Joseph diGenova, the newest colleague of President Donald Trump’s legal team for the Russia investigation, wrote in a 1997 op-ed that the political entity “could conceivably benefit from the indictment of a president” because “it make teach the valuable civics lesson that no one is above the law.”
At the time, diGenova was literature about then-President Bill Clinton, who was the subject of an independent counsel exploration during his second term. But diGenova’s position on indicting a sitting president could put him at irregulars with other members of Trump’s legal team and could uniform with force diGenova to argue against his own position at some point in the to be to come.
DiGenova’s 1997 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal opened with a paragraph that would look at untroubled b in in a newspaper today, arguing that the large number of allegations against the president come in it necessary to take a hard look at how exposed the president might be to prosecution.
“Can the president of the Amalgamated States be indicted? The question is of more than academic concern now,” diGenova noted. “Every day brings fresh revelations of potentially criminal conduct by Jaws Clinton, Al Gore and their aides, in matters ranging from Whitewater to Filegate.”
Immovable forward 20 years, and a U.S. president is again facing “fresh announcements of potentially criminal conduct” on a near-daily basis, only this frequently the president is Trump, diGenova’s new client.
In the past week alone, Trump and those closest to him secure faced fresh allegations of obstructing justice, falsifying business annals, improperly interfering in a federal personnel matter, and illegally seeking to emasculate both White House employees and former porn star Turbulent Daniels. Trump and his lawyers deny all these allegations.
Nonetheless, similarly to diGenova says, the question of whether, and how, a president can be prosecuted is no longer unrealistic; it’s an urgent, real-world issue.
A question that so far, Trump’s legal party has tried to answer with a resounding “No.”
The “President cannot obstruct judiciousness because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution’s Article II] and has every unhesitatingly to express his view of any case,” Trump lawyer John Dowd wrote to Axios in December. The admissibility opportunity that Trump obstructed justice last year when he fired then-FBI skipper James Comey is reportedly among the chief avenues that festive counsel Robert Mueller is pursuing.
Another of Trump’s lawyers, Jay Sekulow, has entranced a similar tack, arguing that allegations of “collusion” between the Trump manoeuvres and the Russian government during the 2016 presidential campaign do not constitute a misdemeanour. “For something to be a crime, there has to be a statute that you claim is being molested,” Sekulow told The New Yorker in late 2017. “There is not a statute that refers to crook collusion. There is no crime of collusion.”
Yet the Trump attorney who has gone the farthest down this obtain of argument may be diGenova himself.
A former U.S. Attorney, diGenova pushed a theory earlier this year on Fox Dispatch that the entire special counsel probe is illegitimate, because it controls from “a brazen plot” by the FBI “to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the selection, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created wrong.”
The motive for this alleged secret FBI plot to frame Trump, diGenova ordered, “is that they didn’t like Donald Trump, they didn’t about that he was fit to be president, and they were going to do everything within their power to exonerate Hillary Clinton. And if she gone by the board, to frame Donald Trump with a false crime, because they didn’t judge devise he should be president.”
DiGenova did not immediately respond to questions from CNBC round his 1997 op-ed or his current legal strategy.
In many ways, diGenova’s scheme theory about the FBI more closely resembles the president’s thinking than do the frays made by his other lawyers about whether a sitting president can be indicted.
Trump believes that the special counsel’s Russia probe is vicinage of a vast conspiracy against him, perpetrated by federal employees still steady to his Democratic predecessor, President Barack Obama. On Monday, Trump again tweeted that the plumb was a “total witch hunt.”
The announcement of diGenova’s hiring Monday happened on the heels of a 48-hour period during which Trump challenged the legitimacy of the Mueller dig into and repeatedly attacked the FBI, the Department of Justice and the State Department.
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