Remember this? It was news in May 2019:
President D___ T___ would have been indicted for obstruction of justice in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation if he did not hold the nation’s highest office, nearly 700 former federal prosecutors argued in an open letter published on Medium on Monday.
The ex-prosecutors — who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations dating back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower — said Attorney General William Barr’s decision not to charge T___ with obstruction “runs counter to logic and our experience.”
The letter added, “Each of us believes that the conduct of President T___ described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”
“We believe strongly that, but for the OLC memo, the overwhelming weight of professional judgment would come down in favor of prosecution for the conduct outlined in the Mueller Report,” the letter continued.
The Mueller report cited 10 episodes indicating that T____ could be prosecuted after he left office. He left office more than six months ago, but there is no sign so far that the Department of Justice is pursuing the matter.
Before leaving office, the former president also tried to overturn the results of the election. I’m not sure there is anything in federal law that explicitly makes that behavior illegal. The laws against treason and sedition are narrowly written and may not apply to a president doing everything he can to illegally remain in office. Congress probably never imagined that kind of behavior.
Nevertheless, this latest news is remarkable:
Former President D____ T____ . . . explicitly pressured {the acting attorney general] to declare the 2020 election “corrupt” in a December phone call, according to documents published Friday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee. [They are] the most recent evidence of T____’s extraordinary campaign to overturn the election’s results.
The House committee—which is investigating the T____ administration’s potentially unlawful efforts to influence the outcome of the election—made public notes taken by former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, during a Dec. 27 phone call between T____ and top officials from the Department of Justice.
In the notes summarizing the call, Donoghue recalled T____ asking Rosen and other top officials to “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and congressional allies [Forbes].
But, according to The Guardian:
D____ T____ insisted on Saturday that when he told senior justice department officials to “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me”, he was not attempting to subvert US democracy, but to “uphold the integrity and honesty of elections and the sanctity of our vote”. . . .
One Washington editor, Benjy Sarlin of NBC News, wrote on Twitter: “We can’t take a continuous historic scandal for granted just because he says it out loud all the time. These are Watergate-level allegations.”
On Friday, Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House oversight committee, said: “These handwritten notes show that President T____ directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election.”
If that isn’t treason or sedition, strictly speaking, it sure sounds like “interference with the orderly administration of law and justice”, i.e. obstruction.
The Department of Justice has work to do in the matter of former president D___ J. T____.
Or doesn’t the rule of law apply to him?
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 