Does James Comey’s statement show that Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice? A Watergate lawyer says yes. Philip Allen Lacovara, who was counsel to Watergate special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, writes in the Washington Post that Comey laid out “evidence sufficient for a case of obstruction of justice” and that “This kind of presidential intervention in a pending criminal investigation has not been seen, to my knowledge, since the days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.”
Comey’s statement lays out a case against the president that consists of a tidy pattern, beginning with the demand for loyalty, the threat to terminate Comey’s job, the repeated requests to turn off the investigation into Flynn and the final infliction of career punishment for failing to succumb to the president’s requests, all followed by the president’s own concession about his motive. Any experienced prosecutor would see these facts as establishing a prima facie case of obstruction of justice.
And that’s just Comey’s opening statement. But there’s a but:
But whether a sitting president may be indicted while in office is an open question. I advised the Watergate special prosecutors (and argued to the Supreme Court in the Nixon tapes case) that the president enjoys no unique immunity from obeying criminal laws. Other Justice Department officials, however, have taken a contrary position.
The ball now is in Mueller’s court to decide whether he has (or will have) enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction and, if so, whether to reach the same conclusion that I reached in the Nixon investigation — that, like everyone else in our system, a president is accountable for committing a federal crime.
Mueller probably won’t be reaching any conclusions—at least publicly—for what feels like an eternity. But given what the general public knows already, given how much we seem to learn each week, you have to figure Mueller has his hands very, very full.