MICHAEL COHEN/ROBERT MUELLER/RUSSIA INVESTIGATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Michael Cohen’s guilty plea for lying to Congress about Donald Trump’s Moscow project prompted a new frenzy of ‘Did the president commit a crime?’ chatter among legal pundits. Finding—or refuting—a smoking gun of criminality has become the singular focus for the president’s supporters and critics alike, and his ex-lawyer’s plea deal has turbocharged the search for evidence that will definitely prove his illegal behavior. The implication is that the federal criminal code is the only arbiter of President Trump’s fitness to remain in office and that special counsel Robert Mueller will have the final say on the matter. As a former FBI agent and lawyer, I sympathize with the temptation to find the statute that will crack open this case. But what matters most here is not found in a criminal law text. It’s a 230-year-old document in the National Archives. Cohen’s guilty plea on Thursday [11-29-18] demonstrates that Trump’s behavior is fundamentally incompatible with the vision of government expressed by the Constitution itself. To wit, Trump not only believes it’s OK to profit from the presidency, but he’s also willing to put the U.S. under a foreign adversary’s thumb to do it.”
–Asha Rangappa, “Trump’s Moscow Deal Is Exactly What the Framers Worried About,” Politico, December 3, 2018