The prohibition, laid out in a 2000 memo by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, was also a key factor in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s decision to refrain from considering whether to charge Trump with obstruction of justice for his repeated attempts to thwart the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Now Democrats on the House Oversight Committee say the federal prosecutors based in the Southern District of New York should disclose whether they made a similar analysis. The president’s longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen was jailed earlier this year, in part for his role in hush payments to women accusing Trump of extramarital affairs, and he implicated the president in the scheme. Documents made public Thursday showed contacts between Cohen and Trump surrounding the hush money payments and were part of prosecutors’ evidence that Trump directed Cohen to make the payoffs.
View the complete July 19 article by Kyle Cheney on the Politico website here.