Deep State! Witch Hunt! Swamp! NO COLLUSION! Donald Trump’s Twitter harangues against Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election have become so common that we are inured to them. Likewise, the denunciations of Mueller by Rudy Giuliani, Devin Nunes, and Sean Hannity can generally be ignored, even when they deliver them in lower-case letters. But when a noted scholar of constitutional law raises similar, though far more rational, arguments, attention must be paid.
Steven Calabresi is chairman of the board of the Federalist Society and the Clayton J. and Henry R. Barber Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law—and, we should add, a friend and colleague of ours.He recently published an op-ed in The Hill, purporting to explain why President Trump has behaved lawfully by demanding a Justice Department investigation of so-called FBI spying, and why Mueller’s own investigation is “unconstitutional.” He is half right, but it is the lesser half.
Thus begins a response by my colleague Steve Lubet and myself, at the American Prospect, here.