Jennifer Palmieri

Opinion contributor

The appointment of Robert Mueller as a special counsel investigating the Trump team’s connections with Russia has put the president on a path he has never traveled: a collision course with the truth.

Firing an FBI director investigating your associates, and maybe you, is a perilous act that could put any presidency in jeopardy. It’s not certain what it will ultimately mean for President Trump. After all, he came to power by defying nearly all conventional rules of politics. Missteps and lies that would doom any other politician seemingly have no impact on him. Trump creates his own world, made up of his own facts and his own rules.

But Trump now faces an unprecedented test in the form of a special counsel investigation. Mueller inhabits a very different world than Trump — a world built on a foundation of facts, in which Mueller can prosecute anyone who lies to him.

I was working in the White House in 1994 when Ken Starr was appointed independent counsel to investigate President Clinton’s investment in the Whitewater real estate development. I was also there four-and-a-half years later when Clinton was impeached as a result of charges stemming from that investigation. As we learned, these investigations can take on a life, direction and scope of their own.

Trump will find that Mueller isn’t just an investigator. He will be a shadow tracking Trump and his staff’s every move. He is charged with investigating links with Russia, and any matters that “arose or may arise from the investigation.” This means Mueller will look into Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and have the latitude to pursue, and prosecute, any wrongdoing that he might encounter along the way.

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I have worked in a White House that’s under investigation. It is even more disorienting than it appears. No one in a position of authority at the White House tells you what is happening. No one knows. Your closest colleague could be under investigation and you would not know. You could be under investigation and not know. It can be impossible to stay focused on your job.

There will be other collateral damage. In the Clinton White House, we tried hard to isolate the team of lawyers working on impeachment, so President Clinton and his staff could continue advancing their policy goals. Yet Congress was consumed with impeachment for months and it was nearly impossible to get anything done.

Similarly, it is hard to imagine the Trump White House making much progress on health care or tax legislation. Leaks from the investigation will continue to happen, there will be hearings with Comey and others on Capitol Hill, and the president himself seems determined to exacerbate his problems with ill-considered tweets, statements and actions.

Mueller’s investigation could force reckonings Trump has long managed to escape. He is the only president in the past four decades who has refused to make his tax data public. As establishing the extent of his financial connections to Russia will be an issue in the investigation, it seems likely tax returns will have to be handed over. Of more consequence, Trump will likely be interviewed by Mueller. If Trump lies in an interview — and let’s be real, based on history the chances are high that he will — he can be prosecuted.

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The parallels to President Nixon’s situation abound. But it would be a mistake to assume Trump is in the same peril as Nixon of being forced from office. When Nixon was revealed to be a liar, his supporters abandoned him and he had to resign. Trump’s supporters aren’t likely to do that. If Trump gets caught in a jam between Mueller and the truth, Trump will cast Mueller as another member of the political establishment trying to take down Trump the outsider. His supporters will cheer. But that won’t stop Mueller from prosecuting him if wrongdoing is found.

The question at the heart of Trump’s investigation is whether he and his campaign colluded with a foreign power to undermine the most fundamental tenet of our democracy — the sanctity of our elections. Trump’s refusal to accept Russia’s role in the elections and his seemingly endless ability to escape consequences for telling lies has made millions of us doubt whether the rules of the republic matter anymore. Does truth even matter anymore?

I am not sure whether the Founding Fathers imagined a figure such as Trump, but they did embed a fealty to truth in the Constitution that the president swore to uphold. The Constitution provides the means to address Russia’s interference in our elections with the gravity it deserves, and to hold a president who refuses to adhere to the truth accountable. How damaging this investigation will ultimately be to Trump remains to be seen. But it is thanks to the genius of our system of checks and balances that, at a minimum, we know this president will be forced to reckon with the truth.

Jennifer Palmieri was director of communications for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaignand in the Obama White House, and was a deputy press secretary in the Clinton White House. Follow her on Twitter: @jmpalmieri

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