Photo credit: By The White House from Washington, DC (P072012PS-0298) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Are Trump and Mueller Locked in SECRET Battle? Evidence Says Maybe
President Trump and his lawyers have stated firmly and publicly that the President cannot be forced before a Grand Jury and forced to testify. However, many liberals (and supposedly Robert Mueller) believe he can.
So many have wondered why Mueller hasn't issued a subpoena against the President, and taken the battle to the courts.
Well thanks to some sleuth reporting over at Politico, we now have evidencce he may have done that MONTHS ago, and that Mueller has been a secret court battle with the White House ever since--which may end in a verdict as early as December.
Politico has more:
As the summer proceeded, we certainly heard a great deal from Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, about purported negotiations with Mueller’s office about the propriety and scope of Trump’s potential testimony. On August 15, Giuliani said Trump would move to quash a subpoena and went so far as to say, “[W]e’re pretty much finished with our memorandum opposing a subpoena.”
And then – nothing. Labor Day came and went without a visible move by Mueller to subpoena the president, and we entered the quiet period before the midterms. Even the voluble Giuliani went quiet, more or less. Mindful of the time it would take to fight out the legal issues surrounding a presidential subpoena, and mindful of the ticking clock on Mueller’s now 18-month-old investigation, many of us began to wonder if Mueller had decided to forego the compelling and possibly conclusive nature of presidential testimony in favor of findings built on inference and circumstantial evidence. A move that would leave a huge hole in his final report and findings.
But now, thanks to Politico’s reporting (backed up by the simple gumshoe move of sitting in the clerk’s office waiting to see who walks in and requests what file), we may know what Mueller has been up to: Since mid-August, he may have been locked in proceedings with Trump and his lawyers over a grand jury subpoena – in secret litigation that could tell us by December whether the president will testify before Mueller’s grand jury.
The evidence lies in obscure docket entries at the clerk’s office for the D.C. Circuit. Thanks to Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Darren Samuelsohn, we know that on August 16th (the day after Giuliani said he was almost finished with his memorandum, remember), a sealed grand jury case was initiated in the D.C. federal district court before Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell. We know that on September 19, Chief Judge Howell issued a ruling and 5 days later one of the parties appealed to the D.C. Circuit. And thanks to Politico’s reporting, we know that the special counsel’s office is involved (because the reporter overheard a conversation in the clerk’s office). We can further deduce that the special counsel prevailed in the district court below, and that the presumptive grand jury witness has frantically appealed that order and sought special treatment from the judges of the D.C. Circuit – often referred to as the “second-most important court in the land.”
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