Can he get away with it? Maybe.
by digby
Greg Sargent has a good piece up at the Plumline about Trump’s “strategy” such as it is with respect to Mueller:
President Trump and his legal team appear to have leaked special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s questions as a set-up to accomplishing a broader goal: To create a pretext for avoiding a sit-down interview. We don’t yet know whether Trump will go through with this, but if he does, and if Mueller tries to subpoena him — which is a real possibility — that could lead to a legal and political standoff that could crank up this crisis to Defcon One.
Which is why it is so dangerous that Trump’s team has reportedly concluded that Trump is currently winning the battle with Mueller in the minds of voters.
CNN reports this morning on Team Trump’s thinking. Trump’s lawyers have concluded that they can win the legal standoff over whether the special counsel has the authority to compel a sitting president to testify. But beyond this, they also believe they’re winning the political argument:
Their political argument also has changed. While the lawyers were originally in a let’s-get-this-over-with mode, they now believe that time is on their side — especially with the 2018 elections looming. They believe that Trump has done a good job discrediting the investigators and the investigation itself.
It’s always possible that this is just bluster and spin. But there are reasons to believe Trump himself probably does think this. He believes only the polls that show he is popular, and in recent weeks, he has conspicuously abandoned his cooperative tone toward the Mueller investigation, switching to a barrage of attacks on the probe as illegitimate and on Mueller himself as corrupt. Trump is getting bombarded by voices out of #Foxlandia telling him that he is the victim of a Deep State Coup, and he likely believes they represent majority opinion.
Meanwhile, whatever the skeletal remains of Trump’s legal team actually believe, they are likely telling him what he wants to hear on this front as well. After all, if they believe a sit-down interview would be treacherous, what better way to persuade him to avoid it than telling him he has already vanquished Mueller — that the public agrees the probe has been discredited and will cheer him on as he flouts the demand for an interview?
This morning, Trump himself basically underscored all these points. Trump tweeted his frequent claim that the charge of collusion is a “hoax” but added something new: He said the probe for obstruction is a “setup & trap.” He approvingly quoted a legal expert he heard out of #Foxlandia today claiming Mueller’s questions are “an intrusion” into the president’s power to fire anybody at will. That’s a reference to the fact that Mueller’s questions focus heavily on Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey.
Taken all together, the emerging stance of Team Trump is that any effort to question Trump about his true intent in trying to derail an investigation into himself is inherently illegitimate. It’s nothing more than a “setup & trap,” an “intrusion” on his powers. Trump is under no obligation to account for any of it.
I think this is probably the case. The only way that his supporters can protect him is by saying that he’s won public approval and therefore has no obligation to cooperate and can do as he pleases with the Justice Department. In other words, his lawyers and advisers may very well now be pushing him to take the 5th or simply refuse to accept a subpoena and also purge the DOJ of anyone that Fox News has told him are deep state traitors to the president, which means traitors to America.
It’s impossible to know if he will follow through on any of that because he lurches from one thought to the next, lies reflexively and fires his staff willy-nilly all day long. But taken all together, the actions of the team over the past month or so do indicate that he’s going to defy Mueller and find a pretext outside of of the Russia investigation to get rid of Rosenstein and maybe Sessions.
They have convinced him that the public is with him so he feels safe in doing that.
And the fact is that vast majority of Republicans are with him and GOP hatchet men in the congress are using their substantial power to help, so I am not sure he can’t get away with all of it.
.