Last summer, the president of the United States, who is the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, tried to fire the federal appointee overseeing an investigation into whether the president or his advisers had broken the law by, among other things, obstructing justice.
When Donald Trump angled for Robert Mueller’s head last year, according to a report from the New York Times, he reasoned that he was within his rights because the special counsel had too many conflicts to impartially run the Justice Department’s probe of possible wrongdoing involving Russia and Trump’s campaign.
Trump sorted Mueller’s conflicts into three neat and ridiculous baskets: money (Trump claimed Mueller gave up his membership at a Trump golf course over a dispute about fees, a tale Mueller’s spokesman has said wasn’t true); family (Mueller had worked at a firm that had represented Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner); and work (Mueller had interviewed for the FBI’s top job a day before he was appointed as special counsel).