Even as Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been strategically picking off Donald Trump’s underlings in order to weaken him, Mueller has also been using the legal proceedings against these underlings to solidify the legal parameters of his upcoming big swing at Trump himself. In fact Mueller just scored a huge legal ruling during the course of a grand jury proceeding that will help him to directly take Trump down.

Robert Mueller’s grand jury pursuit of Roger Stone has been ongoing for months, but there has been so much else going on with Donald Trump’s criminal scandals, it’s taken a backseat until the past few days. Mueller called Stone’s sidekick Andrew Miller to testify, and Miller tried to fight it with a legal motion asserting that Mueller didn’t have the constitutional authority. Not only did that motion fail, it’s backfired on everyone involved.

The federal judge in question didn’t simply strike down Miller’s legal motion. She wrote a lengthy ruling which spelled out Robert Mueller’s legal authority in detail. She’s a Chief Judge, so this sets a strong legal precedent. As we’ve seen in the motions leading up to the start of the Paul Manafort trial, when there’s a mountain of evidence against a suspect, the only real legal defense is to try to get the whole thing thrown out on the grounds of legitimacy. Manafort’s motions were all rejected, which is why he’s very likely to be convicted.

Donald Trump and his lawyers are surely going to try to use the same defense strategy once it’s Trump’s time in the legal barrel. Now they’ll be tasked with trying to argue against Robert Mueller’s legal authority, after a high ranking federal judge already spelled out Mueller’s authority in a ninety-two page ruling. These kinds of rulings may not come with the fireworks of some of the bombshells that keep landing, but these are the kinds of developments that ultimately take someone down under the law.



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