So what’s the view of Kenneth W. Starr, the former U.S. solicitor general who served as independent counsel in the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigation, about President Donald Trump being under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Where does he think the evidence stands? What would he advise Trump to do. He wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post. Here are a few parts of his op-ed:
Under legally binding regulations, the special counsel’s fate rests exclusively with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. He alone is empowered to make that fateful decision. As a matter of honor, and in light of his sworn testimony before Congress, Rosenstein would inevitably resign if confronted with a White House directive to dismiss the special counsel. Wisdom counsels strongly against unleashing a 21st-century version of the Saturday Night Massacre of Watergate-era infamy. Congress is busily carrying on its constitutionally ordained function of oversight. What we’ve seen over the past week has not been pretty, but it is effective and important. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s public hearings have helped educate the American people and uncovered illuminating information from both Comey and Sessions. Among other things, the Senate secured a public and unequivocal denial by the attorney general of campaign collusion. While the Democrats expressed frustration with the attorney general’s refusal to discuss his conversations with the president, Sessions was on entirely solid ground in safeguarding the president’s right to invoke executive privilege, a constitutionally based protection unanimously recognized by the Supreme Court as integral to our system of separation of powers. Notwithstanding reports that the special counsel has launched an inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice, the early returns also suggest the absence of any Oval Office criminality, even with the unsettling use of Trump Tower business methods where they don’t belong. To “hope” that the director would abandon a line of inquiry is most naturally read as pleading and cajoling, but not as an order. In any event, at the time Comey didn’t treat the president’s words as a directive. Still, the official processes now under way should continue unimpeded. Let the legislative and executive branches fulfill their respective roles, ordained at the founding and matured by the wisdom of sobering experience gained over the course of seven generations.
And here is another key quote:
Subject to the possibility of being fired for “good cause,” Mueller should be allowed to do his work unhindered and unimpeded. Absent the most extreme circumstances, the president would be singularly ill-advised to threaten, much less order, Mueller’s firing.
Trump is getting a lot of advice saying he shouldn’t fire Mueller.
Take your bets now on the date for when he’ll fire him.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.