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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe 800 former prosecutors, alleging obstruction of justice, are heroes
Shawn Vestal
Fri., May 10, 2019, 5 a.m.
... DOJ follows a standing Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted. What the prosecutors letter asserts is that if he were anyone else literally any other American citizen his conduct would have resulted in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.
The Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming, the letter reads. These include: The Presidents efforts to fire Mueller and to falsify evidence about that effort; The Presidents efforts to limit the scope of Muellers investigation to exclude his conduct; and The Presidents efforts to prevent witnesses from cooperating with investigators probing him and his campaign ...
Paul Rosenzweig, a senior counsel to Kenneth Starr in the Whitewater investigation and former deputy assistant secretary of Homeland Security in the Bush II administration, wrote a column in USA Today in which he argued that the OLC opinion stands in stark contrast with the intentions of the framers that no person not even the president was above the law ...
Increasingly, the president acts as if the law does not apply to him, Rosenzweig wrote. Every aspect of American history rejects that idea. We had a revolution to overthrow the idea of a kingly prerogative. In signing the letter, many of us were making the point that even official acts, if done for corrupt motives, ought to be subject to prosecutorial scrutiny. As the Watergate prosecutors put it, for them to shirk from an appropriate expression of our honest assessment of the evidence of the presidents guilt would not only be a departure from our responsibilities but a dangerous precedent damaging to the rule of law ...
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2019/may/10/the-800-former-federal-prosecutors-who-signed-a-le/
emmaverybo
(8,144 posts)Investigation that laid out the road map for both impeachment and criminal indictment when Trump is out.
I personally would rather have had such a case laid out without Mueller and the so called angry Democrats indicting a sitting president.
Now other and powerful voices weigh in, the House can hold hearings that take the Public through the findings and more, and if Trump continues obstruction, Dems have an even stronger chance of winning in the courts.
Thank you 800 prosecutors!