A former member of President Donald Trump’s transition team made the case for impeaching the President Tuesday, based on the evidence included in special counsel Robert Mueller’s redacted final report.
“Politics is a team sport, and if you actively work within a political party, there is some expectation that you will follow orders and rally behind the leader, even when you disagree,” wrote J.W. Verret (pictured above, right), a law professor who served briefly in 2016 as deputy director of economic policy on Trump’s transition team, in The Atlantic.
“There is a point, though, at which that expectation turns from a mix of loyalty and pragmatism into something more sinister, a blind devotion that serves to enable criminal conduct.”
Verret specifically pointed to “roughly a dozen separate instances of obstruction of justice” in Mueller’s report, from Trump dangling pardons to “directly order[ing] people to lie to throw the special counsel off the scent.”
Citing an existing Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo preventing the prosecution of a sitting president, Mueller said he’d decided “not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” on whether Trump had obstructed justice, though he provided evidence that could support such a conclusion.
“At a minimum,” Verret wrote, “there’s enough here to get the impeachment process started.”
