What Rod Rosenstein Has to Do if the DOJ Meeting Doesn't Satisfy Trump

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

"In addition to this protracted congressional path, the executive path is a direct order from Trump to the DOJ and FBI to hand over the information. The question for legal experts circulating over the last few days is whether Rosenstein, Wray, and others could refuse. The consensus was that no, they would have to either cooperate or resign, and that they had no legal grounds to refuse.

This consensus may be wrong. It overlooks a key part of the Constitution: Article II, Section 3, which directs that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (emphasis added).

As Ethan Leib and I have explained before in Slate, in the Washington Post, and now in a forthcoming academic paper, the phrase “faithfully execute” comes directly from fiduciary instruments like trusts and corporate charters. This fiduciary language imposes duties of loyalty, care, and good faith against self-dealing and abuse of power. This language migrated from trusts and corporate charters to English statutes mandating duties on public officials, to colonial American charters, to early state constitutions, to the U.S. Constitution and American statutes—creating legally enforceable duties at each stage.

We have argued that this fiduciary duty means that the president cannot pardon himself or his co-conspirators, because presidential action motivated by purely selfish, self-protective reasons would not constitute “faithful execution” of the laws. According to this reasoning, if the president pardons a co-conspirator, a prosecutor could continue the prosecution and if the defendant asserts his pardon in court, the prosecutor can challenge it. Similarly, if the president tries to remove an official like Mueller for solely bad faith reasons, that removal order would violate Article II’s “faithful execution” duty and therefore should be refused by Mueller. Mueller could seek a declaratory judgment from a court that any removal order is invalid. These moves would be unprecedented and would be an uphill battle but only because courts have overlooked the historical significance of the “faithful execution” language.

(snip)


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/what-rod-rosenstein-has-to-do-if-the-doj-meeting-doesnt-satisfy-trump.html

[Proud Liberal Dem]

1. Pretty sad and crazy

that we have gotten to the point of having to carefully parse the Constitution to prevent the destruction/abridgement of the Constitution and long-established norms and traditions.

[uponit7771]

2. +1, the founders wrote the constitution with the premise congress wasn't full of traitors

[Proud Liberal Dem]

3. And that impeachment actually meant something

[BSdetect]

4. All very well but the GOP has shown that it is led by traitors.