Yeomans: Will Trump Fire Mueller? Not Yet.

Washington, D.C., December 19, 2017 – In the latest edition of Yeomans Work, “Will Trump Fire Mueller? Not Yet,” AFJ’s Ronald Goldfarb Fellow for Justice, Bill Yeomans, reacts to recent rumors that President Trump plans to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller as Congress leaves town for the holidays.

“I don’t buy it. Predicting Trump’s behavior is a fool’s errand. He acts impulsively, and often seems not to know in the morning what he’ll do in the afternoon,” says Yeomans. While Trump may fire Mueller eventually, Yeomans writes that for now, “the best guess is that Trump will continue his alternative strategy – a sustained attack on the legitimacy of institutions and individuals designed to undermine public and Congressional support for the investigation. This is an extremely dangerous and toxic strategy for the rule of law.”

Throughout the investigation, “a big fear has been that regardless of how serious the wrongdoing that Mueller exposes is, a partisan Congress and exhausted public will respond with a collective ‘so what.’ Producing that reaction now seems to be the strategy of Trump and his allies. Since impeachment, rather than prosecution, is the principal threat to Trump’s presidency, the ‘so what’ reaction would be enough to protect his office,” writes Yeomans.

But “the public must not fall for this latest assault on public servants and the rule of law,” writes Yeomans. “‘So what’ is not an acceptable response to the revelations emerging from the Russia investigation.”

Yeomans Work focuses on the challenges to the justice system in the era of Trump. Bill Yeomans is available for media interviews. Contact Laurie Kinney, Communications Director, at laurie@afj.org or 202-464-7367.