My understanding is Mueller can investigate Trump-Russia ties related to the election of 2016.
However the report written by Christopher Steele says that the Trump campaign was more worried about Trump-China ties than Trump-Russia ties, that Trump had engaged in a lot of bribery and kickbacks in China.
Does Mueller have the authority to investigate Trump-China ties? What if those ties are unrelated to the 2016 election? Say Trump engaged in criminal acts with China in 2012 that are unrelated to the election, would Mueller be able to investigate or prosecute those?
If in the course of his investigation he turns up evidence of illegal activity relating to China, of course he can pursue it, but I don’t think he can start there. No doubt an actual lawyer will be by soon with a better explanation, but I think it’s fairly common for criminal investigations to morph and expand as additional information is uncovered stemming from the original mandate.
Do you recall Kenneth Starr? Appointed to investigate a real estate deal that might have been slightly shady–but remember, the Clintons lost money on it–and finding nothing actionable, he quickly veered into Clinton’s sex life. So I assume that a special prosecutor can go off on any tangent he likes.
Starr asked for and got permission from Reno to expand the investigation.
Why she allowed him to get into the Lewinski thing is incredibly puzzling. There was no federal charge at all to investigate! (The only matter came up later when the definitions of 3rd base vs. all the way caused a Constitutional crisis.)
This happened in other matters during the Clinton years as well. Resulting in pointless investigations that got bogged down into who said what after the investigation started rather than any actual previous crime.
Give me millions of dollars and the right to subpoena any politician and I’ll find far worse stuff.
Starr was an independent prosecutor, not a special counsel. The former has much wider discretion to act on his own accord, but independent prosecutors no longer exist.
So if evidence arises during his investigation that there may be crimes relating to Trump’s relationship with China, he could choose to investigate that.