President Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd made a bold statement Monday that the president cannot be found guilty of obstruction of justice. Though the legal opinion is not new and apparently based on the word of the law, it does not appear to be in the spirit of it.
Referring to the President’s controversial tweet about firing General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI, in a statement to NBC News and Axios Dowd said that the “president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under and has every right to express his view of any case.”
The same opinion has been voiced by constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz since the summer, but flatly refuted by every other legal scholar.
Dowd’s sudden and brazen claim comes as a surprise even to senior White House officials, and the statement now clouds the President’s current legal strategy against a potential attack from special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecution team.
To further complicate matters, White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who oversees the Trump administration’s responses to Mueller’s investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Election, also said on Monday that the theory put forward by Dershowitz and Dowd were not actually the President’s official legal strategy.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Cobb said: “It’s interesting as a technical legal issue, but the president’s lawyers intend to present a fact-based defense, not a mere legal defense. That should resolve things, but we all shall see.”
+++ + +++
