Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law argued on the Lawfare blog that, contrary to Lederman, Trump has the constitutional authority to “revoke the regulation itself and in so doing obliterate Mueller’s whole office. . . . The protection against removal is ultimately a political one, not a regulatory or legal one.”

Blackman argued that the detailed history showed that Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Bork all assumed that Nixon had the constitutional power to fire Cox personally, despite the regulation then in force that Cox could be fired only by the attorney general and only for “extraordinary impropriety.” That said, Blackman acknowledged that to the public at large, “the termination of Mueller would amount to an admission of guilt and obstruction of justice.”