So change it slightly.
You are the Mayor. You hear that your friend is under investigation. You know that your friend didn’t do anything wrong, so first ask for loyalty from, then threaten to fire the police chief if he doesn’t stop investigating.
Whether or not it turns out that your friend did anything wrong, you are still obstructing the investigation.
No, he does not have the authority to order an investigation stopped, only to fire people starting at the top and working down. Where are you getting this nonsense from?
Except, believe it or not, the Justice Department. He *cannot *tell it what to do.
Having the authority to do something does not mean that one’s intent in exercising that authority is automatically irrelevant. An FBI director who is under investigation for the improper use of government funds to improve his/her personal home has the authority to order that this investigation (assuming in this hypothetical it was being done by the FBI) be closed, to avoid any repercussions. But exercising that authority in that instance would clearly be an abuse of power with corrupt intent. That’s obstruction of justice.
President Ford would not have felt it necessary to pardon Nixon if it was so crystal clear that a president cannot obstruct justice by attempting to shut down an investigation into the actions of himself and his administration.
[quote=“Fotheringay-Phipps, post:1, topic:807445”]
[li]I know that I and my campaign did not collude with Russia, therefore there can’t be any real evidence that I/we did.[/li][/QUOTE]
Where does this hypothetical “Trump” obtain this perfect knowledge of all members of his campaign? Is he a telepath, or are you attributing unto him godlike powers of omniscience?
Not quite. (I didn’t anticipate this being an issue and perhaps didn’t elaborate as much as I might have.)
The Dershowitz position is (AFAICT) that the president has full power to direct etc. and can’t be charged with obstruction no what the reason for his actions. So even if he had the most corrupt intent possible, it’s not technically obstruction, and while he could presumably be impeached for this, he can’t be charged with a crime of obstruction. If this is correct, then the entire question in the OP is moot, so I stipulated that we would ignore this position.
The contra-Dershowitz position is that while the president does have full power to direct etc., he can still be guilty of obstruction if his actions are done with corrupt intent. The question in the OP essentially boils down to whether the mindset I described constitutes such corrupt intent.
[I’m not aware of anybody who believes that the president does not have full power to direct etc., such that he could be charged with obstruction even without corrupt intent. Note that “anybody” here does not include people like Elvis, who has been making this claim in this thread and elsewhere - I’m talking about recognized experts who I’ve seen quoted in media and the like.]
The post you quoted was in response to someone who suggested that Trump’s intentions were not relevant to the issue. I don’t think that’s correct, and that was not what I intended to preclude in the OP.
As I wrote in the OP, “Again, this is not about whether this is in fact what he was thinking (let alone whether he was justified in thinking so if indeed he was).”
T[he relevance of the question is because the burden of proof in any criminal case is on the prosecution. So as long as it can’t be proved that Trump didn’t have this mindset, then he can argue that he did. Hence the question as to where that gets him.]
Ah. In this case, I would agree with you that if the court found it plausible that Trump was so delusional that he believed himself to have omniscience, they might find him not guilty of criminal charges by reason of insanity.
A sane person would not believe they had perfect knowledge of every member of a large organization.
Honestly, I don’t see how Trump’s firing of Comey is a violation of the statute against obstruction of justice in your scenario, because the “corrupt” bit isn’t met. The wording of 18 USC 1503 doesn’t seem to include this particular act.
Congress could quite conceivably deem it a high crime worthy of impeachment, but that is a wholly different matter.