Firing Mueller and Rosenstein wont save Trumps closest allies

[babylonsister]

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/10/17220556/mueller-trump-rosenstein-firing-ny-cohen

Firing Mueller and Rosenstein won’t save Trump’s closest allies
Trump’s inner circle would still be in federal crosshairs.
By Zachary [e-mail] Apr 10, 2018, 4:40pm EDT


President Trump may think he can end all his growing legal problems by firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and special counsel Robert Mueller. He can’t.

A pair of federal prosecutors in New York are now working on cases tied to two of Trump’s closest confidants. The FBI raided Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s office on Monday for a case the prosecutor in Manhattan is handling. Last December, meanwhile, the US attorney in Brooklyn requested bank records tied to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

Those cases are separate from Mueller’s probe into Russian election meddling in 2016 and potential contact between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

That means that if Trump fires Rosenstein and Mueller, those other investigations won’t just go away. Trump would have to fire the other prosecutors and a host of other Justice Department officials.

A slew of other people have also signed off on parts of the investigations. Because Cohen is a lawyer, searching his office and hotel requires approval from not only the New York prosecutor but also officials from the criminal division of the Justice Department in Washington. A judge would also have to sign off on a warrant for the search. All those people could still push the investigation onward.

“Technically, either of these two US attorneys in New York could be fired as well,” Ric Simmons, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Ohio State University, told me. “But firing them in response to investigations into Trump’s lawyer and son-in-law would look almost as bad as firing the special counsel.”

That’s a lot of firing, and legal experts say any lawyers still left in those offices would probably continue the cases. Trump and his closest aides, in other words, would still be in federal crosshairs.

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Trump is fixated on Mueller, but the former FBI chief isn’t the only one probing the president’s inner circle. And with the number of investigations continuing to grow, and to include more federal prosecutors, Trump can’t fire his way out of the legal woes facing his closest advisers.