JUSTICE DEPARTMENT/MICHAEL COHEN/ROBERT MUELLER/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/WOMEN: “This weekend, President Donald Trump raged against Michael Cohen, calling his former lawyer and accuser a ‘rat’ for cooperating with federal prosecutors. Cohen has accused Trump of directing him to make secret hush-money payments to two women so that they wouldn’t tell their stories before the November 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s description of the role of Individual 1 – the president himself – leaves no doubt that career Justice Department prosecutors regard Trump as a full-blown co-conspirator. And most serious-minded criminal lawyers agree that, if these allegations are true, the president, but for his day job, would have been sitting in the dock with his long-time fixer. By all accounts, however, neither the United States attorney in Manhattan nor Special Counsel Robert Mueller is likely to indict the president so long as he remains in office. Official Justice Department policy, as set out in a 2000 opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), holds that a sitting president may not be indicted, even if any trial is postponed until the president has left office.”
–Lawrence S. Robbins, “How Trump Could Get Away With It,” Politico, December 17, 2018