On Friday, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel argued that President Trump’s lawyers aren’t handling the Robert Mueller investigation the right way. The lawyers are all focused on his personal liability, and not on how the Mueller probe threatens the separation of powers.
She noted constitutional lawyer David Rivkin argued in her newspaper “that a president’s exercise of the powers of his office cannot legitimately be construed as obstruction of justice. Among those powers are the right to direct law enforcement and to fire executive-branch appointees at will.”
What’s really fascinating about Strassel’s column is the liberal argument that ordering more transparency is being painted as somehow an obstruction of justice:
Already we are seeing the obstruction narrative threaten other core powers. We are now told it is obstructionist for a president to use his pardon power, as Mr. Trump did with Joe Arpaio and Scooter Libby. We are told that Mr. Trump is obstructing justice by ordering the attorney general to cooperate with congressional document demands. And Team Trump needs to understand that the mere specter is enough to constrain the presidency; Mr. Mueller doesn’t need to bring a charge.
Whether or not Mueller ever charges Trump with anything could be seen as irrelevant. The point is that in every news cycle, Trump is portrayed as weakened and endangered by the prospect of indictment and even impeachment.
The Libby pardon should remind conservatives that special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald never came close to indicting Bush or Cheney, but the probe allowed the media to cast dark clouds all over the second term and was a great tool in helping journalists hammer a daily point that Team Bush was mendacious to the point of being in legal trouble.
Strassel recommends that Trump pursue a strategy of aggressive transparency, exposing and declassifying what Team Obama was doing to prevent him from winning the presidency. Imagine Brian Stelter and the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” liberals complaining about all the nefarious releasing of a flood of information! Or outrage them more by declassifying them in a drip-drip-drip fashion that underlines our media's tendency to omit-omit-omit information Obama lovers can't abide.
Simultaneous to legal overhaul, the White House should immediately order the declassification (with redactions for sources and methods) of every underlying document in the Justice Department and FBI counterintelligence probe, including any paper at the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and any other agencies that were involved. Everything. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants. Emails. Texts. The interviews with dossier author Christopher Steele. The story of how exactly the FBI came into possession of info about Trump aide George Papadopoulos. Details of any as yet undisclosed FBI spying on the Trump campaign.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have warned him off this transparency, on the grounds—yet again—that such a release might be construed as obstructing the Mueller probe. To repeat: The president has ultimate authority over classification, and no exercise of that constitutional power can be obstruction. Even the few documents the public has seen—the Comey memos, the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page texts, a glimpse of one FISA warrant—have created a compelling case that the FBI and Justice Department in 2016 abused their power.
Yes, there are risks of a worrisome declassification precedent. But they are outweighed by the gravity of the threat to the executive branch and the potential loss of faith in law enforcement. The nation has the right to the full story now—to understand better how we ever got to a special counsel, and to put Mr. Mueller’s ultimate findings in context.
The media and anti-Trump elites have created a false choice: that Mr. Trump must either sit back and take it, or go on a firing rampage. He has better options. He can define the terms of this debate and defend the executive branch. And he can enlighten the country. But his time for doing so productively is growing very short.
