A new report form NBC News on Tuesday makes the bombshell claim that President Donald Trump has been talking to friends about the possibility of asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “consider prosecuting Mueller and his team.”
In advance of Trump’s State of the Union speech, due Tuesday night, NBC News published an article examining how the president feels about how things are going in the country and his own job performance one year into his first term. The report reiterates Trump’s claim that he believes that the Mueller investigation will soon exonerate him. A friend of the president is quoted as saying that Trump isn’t planning on firing Mueller, believing such an action will only “play right into Mueller’s hands.” This same friend continues that Trump is afraid of giving Mueller “the moral high ground.”
NBC’s report goes on to quote an unnamed Trump advisor with the president’s desire to prosecute Mueller if the current strategy of discrediting the investigation without officially firing the special counsel proves not to be enough.
“Here’s how it would work: ‘We’re sorry, Mr. Mueller, you won’t be able to run the federal grand jury today because he has to go testify to another federal grand jury.’”
An article Tuesday in Raw Story discusses the NBC report and makes the point that Robert Mueller has not, at least to this point, been accused of any crimes, so it’s unclear exactly what he would be charged with in any future attempt at prosecution.
This latest news comes after a busy few days of events that, taken together, seem to throw the future of the Mueller investigation into more doubt than has been seen before. The New York Times reported Monday that deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, who has frequently been the target of Trump’s criticism in recent weeks, has been forced to resign his position . Another article from the New York Times suggests that deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is likely to become a target of the president and Republicans in Congress when the controversial Devin Nunes memo is released. Rosenstein was apparently the official to sign off on the contested FISA warrant of Carter Page that is now being alleged by Nunes and other Republicans to amount to a criminal abuse of power by the FBI.
Twitter pundits have been quick to jump in with their own thoughts about NBC’s report.
That Trump would even float the idea of PROSECUTING special counsel Robert Mueller is a clear reflection of the GOP’s complete & utter failure to fulfill their constitutional duty of imposing constraints on the exec. branch.
He’s drunk on power & Republicans are enabling him. https://t.co/CUE4RWGsj4
— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) January 30, 2018
Trump is considering prosecuting Mueller for investigating his collusion with Russia, friends say. That’s the real State of the Union: a coup in broad daylight. https://t.co/t73Unk775u pic.twitter.com/iaBkgU7RUC
— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) January 30, 2018
