Can the FBI Investigate the President?

By Andrew Napolitano | News Max Online |

Last weekend, The New York Times reported that senior FBI officials were so concerned about whatever President Donald Trump’s true motivation for firing FBI Director James B. Comey was that they immediately initiated a counterintelligence investigation of the president himself.

The Times reported that these officials believed that Trump may have intentionally or unwittingly played into the Kremlin’s hands by firing Comey so as to impair the FBI investigation into what efforts, if any, Russian intelligence personnel undertook in attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election and what role, if any, the Trump campaign played in facilitating those efforts.

Trump gave three public reasons for firing Comey.

He told Comey he was fired because he had dropped the ball in the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of private servers for her official work as secretary of state by declaring publicly that Clinton would not be prosecuted. He told his Twitter followers that he fired Comey because Comey’s a “total sleaze.”

And he told Lester Holt of NBC News that he fired Comey because he would not shut down the FBI investigation into the Russian behavior during the 2016 campaign and would not drop the prosecution of his former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

It is the reasons he gave to Holt that, according to the Times piece, impelled senior FBI officials to believe that the president himself might be a national security risk.

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