The president’s day indeed
President Trump is, oddly enough, correct: He has a “legal right,” as he belligerently tweeted last week, to influence criminal cases — and all sorts of other matters presidents have left alone. Trump being Trump, he was wrong again before the sentence ended. Responding to Attorney General William Barr’s objection to his tweeting about criminal cases, the president went on to note that despite his authority to do so, he had “so far chosen not to” interfere in such matters. In fact, from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to last week’s intervention on behalf of his felon friend Roger Stone, his administration has been a veritable festival of political meddling in the machinery of criminal justice.
Other presidents have refrained from doing so by custom, not law. Richard Nixon, the last president to flout that standard, faced impeachment and resigned under pressure.
But Trump has no use for custom, and his impeachment found the Senate’s Republican majority refusing to consider the case for his removal, much less bring it about. If a sitting president can be neither indicted, according to the Justice Department policy Mueller scrupulously observed, nor removed from office, he faces precious little legal constraint.
Recent events have demonstrated that dire state of affairs. The president last week publicly objected to federal prosecutors’ recommendation that
Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for obstructing investigations into his service as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and Russian agents. Barr promptly overruled the advice, a rare intervention for which the president publicly thanked him.
Barr’s uncharacteristic objection to the president’s commentary, which came after four Stone prosecutors resigned in protest, is either a prelude to his departure or a puton. The Justice Department’s handling of other cases with political implications points to the latter.
The attorney general has reportedly tasked outside prosecutors with reviewing another Mueller prosecution, that of former national security adviser
Michael Flynn, as well as other sensitive cases being handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. He has appointed another prosecutor to investigate the origins of the FBI probe that became Mueller’s, an errand in line with Trump’s strenuous efforts to disprove Russian interference.
The department also spent nearly two years investigating Andrew McCabe, a former FBI deputy director and Trump nemesis, for allegedly deceiving internal inspectors before it finally abandoned the case last week. According to newly released transcripts of closed proceedings in a related case, U.S. District Judge Reggie Barnett Walton criticized the president’s role in the prosecution and the department’s investigation as unnecessarily protracted, saying, “I don’t think people like the fact that you’ve got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted. I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road.”
It’s no wonder Trump has attacked the judiciary, including the judge in the Stone case, another potential check on his power in Congress’ absence. The same goes for unruly states such as California, a subject of another recently dropped Justice Department investigation, and New York, which he punished by revoking its eligibility for a trustedtraveler program.
New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, one of the House impeachment managers, predicted such consequences for the states should the Senate ignore Trump’s leveraging of federal funds to force Ukraine’s government to smear his enemies. Having suffered no practical consequence for his abuse of power, the president has even more power to abuse.