Nearly 400 federal prosecutors on Monday said they believe President Donald Trump would have been charged with obstruction of justice if not for a longstanding Justice Department policy barring the indictment of a sitting president.
In a letter posted online, 370 DOJ alumni with up to four decades of service with the department wrote that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report — a redacted version of which was publicly released last month — formed a case for obstruction against the president for which there is “overwhelming” evidence.
Mueller concluded his report in March after a nearly two-year investigation, and though his team found insufficient evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian agents to interfere in the 2016 election, Mueller did not make a determination on whether Trump obstructed justice in the investigation.
Instead, Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made the decision that there was insufficient evidence to charge Trump with obstruction, a move that has outraged congressional Democrats who have argued Mueller left the matter up to Congress.
The attorneys said Monday that “the Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming.”
“We believe strongly that, but for the OLC memo, the overwhelming weight of professional judgment would come down in favor of prosecution for the conduct outlined in the Mueller Report,” they said, referring to a policy issued by DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Among the acts highlighted by the special counsel are Trump’s attempts to fire Mueller, as recounted by former White House counsel Don McGahn, and Trump’s attempts to get McGahn to deny those efforts.
The attorneys also took issue with Trump’s alleged attempts to curtail the scope of the special counsel’s probe, citing Trump’s efforts to get then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to un-recuse himself from the Russia investigation.Last, the attorneys cite Trump’s efforts to prevent witnesses from cooperating with investigators, citing his public and private statements to former personal attorney Michael Cohen and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort throughout the investigation.
“All of this conduct — trying to control and impede the investigation against the President by leveraging his authority over others — is similar to conduct we have seen charged against other public officials and people in powerful positions,” they wrote.
They also argued that not only is there sufficient evidence to charge the president with obstruction, it would not have been a close call.
“We emphasize that these are not matters of close professional judgment,” they said, though they noted that, if charged, Trump would be presumed innocent until proven guilty and that “there are potential defenses or arguments that could be raised in response to an indictment of the nature we describe here.”
“But, to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice — the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution — runs counter to logic and our experience,” they continued.
Trump and his allies have simultaneously assailed and praised Mueller’s findings, calling the 400-page report at once exoneration and a one-sided prosecutorial document that is riddled with inaccuracies.
In the aftermath of the report’s release, tensions between the White House and Democratic members of Congress have erupted into a legal battle to have an unredacted version of the report and its underlying evidence made public. And Barr’s initial handling of Mueller’s findings have placed the two friends and former colleagues at odds with each other.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine