Mueller prosecutor exposes massive loophole Trump’s immunity can’t protect

President Donald Trump has no love for Andrew Weissmann, a former prosecutor for the Department of Justice who served as a lead member of the Robert Mueller investigation. Trump has called Weissman “scum” and “a bad guy,” and name-checked him on more than one executive order, one revoking his security clearance and others, and another targeting his law firm for daring to employ him.

Weissmann says Trump can hate on him all he wants — but the president can’t escape the corruption charges that will likely badger him for years after he leaves the White House.

“The one thing I strongly suspect, if we get back to a normal rule of law administration, I think we’re going to learn about corruption,” said the author of new book, Liar’s Kingdom: How to Stop Trump’s Deceit and Save America. “We’re going to learn that it is off the charts, particularly regarding financial crime, and it’s going to be eye-popping.”

This will be bad for Trump, providing he survives his second term, because money crime prosecution has a nice long half-life.

“That is the kind of thing that can be prosecuted, and it is not covered by immunity,” Weissmann told Washington Roundtable host Jane Mayer. “… The statute of limitations, which is the time period by which you’ve brought a case, will not have run on those things. This means it won’t be too late to prosecute. So, if Donald Trump is out of office in a couple of years and you have a normal administration, even at the shortest range it’s a five-year statute of limitations, which means you have five years to bring a case.”

He added that there are also “all sort of ways” to reset the timer on the deadline: “I’m saying given the shortest amount of time is five years, but it could be much longer in effect.”

Still, a case must be brought if the nation is to ever recover from Trump’s transgressions and the stink of corruption that he’s laid over the federal government. Trump, he said, is the ultimate stress test for democracy and he shows where democracy is failing.

“We cannot be in the situation where if we get out of this we go into denial about what happened. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. If you have Donald Trump winning twice there will be many, many more of these [kinds of bad characters],” he said. “We’re humans. We are imperfect. The whole idea of institutional reform is to have the institution create rules that lessens these risks.”

But he added that a course correction could only happen if “we have the backbone and the smarts to realize that where there is that proof—and if it’s a righteous case not a vindictive case — that it has to be brought as a deterrent to this happening again.”

“We can’t close our eyes to it,” he warned.