Allies Fear Trump Could Go Postal and Fire Mueller

Two things continue to strike me as the shock waves continue from yesterday's FBI raid on Donald Trump consigliere, Michael Cohen.  First, if Trump is completely innocent of collusion with Russia or other crimes, why is he acting increasingly obsessed with closing down Robert Mueller's investigation and acting as if he has cataclysmic secrets and misdeeds he is trying to hide?  Second, if Trump is in fact guilty of crimes or collusion, why did it never seemingly occur to him that once he occupied the White House, eventually all of his dirty linen would eventually come out?  Personally, I suspect that Trump is likely guilty of any number of crimes, treason perhaps being one of them.  Trump's increasingly desperate behavior and attacks on the nation's legal and criminal justice systems only add to my gut feeling in this regard.  Now, as two piece in Vanity Fair - one here and one here - report, fearful that Michael Cohen might be "flipped," Trump may be edging closer to firing Mueller, Rod Rosenstein and/or Jeff Sessions, thereby igniting a constitutional crisis.  Here are excerpts from both pieces:

It was supposed to be the most somber and impressive of presidential moments, a gathering of the national security team at the White House to discuss military options to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb that killed at least 60 people, including children. But as the meeting began, Donald Trump was more enraged by a crossed red line much closer to home: the F.B.I.’s raid on his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen.

There have been times during Robert Mueller’s investigation—Mueller’s subpoenaing of Trump business records, for instance—when White House advisers worried Trump seemed on the verge of triggering a constitutional crisis by firing Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The stunning Cohen raid is another one of these moments. “He’s sitting there bitching and moaning. He’s brooding and doesn’t have a plan,” a Republican close to the White House said last night. “I could see him having a total meltdown and saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m firing all of them,’” a Trump friend told me. “This is very dry tinder. If someone strikes a match to it, you could see it catching fire,” added a former official.

In the past, Trump’s impulses could be tempered by the calming presence of loyal aides like Hope Hicks and longtime security chief Keith Schiller. But both Hicks and Schiller are gone, leaving Trump to operate largely unchecked. His legal team remains leaderless following the resignation of Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd . . . .

The second piece looks at why Trump's desperation level is growing:

The implications, for Cohen and for Trump, are potentially explosive. “I suppose you could say that it is Trump’s moment of truth,” Bob Bauer, the former Obama White House general counsel, told me. “It is the red line he always seemed to draw in his bitter complaints about the Mueller investigation—now here we are. Cohen would not be a subject or target that Trump would wish to have flipped against him.” Legal experts agree this is a major development. “It’s an enormously aggressive move for any prosecutor to make, particularly given Cohen’s client,” said Sol Wisenberg, a deputy special prosecutor during the Starr investigation. Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general under Obama, described it as “very bad news” for Cohen. “D.O.J. only raids once they have concluded that lesser options—like cooperation—aren’t working and that there is a risk that evidence may be destroyed,” he said.

The barrier to convincing a judge to approve a search warrant would be even higher in a case involving a sitting president. More significant, a judge would require evidence of potential illegal behavior between Trump and Cohen before approving the seizure of any communications involving both of them. “If the warrant specifically authorized the seizure of attorney-client communications, the government would have had to convince a federal magistrate that the crime-fraud exception was in play,” Wisenberg added. . . . . if the client is attempting to use the lawyer, or the lawyer is volunteering to be a part of an ongoing crime, there is no attorney-client privilege.” [O]utsourcing the raid could mean “there is some aspect to what is in Cohen’s office that is outside of Mueller’s jurisdiction,” he added. If the latter is true, Wisenberg noted, “Then it is no longer part of Mueller’s case.” That logic is unlikely to soothe Trump, who is reportedly itching to fire Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller. Still, it provides the special counsel with at least one degree of separation from the initial raid. “To criticize Mueller misses the mark,” Wisenberg continued. “It was wise of Rosenstein to assign the case to another office to take the heat off of Mueller.”

It also establishes a protective barrier between Mueller and one of the seedier Trump scandals. “It is wise that Mueller and Rosenstein avoided the fatal mistake of Ken Starr when he decided to expand his jurisdiction to the Monica Lewinsky matter, a tawdry subject, but not highly serious to the welfare and security of the American people,” William Jeffress, a white-collar defense attorney who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case, told me. “There are several possible crimes that might have been committed by the circumstances of the hush money, but these are appropriately investigated by a U.S. attorney, not by special counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference in the election.”

Will Cohen flip? “You just need to break one weak link to do it,” Hall said. But don’t expect new indictments too soon. “I think that things are going to sound like they are slowing down for a little bit because all of this information has to be pulled, digested, analyzed, inputted into a bigger picture,” he cautioned. “Nixon didn’t resign because of the Ellsberg Papers, but that led to the Watergate break-in, that led to the cover-up, and Nixon’s resignation was tied directly to the cover-up . . . So, to me, as things heat up, the next big thing will be a shift from things like ‘What was the Russian involvement in the campaign?’ to ‘Has the cover-up begun and where is it?’”