MUELLER TERRIFIES TRUMP

The president wants him gone. But all the reasons to fire or sideline him are bogus.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller scares the daylights out of President Trump and the White House. Trump is obsessed with the Russia investigation, refusing to let go of it on Twitter and otherwise. Many of his top aides are caught up in it, including his sonin- law, Jared Kushner. Almost every top White House official, including the vice president, is lawyering up. Even the president’s lawyer has gotten a lawyer.

If Trump or those around him have done anything wrong, Mueller represents a real threat. He is about as good a special counsel as one can imagine, having bipartisan credentials and deep prosecutorial experience — far more than the late Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. And Mueller is assembling a dream team of expert deputies. Of course the president would love an excuse to get rid of Mueller.

We have rebutted claims that Mueller’s prior law firm affiliation posed a conflict — under the District of Columbia’s tough professional conduct rules, it does not. But Trump’s surrogates continue to manufacture new and ludicrous conflict of interest claims. One is that because Mueller worked closely with James Comey at the FBI and because Comey is a material witness to the obstruction of justice part of the case, Mueller cannot investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute an obstruction of justice charge.

We are not aware of any precedent for requiring a prosecutor to recuse from a case simply because a colleague who was also a law enforcement officer was a material witness in the case. Nor do the applicable rules of professional conduct for attorneys or prosecutors require it.

In fact, many prosecutors are close friends with police officers, detectives, FBI agents and other law enforcement officials.

FRIVOLOUS OBJECTION

The rules even explicitly say a lawyer can act as an advocate in a trial in which another lawyer currently in the same law firm is a witness — so clearly, a former colleague would not be a problem. To preclude prosecutors from working on cases solely for such reasons would hamper the course of justice.

Another argument is that Mueller should not have hired any lawyers for his staff who made significant campaign contributions. This overlooks that Mueller himself was a registered Republican when he was appointed by President George W. Bush to head the FBI, and he was named special counsel by Trump’s own deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein.

His critics apparently feel that Mueller has not sufficiently solidified his GOP credentials by making significant recent campaign contributions. But to them, his deeper sin is that he appointed to his staff a few lawyers who made contributions to Democrats. This presumably makes the entire enterprise a partisan “witch hunt.”

This objection is frivolous. Presidents of both parties have for a long time appointed campaign donors to be U. S. attorneys and top Justice Department officials. Every American is subject to being prosecuted by these officials who were also contributors to one party or the other. But a Republican special counsel who hires a handful of Democrats is presumed to be biased against the most powerful man in the country, the president? Nonsense.

While they’re at it, Trump surrogates might as well object that Mueller and John Kerry, a former Democratic senator and secretary of State, went to high school together at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N. H. In fact, Mueller and Kerry played together on the St. Paul’s ice hockey team — and after graduation, they went off to Vietnam together. Kerry, of course, has little to do with the Russia inquiry, but perhaps Trump’s defenders will argue that this entire “Russia thing” is a conspiracy engineered by those who fought in America’s most tragic Cold War episode against those, like Trump, who did not. THE COX CONNECTION What next, dredging up that Cox also went to St. Paul’s? Maybe the three of them cooked up this plot decades ago over gin and tonics at an alumni mixer?

The conspiracy theories can go on and on as Trump’s most extreme backers look for an excuse for him to fire Mueller. But it won’t work. The overwhelming majority of Americans want this investigation to find out what happened when the Russians interfered with our 2016 election, and who among us helped them.

Chances are if Trump fires Mueller, Vice President Pence’s trajectory to the Oval Office will accelerate. The American people, and Congress, simply will not stand for it. The president needs to get off Twitter and focus on his job — and let Mueller and his team do theirs.

Richard Painter is the vice chairman and Norman Eisen is the chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. They were chief White House ethics lawyers for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively.

ALEX BRANDON, AP