I was on the Kennedy Show on Fox News to discuss the legal issues behind releasing the Mueller Report and the upcoming Michael Cohen testimony.
TRANSCRIPT
Kennedy: Will the Mueller Report see the light of day? Joining me now, attorney extraordinaire Gayle Trotter is back. I want to see the findings from this report that has been going on for an awful long time. It’s coming up on its second birthday–it should probably go to Disneyland at-this-point.
Trotter: Yes, everyone would like to see the report but it does not mean everyone should see the report….
Kennedy: why not?
Trotter: Because there’s this idea when you decide to investigate a crime, unless you have evidence to prosecute the crime, if you release the evidence that you have gathered, that does not lead you to feel like you could go prosecute it and take it to a completion of above reasonable doubt, then you end up releasing a lot of information that people do not have the venue to which they can defend themselves. So that is why the Department of Justice has guidelines that say if they decline to prosecute it, they don’t release underlying evidence.
Kennedy: That is in a traditional setting. That was some of the criticism that civil libertarians posed to James Comey when he laid out a laundry list of Hillary Clinton’s crimes, but said we’re essentially declining to prosecute, it wasn’t his decision to prosecute and he certainly overstepped his bounds….
Trotter: He did, and he was fired for that.
Kennedy: ….and the inspector general gave him a hard time for that as well, and President was well within his rights to terminate him. I understand that but I don’t know that President, if this turned into an impeachment proceeding, if he would have the same due process because you’re talking about the President of United States. This is such a massive undertaking, there is so much taxpayer money that goes into it. There has been so much opacity already, that even if it completely exonerated the President, I still want to see it.
Trotter: An impeachment process is completely a political process, not a legal process, so the special counsel is basically a line prosecutor. Andrew McCarthy has discussed this a lot in his writings; he’s a former US Federal prosecutor. It is important to understand that in legal process, there are consequences if you disregard guidelines. Even Adam Schiff said this that when James Comey released all that information he went against longstanding principles. He’s using that now to try to say it should be done differently this time.
Kennedy: I think that Schiff is worried that the report isn’t really going to have teeth and they want extract as much out of it as possible. Now Michael Cohen, who has now turned into the darling of the Democrat Party, he’s going to go through three days of testimony on Capitol Hill this week, but he can’t really talk about anything. He can’t talk about the Russia investigation, and so are they asking him about his needs and feelings?
Trotter: I predict it’s going to be a big nothing burger. He’s going to go out there and say nothing that is going to be any new information. As you said, he is testifying before three different committees of the House and the Senate. Only one of the hearings is going to be public, he can’t talk about Russia. Instead just think about what he has done in the past? He’s given a lot of inconsistent stories with a lot of facts that don’t match up. He’s given false statements to Congress, so what exactly does he have to contribute to the knowledge about anything related to this when he is such an untrustworthy source?
Kennedy: We’ll only get to see one of those hearings; the other two, as you point out, are behind closed-door. Boring! But you’re not, you’re awesome, Gayle Trotter. Thank you so much for being here
Trotter: Great to be with you Kennedy.
Kennedy: Very good. A bright legal mind.
