Ex-Watergate Prosecutor Urges Mueller To Indict Trump If Republicans Block Impeachment

Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks said Thursday that she believes special counsel Robert Mueller should indict Donald Trump if Republicans in Congress refuse to hold him accountable for any potential crimes.

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In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Wine-Banks acknowledged that Mueller is likely to follow the rule that a president cannot be indicted, but she said he should make an exception since any political remedy to hold Trump accountable will be blocked by Republicans in Congress.

The ex-Watergate prosecutor said the difference between the roadmap to impeachment that Congress was given for Nixon and the one that Mueller could potentially give this Congress is that Republicans will refuse to follow it.

“They will ignore any roadmap,” Wine-Banks said. “They are ignoring the evidence that is in their face.”

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Wine-Banks said:

Well, they say they are going to follow the rule of the office of legal counsel that says the president cannot be indicted. I don’t agree with that conclusion. I didn’t agree with the decision not to indict Richard Nixon. We did issue a report which was given to the House in order to have them have a roadmap for impeachment. The difference between then and now is that this House will do nothing with it. They will ignore any roadmap. They are ignoring the evidence that is in their face. Right now, it is obstruction in plain sight. It’s been obstruction in plain sight since the very, very beginning. So it’s got to happen that something will be done. I think there will be a blue wave in November and the House will treat it differently.

The Republican Party has no conscience

The difference between the Nixon era and the Trump era isn’t the corruption in the White House – that’s fully intact. Instead, it’s the fact that the Republican Party no longer has a conscience.

A roadmap to impeachment handed down by Robert Mueller may have meant something in the 1970s when the Republican Party wasn’t living inside a right-wing bubble of Fox News conspiracies.

But it’s a new world in 2018. The GOP has built themselves and their supporters an entirely new reality. They no longer need to react to damning evidence or inconvenient facts because they don’t exist in their truth-free universe.

As Jill Wine-Banks said on Thursday, the special counsel should acknowledge the fact that the GOP today is not the same party that forced a Republican president out of office decades ago.

This Republican Party will block any and all measures to hold Trump accountable for crimes uncovered during the special counsel investigation.

Given the fact that Republicans are unwilling to fulfill their duty as a check on a corrupt president, Robert Mueller should move forward with indictments if the evidence supports it.

Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.