restriction is now gone.
Trump is the subject of 15 investigations, criminal and civil, by nine federal, state and district agencies into his business and personal finances, including his tax affairs, his campaign, his inaugural committee and the charities associated with him.
Many of them are on their way to moving forward separately. But due to the heinous nature and scale of Trump’s alleged crimes, a special commission has been called in to examine the evidence. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman from California, said: “When we escape from the hell of Trump, America needs a presidential commission on crime. It should be made up of independent prosecutors who look at those who empowered a corrupt president; example one, sabotaging the mail to win an election. “
Ken Starr, the independent prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky scandal, commented during the Mueller investigation that the special counsel would recommend impeachment or that Trump would face indictment once he leaves office.
Later, Starr was part of Trump’s defense team at congressional impeachment hearings for his alleged attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into the business activities of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Trump was found guilty in the House of Representatives and won in the Republican-controlled Senate.
It remains to be seen whether a Democratic administration would go after Trump in the Mueller report. Biden himself has remained cautious about this. But Kamala Harris has argued that the Justice Department “would have no choice” but to act. The vice president-elect said while running for the Democratic nomination: “I think we should believe Bob Mueller when he tells us, essentially, that the only reason no indictment was returned is because of a Justice Department memo that suggests no you can impeach a sitting president. But I have seen prosecution cases based on much smaller evidence. ”
During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s team, led by his national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was later convicted in the Mueller investigation, had routinely incited “lock her up” chants about “Corrupt Hillary.”
No charges were ever brought against Hillary Clinton, but the administration has launched investigations into former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe. Trump had also threatened to fire Barr if he did not indict Barack Obama, Joe Biden and many others for the alleged scandal he called “Obamagate”, related to a vague theory that Obama officials framed Trump for the investigation of collusion with Russia, and stated that the prosecutions will continue once he is re-elected.
There have been reports that Trump might pardon himself before leaving office. It is unclear if he can do so constitutionally and the issue came up during Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing before the Supreme Court.
But even if he could carry out a president’s unprecedented act of forgiving himself, he would still be susceptible to the state and local charges he faces. One, from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, cited Trump (“individual 1”) in charges brought against his former personal attorney Michael Cohen for money-related campaign finance offenses. secret paid to women, one of them Stormy Daniels, who allegedly had affairs with Trump.
Cohen, who pleaded guilty to the charges, had claimed under oath that Trump had ordered him to make the illegal payments and that the Trump Organization reimbursed him for the payments. The former lawyer, now bitterly estranged from Trump, has predicted that his former boss “could soon be the first president to go directly from the White House to jail.”
In another case, Cyrus Vance Jr, the Manhattan district attorney, is investigating what his office has described as “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct in the Trump Organization.” In addition to Trump’s taxes, he will examine whether Trump and his company were involved in bank fraud, insurance fraud, criminal tax fraud, and falsification of business records.
Trump and his legal team have challenged a subpoena asking his accounting firm for eight years of tax returns and financial records. Five courts have dismissed the challenge. Trump also lost an appeal to the Supreme Court seeking immunity from the state grand jury subpoena.
The New York attorney general is also investigating whether the Trump organization manipulated the value of assets to guarantee loans and tax benefits. Among the lines of investigation are tax breaks at the Trump Seven Springs complex in New York and the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles. There are also investigations into the valuation of a Trump office tower on Wall Street and the cancellation of a $ 100 million (£ 76 million) loan at the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.
Prosecutors say this is a civil investigation and is not being conducted in coordination with any law enforcement agency at this time. But, they say, it could become a criminal matter if evidence emerges to support it. Lawyers for the Trump Organization have claimed that New York Attorney General Letitia James is politically motivated and had tried to postpone the deposition of one of the president’s children until after the election. This was rejected by the court and Eric Trump recently made his statement remotely.
Trump also faces legal action from alleged victims of his sexual assaults, such as E magazine writer Jean Carroll, who claimed Trump raped her at a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. They are suing him for defamation after he accused them of fabricating the attacks. In these cases too, Trump had tried to profit from his position. Last month, in an extraordinary move, Attorney General Barr replaced the Justice Department as a defendant in place of Trump in the Carroll case.
Lawyers for the department claimed that Trump should not be sued because he had made his comments about Carroll in the “course of an official White House response to press inquiries,” even though what he said was on a matter that it took place decades before his election. .
Carroll’s attorneys accused Barr’s decision of distorting the search for justice. “There is not a single person in the United States, not the president or anyone else, whose job description includes defaming women who sexually assaulted,” they said in a statement.
It seems unlikely that the Justice Department, under Biden, will continue to take on Trump’s role. There may well be a desire to draw a line after the extraordinary turbulence and divisions of the Trump years. In his speech as president-elect, Biden spoke of a “time to heal,” promising “not to divide, but to unite the country.”
Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School, told NPR broadcaster: “If this is good for the country it is a very difficult question that is going to be very complicated. If it’s good for the Biden administration […] to be engrossed in being the first administration to impeach a previous president, those are very difficult questions. “But Goldsmith also acknowledged that” it is not entirely clear that looking forward and not looking back is an available option. “
Such has been the toxic nature of the policy with Donald Trump: the aggression that the former president had shown towards his opponents; the sheer volume of accusations against him – it will be very difficult to stop the calls for legal proceedings.
