(04-18-2019, 11:10 PM)TJBender Wrote:

(04-18-2019, 09:03 PM)MalabarJag Wrote:
Telling who to fire Mueller? Mueller was under Sessions and Rosenstein, not Don McGahn or anybody else I've never heard of.

Asking for supporting evidence is shady? Asking to end an investigation that has no basis in fact is deserving of "serious repercussions"?

The rest of your statement is a real stretch. Are you suggesting that complaining about a false charge or the people claiming it is a crime? That would mean that every innocent defendant would be committing a crime by defending himself.

1. Being an idiot does not excuse Trump from telling his White House counsel to ensure the firing of the special counsel sent to investigate him.
2. He wasn't "asking for supporting evidence". He was asking intelligence community officials to put out statements saying that he was not linked to Russia.
3. Let's say I'm the King of France. Let's assume that I've been named as a person of interest in the burning of the Notre Dame because my own personal construction company stood to gain a massive contract for its rebuilding. I know that's ridiculous, and in fact it's a false allegation. If I go visit the lead inspector and tell him that I'd like him to "lift the cloud", isn't that interfering with the investigation? If I call my chief of staff and tell him to fire the lead inspector, how am I not obstructing that investigation? Obstruction is obstruction, regardless of whether there was actually a crime at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

The obstruction of justice side of things should be further explored. Nothing else that I've seen so far merits a second thought, but if a President tried to use his own power to short-circuit an investigation into himself, I don't know of a planet out there where that's not a problem.

No.  That's not obstruction of justice.  Your not interfering with the investigation for a corrupt reason.  In order for a chief executive to obstruct justice he would have to order the destruction of evidence or perjury, not exercise his article 2 constitutional authority as the head of the executive branch.  Firing Mueller would have been a political misstep but not criminal conspiracy.

Moreover, the special counsel was illegal to start with.  The appointing officer (Rod Rosenstein) would be a material witness to any investigation of obstruction of justice (because of his direct involvement in firing comey).  That means he would have had to resign (not just recuse because I don't think anyone at doj had another senate confirmed position with authority to appoint special counsel) and let the next person review the fact pattern.  The special counsel was ineligible because the day before his appointment he was rejected by Trump for his old job as FBI director.  The probe should have been ended before we started torturing potential witnesses for them to flip on the president.

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