First, there’s the attorney’s rule of thumb that a client anywhere in the vicinity of a criminal investigation ought to keep his trap shut. “It’s 100 percent clear that the rule in the normal criminal case is not a word from the client,” says Harry Litman, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at UCLA Law School and practices with the firm Constantine Cannon. “A president may have different political imperatives, but Trump’s tweet logorrhea does not reflect a well-thought-out strategy.”
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina imagined warning Trump: “You may be the first president in history to go down because you can’t stop inappropriately talking about an investigation that, if you just were quiet, would clear you.”
A talkative client runs the risk of intensifying prosecutorial scrutiny. In this case, the prosecutor is Special Counsel Robert Mueller. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s highly unlikely Mueller saw the Comey hearing as exonerating Trump of obstruction of justice. To the contrary, Mueller is almost certainly investigating the related Michael Flynn and Comey-firing angles.
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