Posted by cccp1014 on 1/27/2018 11:28:00 PM (view original):
Again FU Jeff. Just FU and your liberal biased views.
But could he legally squash the investigation if he wanted to?
Because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the investigation, the decision to appoint a special counsel fell to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein. In his order making the appointment, Rosenstein cited federal regulations issued by the attorney general in 1999, 28 C.F.R. § 600.4-600.10. The rules were drafted in the wake of the Kenneth Starr investigation of President Bill Clinton.
According to those regulations, a special counsel “may be disciplined or removed from office only by the personal action of the Attorney General” (or in this case, the acting attorney general). And Rosenstein can’t just do it on a whim, either. According to the regulation, special counsel can only be removed “for misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause, including violation of Departmental policies.”
In a Senate hearing on June 13, Rosenstein said he alone exercises firing authority, and that he had not seen any evidence of good cause for firing Mueller.
“It’s certainly theoretically possible that the attorney general could fire him, but that’s the only person who has authority to fire him,” Rosenstein said. “And in fact, the chain of command for the special counsel is only directly to the attorney general, in this case the acting attorney general.”
If he wanted to, wrote Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and co-founder of Lawfare, Trump could then fire Rosenstein. In that case, the authority over Mueller would fall to the associate attorney general. In theory — and ignoring the political consequences of doing so — Trump could keep firing people until he got someone to follow through on an order to fire Mueller.
“That means it could go down the line until an assistant attorney general did not resign and instead carried out the President’s order,” Goldsmith wrote.
There’s yet another route the president could take, Neal Katyal, a professor of national security law at Georgetown University, wrote in a piece for the Washington Post on May 19: “Trump could order the special-counsel regulations repealed and then fire Mueller himself.”
Katyal said he would know, because back in 1999, he was tapped by then-Attorney General Janet Reno to head an internal working group on the issue of special counsel — and he helped write the regulations now being cited by Rosenstein.
“The rules provide only so much protection: Congress, Trump and the Justice Department still have the power to stymie (or even terminate) Mueller’s inquiry,” Katyal wrote.
Again, FU Jeff. HRC was dirty.
what does HRC have to do with this?