As President Trump fails to stall inspection of seized documents and investigator Robert Mueller digs deeper into the President’s inner circle and business dealings, Julian de Medeiros from the University’s School of Politics and International Relations said: ‘America stands at the brink of an unprecedented civil and constitutional crisis.
‘Crying foul play, the Trump administration has sought to view the papers that were seized in last week’s raids on Michael Cohen’s office.
President Trump’s longtime legal fixer and close family associate, Cohen is as close to the inner circle of Trump as one can get without touching his actual blood relatives. In an extraordinary move, the Trump administration sought a restraining order against its own justice department.
‘This will lead to increased speculation regarding the possibility that the President might choose his final and most extreme option to delay the investigation into possible collusion and/or obstruction of justice, which would be to fire Rod Rosenstein, and special counsel Robert Mueller.
‘This would risk a constitutional crisis and spark massive popular protests. In the eventuality that Trump takes this most drastic measure, the activist group MoveOn.org has already committed more than 300,000 people to rally across the country to protest the President’s actions.
‘The escalating tensions in Washington following the FBI raid on Michael Cohen’s offices, have demonstrated the relative limits of Attorney-Client privilege. For one, it is not sacrosanct. If a lawyer helps his client commit a crime then any documents relating to this are rendered void.
‘Two, there is such a thing as a federal ‘taint-team’, which is a group of officials that scan the seized documents for materials that would be considered subject to Attorney-Client privilege so as to remove them.
‘And three, Trump’s business dealings and his associates are increasingly being treated as if they are part of an organized crime network. The investigative tactics we are seeing now would otherwise be associated with federal investigations into the mob, not the President.
‘As the FBI investigation draws ever closer to Trump’s inner circle, new layers of deceit of revealed every day. For example, it came out that Michael Cohen was also the attorney for Fox News host Sean Hannity, who has repeatedly referred to the FBI investigation as treasonous and a deep state operation against the Presidency.
While it is as of yet uncertain what the outcome will be, America stands at the brink of an unprecedented civil and constitutional crisis the likes of which the nation has not seen since at least the Nixon Watergate Scandal.
Julian de Medeiros
Julian de Medeiros is a seasoned commentator on Post-Truth politics in the US and Turkey. His writing has appeared frequently in OpenDemocracy and Research Turkey. His next book is titled ‘Conspiracy Theory in Turkey: Democracy, Protest, and Post-Truth.’ He is also writing a book on Post-Truth Politics in America for McGil Queens UP. He is a native of Massachusetts and resides in London.
He holds an MA degree in North American and British Cultural Studies from the University of Freiburg, Germany, and is expected to receive his PhD in Comparative Politics from the University of Kent in 2018.