Will President Trump fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller? It seems probable given his firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his appointment of Matthew Whitaker as Acting Attorney General immediately following the November election. Sessions was protective of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Department of Justice official to whom Mueller reports, and Whitaker, a Trump sycophant, has previously publicly disparaged the Mueller Investigation. If Mueller is fired, what, if anything, can be done to investigate whether the President colluded with the Russians in connection with his 2016 election bid and, assuming arguendo he committed crimes in connection with any such collusion, to insure that he is ousted from office and appropriately sanctioned? A review of the available options shows that there are few and that none of them is really good.

State and Local Investigations/Prosecutions. For some time now there has been a lot of loose, uninformed talk by political pundits about State Attorneys General or other local prosecutors picking up where Mueller leaves off. But there are significant obstacles to investigations/prosecutions of the President in the two most likely local jurisdictions: New York state (where Trump maintained his 2016 campaign headquarters) and the District of Columbia (home of the Federal Election Commission and the locus of much of the obstruction of justice/false statements under investigation by Mueller).

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