Tag Archives: Nixon impeachment

More on Mueller’s Endgame: Unindicted Co-Conspirators & Other Stuff

01 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

By Frank Bowman

Under current Department of Justice policy, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is not empowered to seek an indictment against a sitting president. Yesterday, I discussed here and on Slate two ways Mueller could nonetheless ensure that Congress would be informed if he concluded that Mr. Trump had committed crimes.

Several colleagues and commenters on the blog have raised questions that may have occurred to others.  I try to answer them below:

Uninidicted co-conspirators: A colleague remembered that President Richard Nixon was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a case brought by Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski He wondered whether that might provide an avenue for disclosing Mr. Mueller’s conclusions and the evidence supporting them. It could. Theoretically. But the reason I didn’t mention this option is that listing unindicted co-conspirators by name in an indictment has been sharply criticized by courts and is strongly discouraged by Department of Justice policy. Formally identifying someone as a criminal without formally charging him imposes a damaging public stigma without a mechanism for removing it. Therefore, the general rule is that, if prosecutors have sufficient evidence to charge someone with a crime, they should do so, which both triggers their obligation to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and gives the person named an opportunity to defend himself.

Accordingly, Section 9-11.130 of the U.S. Attorney’s Manual states: “In the absence of some significant justification, federal prosecutors generally should not identify unindicted co-conspirators in conspiracy indictments.”

Jaworski evidently felt that naming Nixon was justifiable, presumably for reasons that would appeal to Mr. Mueller, such as a desire to avoid the complications entailed by indicting a sitting president, while at the same time letting Congress and the public know about his legal judgment that Nixon had committed a crime.  Mueller might come to feel the same way. However, while Jaworski seems to have enjoyed a substantial amount of operational freedom due to the firestorm that resulted from the firing of his predecessor Archibald Cox in the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, it’s pretty plain that any decision by Mueller that directly touches on Mr. Trump is going to be carefully scrutinized by his DOJ superior.  That superior (whether it is Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein or someone thrust into that role by Mr. Trump’s evident desire to fire him) could easily justify refusing to allow Mueller to name Mr. Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator on the ground that it violated DOJ policy and was not supported by a “significant justification.”

To be clear, if Mr. Mueller concludes that Mr. Trump conspired with others to commit crimes, he can certainly draft indictments of those others, and structure his case against them, in a way that makes Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing fairly clear without naming him as a co-conspirator.  In the end, that is perhaps the easiest way for Mueller to proceed.  However, that approach necessarily saves Mr. Trump from two legally and politically important events — the formal and public judgment by Mr. Mueller, expressed in his signature on an indictment, that Mr. Trump committed a crime, and the formal and public conclusion by a grand jury of ordinary citizens, expressed by approving the indictment, that Mr. Trump probably committed that crime. Leon Jaworski named Richard Nixon precisely because he appreciated the significance of these solemn pronouncements.

Reader questions: Tye Simpson asks: “How do you square the special counsel’s congressional authority in section [609](c) to prosecute if there’s no authority to indict? In the event of conflict shouldn’t a general departmental policy or practice be subordinated to a specific congressional authority?”

The key is the reader’s characterization of Mueller’s authority to prosecute as “congressional authority.”  It’s not.  The regulation I referred to in yesterday’s post is an internal Department of Justice regulation, not a congressionally authorized statute.  And the regulation, 28 CFR 600.6, merely gives Mueller the same authority granted the U.S. Attorney in a federal judicial district.  Like all U.S. Attorneys, Mueller is subject to DOJ regulations and the DOJ chain of command.  The regulations give Mueller’s superiors the power to bar him from doing things that are contrary to DOJ policy.  Indicting a sitting president is against DOJ policy.  Therefore, Mueller’s superior, now Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, can prevent Mueller from doing it.

Tye Simpson also asks: “For a non-lawyer: What about: 600.9 (c) “The Attorney General may determine that public release of these reports would be in the public interest, to the extent that release would comply with applicable legal restrictions…”? Currently, R. Rosenstein’s call?”

The reader refers to the DOJ regulation governing disclosure to Congress and the public of reports on instances when higher DOJ authority blocks a special counsel from pursuing some action he wants to pursue.  The short answer to the question is “yes.”  That is, if Mueller recommended indicting Mr. Trump and was ordered not to do it, the Justice Department would be obliged to report that event and the reasons for it to Congress.  That’s the provision I’ve suggested Mueller could use to force disclosure to Congress of a conclusion that Mr. Trump committed a crime.  Disclosure to Congress in those circumstances is not optional.

However, the section to which the reader alludes, 28 CFR 609(c), governs disclosure to the public.  And those disclosures are discretionary.  In this case, the discretion would presumably be exercised by Rod Rosenstein.

Trump commits another impeachable offense: Siccing federal criminal investigators on his enemies

03 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Richard M. Nixon. The second article charged that President Nixon abused the powers of the presidency either by using or trying to use federal investigative agencies against his political enemies or by interfering or trying to interfere with lawful investigations by those agencies into his own wrongdoing or that of his subordinates.  He tried to get dirt on his opponents through the IRS. He ordered the FBI to conduct investigations of actual or suspected enemies in and outside of government. He sought to suppress investigations into the growing Watergate scandal. As the fifth specification of the article of impeachment put it:

In disregard of the rule of law, he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Criminal Division, and the Office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, of the Department of Justice, and the Central Intelligence Agency, in violation of his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

In short, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Richard Nixon because he sought to turn the immense power of the Justice Department and federal criminal investigative agencies against his political adversaries. Although this article of impeachment was never approved by the full House of Representatives because Nixon resigned before a vote could be taken, it received more votes in committee than any other proposed article. No respectable scholar of the constitution doubts that directing the criminal justice and intelligence systems of the United States against political opponents for purposes unrelated to the impartial enforcement of the law or preservation of legitimate national security interests is among the impeachable “high Crimes & Misdemeanors” of Article II, Section 4.

This morning, Friday, November 3, Mr. Trump sent out a series of Tweets in which he explicitly urged the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party for a grab bag of supposed offenses — e-mails deleted from Secretary Clinton’s private server, the Russia-uranium kerfluffle, activities by Tony Podesta (lobbyist and brother of Secretary Clinton’s campaign manager), and the allegation that officials at the Democratic National Committee worked with Secretary Clinton’s campaign to give it a boost over that of Senator Bernie Sanders.

The Trump Tweet-string included these classics:

Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems..

….People are angry. At some point the Justice Department, and the FBI, must do what is right and proper. The American public deserves it!

Mr. Trump followed up these Tweets with statements to the press in which he said he is “disappointed” with the Justice Department and would not rule out firing Attorney General Sessions if Sessions won’t investigate Democrats.

In my view, Mr. Trump’s tweets tiptoed right up to the line of an impeachable offense.  His subsequent statements to the press stepped firmly over it.

Using the Nixon precedent as a template, in order to show that Mr. Trump’s behavior is impeachable, several requirements must be met:

First, he must be seeking to employ the criminal investigative powers of the federal government against his political opponents.  That is unquestionably the case.

Second, he must be acting, in the words of the Nixon impeachment article, “for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office.”  Although his most devoted adherents may claim otherwise, it is impossible to divine any legitimate, non-political, purpose in his call for action by the Justice Department.

  • Although it is doubtless a matter of intense interest for members of Democratic Party, whether the DNC did or didn’t favor Secretary Clinton can by no stretch be translated into a violation of law, and still less a fit subject for a criminal investigation by a Justice Department controlled by the opposing party.
  • The Clinton e-mail matter has already been investigated by the Justice Department, even if extreme Republican partisans may not have liked the outcome.
  • Tony Podesta’s activities are already the subject of inquiries by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which is why Podesta just resigned from his own lobbying firm.  So Trump’s inclusion of Podesta in his broadside manifested either a scarcely credible ignorance of the state of play of an investigation with which Mr. Trump is plainly obsessed or a willful attempt to deflect attention from Mueller’s focus on Trump campaign affiliates.
  • And, as multiple credible observers have explained, the Russia-uranium-Clinton connection is an invented non-story. Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear materials and non-proliferation expert, observed in Newsweek, “I have to say that this is one of those things where reasonable people cannot disagree: There just aren’t two sides.”

In short, every item on the laundry list of things for which Mr. Trump wants the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents is either not a crime, has already been or is being investigated, or, in the case of the Clinton-uranium “scandal,” is an invented storyline promoted by Mr. Trump and his supporters to divert attention from the Mueller investigation.

Third, it is not necessary to establish impeachable misconduct that a president succeed in bending law enforcement agencies to his corrupting purpose. While some of the law enforcement and intelligence officials Nixon tried to enlist in his illegal schemes cooperated, many refused or ignored his orders, the IRS, the CIA, and important elements of the FBI among them. His failed attempts to misuse federal agencies were nonetheless integral components of the impeachment case against him.

This is a key point in the present case. If pressed, Mr. Trump will no doubt claim that he didn’t order anybody to do anything and that his Tweets are, at worst, expressions of dismay at the established norm that bars presidents from direct involvement in Justice Department decisions. This is, of course, transparent eyewash.  When a President of the United States publicly proclaims that he wants an executive branch agency to do something and will be deeply displeased if it doesn’t, that’s tantamount to an order.

Even if it were not, Mr. Trump took the next and fateful step this morning when he expressed disappointment in the Justice Department for its inaction and held open the option of firing the Attorney General if his wishes were not honored.  That is as close to a direct order as a president can give without putting it in writing.  Any way you slice it, Mr. Trump is telling the Justice Department and the FBI that he wants them to engage in legally baseless, politically motivated criminal investigations.

Finally, it is not, cannot be, an excuse if Mr. Trump were to say, “Well, even though the uranium story and all the rest prove to be baseless, I didn’t know that. As I so often do, I was just responding to what ‘people are saying.'” As the Nixon articles of impeachment observed, a president has the solemn constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws shall be faithfully executed.”  If this duty means anything in the criminal justice setting, it means that presidents shoulder an obligation even more binding than that assumed by their subordinates not to unleash on any citizen the intrusive, life-altering power of federal investigative agencies absent credible evidence that a real crime may have been committed.

Let us be absolutely clear here. No matter how far Mr. Trump has warped our collective sense of what is normal or even minimally acceptable in an American president, it is not acceptable for a president either to employ, or threaten to employ, the agents and ministers of the criminal law of the United States against his enemies for political gain.  A president who does so engages in precisely the class of misconduct perilous to the maintenance of republican government for which the founders designed the remedy of impeachment.

When and if the political season is ever ripe for enumerating Mr. Trump’s “high Crimes & Misdemeanors” in articles of impeachment, his attempts to corrupt the American justice system should be among those articles.

Frank Bowman