Trump's push for inquiries challenges Justice Dept. independence

Source: Politico | November 3, 2017 | Darren Samuelsohn

By going after political opponents for prosecution, the president risks a major breach of protocol.

President Donald Trump is putting his Justice Department in an impossible spot by demanding that it investigate his political opponents.

With his forceful pleas via Twitter and recent media interviews to launch inquiries into everything from Hillary Clinton’s e-mails to an Obama-era uranium deal, the president is essentially setting the department up for a major breach of protocol if it actually follows through on his requests, according to former government attorneys and prosecutors.

“There is a reason why we have a norm against presidential interference in criminal investigations,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former George W. Bush-era Homeland Security official and senior counsel from the Kenneth Starr investigation into President Bill Clinton. “President Trump is the living, breathing proof-case for that norm.”

Trump’s calls for both the Justice Department and the FBI to dig into a series of purported Democratic scandals have been widely dismissed as a way to deflect attention from special counsel Robert Mueller and the criminal charges he filed earlier this week against three of the president’s former campaign aides.

But Trump is still the president of the United States, and his public statements encouraging investigations into his current and former opponents have drawn widespread criticism across the ranks of current and former law enforcement officials. Trump’s statements also leave his political appointees at the Justice Department in a bind: Do they follow the orders of the president who put them in their jobs, or do they follow the historical norms and rules of their department that mandate they stay clear of politics when they open, investigate and close any criminal cases?

“Any probe would be suspect from the get-go because it was instigated by Trump, against his former political rival, and was promised during the campaign and then only revived when Trump got into his own political hot water,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former Justice prosecutor who worked on the Bush-era special-counsel inquiry into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

“I cannot imagine DOJ would entertain this — at least I would hope not,” he added. “It would set a horrendous precedent if the president of the United States could dictate to the DOJ who should be investigated and then start that practice by investigating his former political rival.”

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