Regardless of whether a federal indictment of the President is allowable, it’s irrelevant, because it’s impossible. He’s the sole, uncontested head of the executive branch of the federal government, and thus any indictment of anyone under federal law is ultimately derived from his authority. That’s why the Constitution had to lay out a separate process for dealing with a criminal President.
That said, however, absolutely nothing prevents a sitting President from being indicted, tried, convicted, or sentenced by a state.
I’m guessing that if a state were to go all the way and sentence a sitting President, they’d have to wait for him to get out of office for him to serve the sentence.
That would be a neat trick. High crimes are crimes. Misdemeanors are crimes.
That said, even before this loony-tune Congress, it was a fact of life that an impeachable offense is whatever Congress wants it to be, regardless of whether it is actually a high crime or misdemeanor.
No. The criminal justice system is under the direction of the Attorney General, and the President cannot interfere with it. If he does, it’s obstruction of justice. There are myriad other constraints on the President that prevent him from having the dictatorial powers you purport him to have, but that’s another discussion.
No again. The authority is ultimately derived from We The People, and exercised through our employees.
It certainly did not. It provided a mechanism for other employees of Us The People to fire an official (not just the President; judges and Cabinet officials have been impeached too) before his term expires statutorily, if his conduct is so egregious as to require it in their (delegated) view. Impeachment explicitly has no relation to the criminal justice system, other than the political pressure that a charge, indictment, etc. can put on them. Congress may choose not to impeach a criminally convicted official, and it can choose to impeach one who hasn’t even been charged, but the decision is solely one of statecraft and politics.
The continuing notion that impeachment is just the mechanism for Presidents to be tried for crimes was widely spread by the Republicans during the Clinton matter, as way to try to vindicate their actions. But it’s still false.
The public has already been conditioned for news like this. Months ago, when we didn’t have as many facts as we have know, the Trump apologists were already laying the groundwork:
It was Don Jr, not Trump himself, so there’s plausible deniability
Collusion isn’t illegal
Lying to the press and the American people isn’t the same thing as lying under oath, so no big deal
It’s unclear what bombshells could drop that would actually matter at this point. All of this stuff should be damaging politically; that’s the way it’s supposed to work. But the world doesn’t work that way anymore.
Yeah, I saw a snippet yesterday. Wasn’t that revealed in the Senate investigation? I would think that this is something that Mueller would want to look into, as it just screams of conspiracy, or at least a conspiracy mind.
They, like all other federal LEO’s, are sworn to preserve/protect/defend the Constitution. You can imagine them all going rogue if you like, but you can imagine anything.
Except constitutional scholars disagree on this point, and there is no precedent to follow. Saying “defend the constitution” as if it were some magic words that everyone agrees on in every instance is so simplistic as to be nonsensical.