HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030259.jpg

conclusions. There is no smoking gun beyond the often flagrant, custom-breaking, events of the President's 16 months in office. Indeed, much of the evidence is based on the President's public statements and tweets about those events. "This indictment could have been drafted without anyone being interviewed," said one source. This is, from the perspective of White House sources good news: the case then, is just an issue of what motives are ascribed to the President's behavior—behavior that is, the President's supporters believe it is easy to show, impulsive and not thought out. Hence no intent. For the Mueller team, it is precisely that careless behavior and flagrant disregard for constitutional standards that they hope-to put on trial.

According to a source involved in the Mueller strategy, the plan to indict the President is now "more advanced" than it was when the terms of the indictment were agreed in April. In the intervening months, the president's lawyers, spokespersons and surrogates have staged a very public debate about whether such a legal proceeding would be constitutional—in effect trying to discredit, ahead of time, any prosecutorial action the Special Counsel's office might take. This may be a preemptive response to an indictment they expect is forthcoming. It may also be an effort to pressure Rosenstein. It may even be an effort to convince Mueller of that, since some in the White House believe that that the plan to indict is not a strategy yet embraced by the whole Special Counsel's office, but one that is being advocated only by its most virulently anti-Trump purists on the investigative team—most notably by the number two lawyer under Mueller, Andrew Weissmann.

It may be noteworthy that there appears now not to be plan for an indictment related to collusion, although, legal experts say, that could come later and may depend on new information from the investigation of the President's personal attorney, Michael Cohen. It is also possible that alternative plans have been made—preparation for more expansive indictments, for instance, or for a broader report that would include the allegations of obstruction but not seek to indict the President.

The White House view is that without the underlying collusion charge—"real collusion," in the words of one White House advisor, "and not just a bunch of Facebook ads and some trolls"—Mueller will be presenting a weak and politically-motivated case. "That's a witch hunt," said the advisor. The view of the Mueller team, or at least that of its most ardent members, seems to be that the obstruction charges go to the very heart of exposing how Trump has abused his power and turned

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030259