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oversees the Mueller team. Indeed, Rosenstein, as recently as April, publicly declared that the President was not a target. This may have been a form of fig leaf to soothe a President who regularly demands aides assure him he is not being pursued: the President does not become a formal target until Rosenstein agrees to designate him as one.
The proposed indictment confronts Rosenstein with matters with which he has been intimately involved. The case, according to my conversations with White House and other sources familiar with the investigation, is fundamentally Trump versus the FBI, Justice Department, and Mueller investigation itself. In many ways, it boils down to the word of former FBI Director James Comey against the word of Donald Trump. Rosenstein, at the President's behest, drafted a memo justifying the Comey firing for how the former FBI Director handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But that justification, in an embarrassment for Rosenstein, was shortly brushed aside by the President when he admitted that he fired Comey to disrupt the Russian investigation. What's more, the indictment is said to charge that the firing of Andrew McCabe, the former Deputy Director of the FBI, who reported directly to Rosenstein after the Comey dismissal, was an instance of illegal retaliation by the President against a potential witness.
According to a source with knowledge of the proposed indictment, it will be all the more controversial because if finds the entire narrative of the case for obstruction in plain sight. Almost nothing about the case involves new information. "This indictment could have been drafted without anyone being interviewed," said this source. Rather it takes well covered public events and moves them to a set of circumstantial 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 is, according to White House sources who have gotten wind of this approach, good news: the case then, is just an issue of what motives you ascribe 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 the rules that they aim to put on trial.
There is no certainty that the Special Counsel's office will

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