Now that the FBI has raided the house and office of longtime Trump lawyer and certified genius brain Michael Cohen, the President and his allies have moved to the battle stations. Trump has always called the Russia probe a "witch hunt," normally in all-caps. He has questioned why Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed in the first place. But now, they must dial up the rhetoric to a new level—regardless of the facts, of course.

Trump suggested in a Tuesday morning tweet that the raid marked the death of attorney-client privilege, even though there is a well-known "crime-fraud exception." That takes effect when the attorney in question is suspected of participating in a criminal conspiracy. And then cometh Rand Paul, everyone's favorite neighbor, to announce it's not just Special Counsel Robert Muller. Now all special prosecutors are bad:

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Incredible. @RandPaul argues Mueller's investigation is bad because it's too expansive, immediately gets called out for his hypocrisy by @BillHemmer.



"How did you feel about Ken Starr in the 90s?" Hemmer asks.



"You know, I may not have been as consistent back then," Paul says. pic.twitter.com/5D7MfBuDJd — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 10, 2018

Credit to Fox News' Bill Hemmer, who immediately snapped back with a question about whether Paul had so many misgivings about Special Prosecutor Ken Starr. In the '90s, when Rand Paul was an ophthalmologist volunteering with this dad's Senate campaign, Starr investigated President Bill Clinton for anything and everything until he discovered the Monica Lewinsky affair and Clinton's accompanying lies.

Paul couldn't quite squirm his way out of that question:

PAUL: You know, I may or may not have been as consistent back then, to tell you the truth.

Perhaps Paul, a bona fide trooper in the Benghazi brigade, could express a little more concern over the number of people in Trump's orbit being raided, receiving indictments, or pleading guilty. His suggestion that Mueller is going beyond his remit is likely wrong, as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein granted the special counsel broad authority to investigate the Russian question and many areas related.

But let's just say Mueller was bucking the constraints on his authority, isn't what he's found troubling to Paul?

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Once upon a time, even members of Congress from the president's own party considered oversight of the executive branch part of their responsibility. During Watergate, Congressional Republicans helped spell Richard Nixon's downfall. The investigation ramped up after the Saturday Night Massacre, when the attorney general and his deputy resigned in protest before Nixon got the solicitor general—by then the acting AG—to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.

That may sound familiar. It looks more likely than ever that Trump will try to engineer the firing of Robert Mueller. To do so, he would have to persuade Rosenstein to fire the special counsel—or fire Rosenstein and find someone who will. (AG Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the probe, much to Trump's chagrin.) This would bear eerie similarities to the incident that spelled the end of the Nixon regime—but how would the Republican Party of today react in Congress?

We got one encouraging sign from Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who joined Fox Business to put the situation in no uncertain terms for the president:

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.@ChuckGrassley on Fox Biz: "I have confidence in Mueller, the president ought to have confidence in Mueller, and I think it would be suicide for the president to want to talk about firing Mueller. The less the president says on this whole thing, the better off he would be." — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 10, 2018

Would Grassley's colleagues join him in taking the necessary action if Trump does, indeed, defenestrate Mueller? Would Grassley even take action? After all, he followed that up with this:

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Grassley adds that Mueller may be "coming to a dead end as far as the collusion of Trump with Russia in this election," but if Trump fires him, "the Democrats would have a good issue in this upcoming election." — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 10, 2018

The problem is not that Democrats would have a good campaign issue. It's that the president would have struck a dangerous blow against the rule of law—namely, by declaring that he is above it simply because he is the president. (Does that sound familiar?) It would constitute a constitutional crisis and a threat to the republic as we know it. It's not bad politics, it's authoritarianism.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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