President Trump and his legal team likely exhaled last month when special counsel Robert Mueller’s office notified them that the president is not being treated as a suspect in the Russia investigation at this time. Mueller’s disclosure to Trump’s lawyers will come as a piece of good news for a legal operation that desperately needed a reprieve from the ceaseless negative coverage of the probe. The Washington Post reported that a faction of the president’s attorneys are holding out hope that the lack of an indictment will be the beginning of the end of an investigation that has lasted for 10 months and which has evolved into a comprehensive inquiry on everything from possible collusion with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential campaign to the influence of foreign money in U.S. politics.
While Trump is not a target of the special counsel at this stage, he is still a subject. That means that however the White House wants to spin this latest development, Trump is hardly out of the woods Mueller is an astute law enforcement professional who understands the nuances of Justice Department guidelines and legal precedent like the back of his hand. And he recognizes all too clearly that it would highly unusual, indeed unprecedented in American history, if he decided to file a charge against a sitting president. Even assuming Mueller’s team of prosecutors believed it was proper on the merits to charge Trump with a crime, there is more than a decent chance that Mueller would restrain himself from making that decision in order to save himself from the agony of the inevitable White House appeal to the Supreme Court.
The biggest threat to Trump has never been a criminal charge, but rather the hellfire that would result from a voluminous, highly detailed, facts-oriented public report telling a highly compelling story about specific, legally-questionable actions the president took to either shut down or discredit the Russia investigation. If Mueller were to write such a report and send it to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (and were Rosenstein to declassify the findings due to intense public interest in the case), Trump would be ensnared in the biggest political crisis of his life. The fact the name “Robert Mueller” — a former federal prosecutor, director of the FBI, and straight-laced public servant respected by Democrats and Republicans alike — would be scrawled on the report’s cover sheet only adds more credibility.
Adopting a rigorous public relations strategy is easy when the independent counsel was Ken Starr, who could be typecast as an ideological conservative zealot who sought to overthrow a Democratic administration. It’s infinitely more difficult, however, when the lead prosecutor is a guy like Mueller.
It is way too early to speculate what a “Mueller Report” would say or if it would even be released to the public. The investigation doesn’t appear to be nearing a conclusion; in fact, the probe is expanding, which means that any final report compiled by the special counsel’s office could potentially be more damning than it would normally be. There is also the possibility of the unknown; for instance, perhaps Trump chooses to deliver a deposition and fibs, exaggerates, or downright misleads in the process of answering questions.
The point here is that Trump is still very much in Mueller’s crosshairs. And his presidency could be irrevocably tarnished even by the mere perception of flouting the law.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
