After two high-stakes congressional hearings, President Donald Trump faces more explosive moments to come in the expanding criminal investigation that has consumed Washington.

The president and his attorneys are showing an increasing willingness to play hardball in their defense, raising the prospects of drag-out fights over everything from Oval Office tape recordings (if there are any) to the president testifying before a grand jury.


Although special counsel Robert Mueller and key House and Senate committees set out to investigate whether Trump’s team worked with Russia to win the White House, their path could end up being defined by these sidebar showdowns, where there’s little history beyond Watergate or Monica Lewinsky to guide them.

“A set of two precedents is not a big set of precedents,” said Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and Duke University law professor. “You also have to say whatever the Trump story ends up being, it’s probably going to be something else.”

The Trump-Russia investigation is moving at a breakneck pace compared with past White House scandals. To help keep up, here are six potent powder kegs awaiting Trump, Mueller and Congress:

Executive privilege

The White House decided not to block ex-FBI Director James Comey’s testimony about his own firing and interactions with Trump before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, meantime, repeatedly sidestepped questions Tuesday from his former Senate colleagues about Comey’s firing, explaining that Trump had decided not to invoke executive privilege — yet.

“At this point, I believe it’s premature” to discuss private interactions with the president, Sessions told frustrated Democrats on the Senate panel.

Trump and his attorneys can expect to face the same decision again and again about whether to resist giving full answers — or handing over documents — if they think questions and requests from Congress or Mueller probe too deep into their internal communications.

Legally, Trump won’t have much to lean on if he wants to hold back information. Presidents haven’t been very successful in their attempts to block inquiries, and it would be even harder to assert privilege if a court believed the materials in demand would help in determining the existence of a criminal violation.

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The Supreme Court’s unanimous 1974 decision rejecting President Richard Nixon’s attempts to withhold private presidential tape recordings and other materials despite a subpoena also looms over any executive privilege debate.

Trump hasn’t given an explanation since a mid-May warning to Comey on Twitter that he’d “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations,” but legal history isn’t on his side if tapes exist and he wants to protect them.

The tape issue could come to a head soon. The House Intelligence Committee has asked White House Counsel Don McGahn to say whether there are tape recordings, and there’s a June 23 deadline to turn any relevant materials over to the panel.

Lawyer versus lawyer

More than a dozen lawyers are already working on behalf of Trump and his associates in the Russia investigation, representing everyone from the president himself to senior White House aide Jared Kushner, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen and former campaign advisers Carter Page, Roger Stone, Boris Epshteyn and Michael Caputo.

More lawyers mean more complications.

There are already the makings of a clash between Trump’s personal attorney Marc Kasowitz, who is taking the lead on all public crisis communication on the Russia scandal and has reportedly discouraged White House staff from retaining their own private counsel, and the lawyers who take on Trump aides as clients.

“His duty is to Trump — not White House staff,” said Jane Sherburne, a former Clinton White House attorney. “So first and foremost, White House staff should understand that he is not looking out for their interests.”

Trump aides who don’t have their own attorneys “may be at risk of making decisions or enabling the creation of a record without having fully understood the potential consequences for them,” Sherburne said.

“Even as Kasowitz may suggest their interests are aligned with Trump’s, he is not in a position to evaluate that for the staff, and they would be wise to get independent professional advice about their own risk,” she added.

Trump’s tax returns

Democrats and Republicans alike have been gunning for Trump’s tax returns since the heat of the 2016 campaign. Blue states like California and New York are trying to pass laws requiring candidates running in their 2020 presidential primaries to file reams of tax documents to get on the ballot. And the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia filed a federal lawsuit Monday over Trump’s businesses, largely in hopes they’ll get ahold of his tax returns.

But there’s one venue where the president’s tax records may be most susceptible to discovery: the Russia investigation.

“It shows the chaos around Washington that nobody has really started to talk about this yet,” a Justice Department lawyer told Politico Magazine in a story published last month. “But finally, I think, someone is going to get their hands on Donald Trump’s tax returns. And that man is Robert Mueller.”

Mueller could get a federal judge’s sign-off on the release of Trump’s returns — so long as he can show there is reason to believe a crime has been committed and the documents would help the case.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin may not be thrilled with the IRS releasing those materials, and white-collar veterans wouldn’t reject the idea the White House might spoil for a fight. But if it happens, it’s possible Trump may not even be notified of a court order to the IRS.

“The move does not require a formal subpoena or the action of a grand jury; veteran federal prosecutors said it could all take place in a matter of hours,” the Politico story noted.

A grand jury

The federal courthouse in Washington could become the center of the political universe.

While Mueller has other options, including just across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia, the Constitution Avenue location is a likely spot where he might convene a grand jury for witness testimony in his investigation and for potential criminal indictments.

“You will eventually have a bit of a circus outside the grand jury building,” said Adam Goldberg, a former Clinton White House crisis communications official.

Grand jury hearings don’t take place in public, though the witnesses are free to talk about the experience when it’s over. But reporters often camp out by the buildings anyway to try to learn what’s happening in a special prosecution case — eager to pick up clues based on who is called in to testify.

That’s not his only option. Mueller can also do official witness interviews away from a grand jury spotlight — and it’s there that he can negotiate with a witness’ attorneys over everything from whether there’s a video recording of the proceedings to the granting of immunity from prosecution.

A white-collar attorney said participating in these interviews is at the discretion of the witness. “Therefore, everything about it is negotiable because you have no duty to do it,” the attorney said.

Trump himself could even find himself before a grand jury. Last week, the president said he’d be “100 percent” ready to testify under oath on the Russia probe, and White House press secretary Sean Spicer clarified Monday that the president was referring to appearances before Mueller and not Congress.

There is some precedent for that. Bill Clinton was the first president to testify as a subject of a grand jury investigation, appearing in 1998 via closed-circuit television from the White House to talk about his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney gave interviews in their offices — not grand jury testimony — during the special prosecutor investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

Whether Trump follows through with his offer to speak with Mueller remains to be seen. He’d also have the option to invoke his Fifth Amendment right, refusing to incriminate himself.

Among the Trump officials who are expected to get Mueller inquiries: Anyone Comey mentioned last week in his public testimony related to the Feb. 14 Oval Office meeting where the president allegedly pulled him aside to talk about the Flynn probe, suggesting he “let this go.”

Vice President Mike Pence, chief of staff Reince Priebus, Sessions and Kushner were in the room before Trump asked them to leave, Comey said.

“If you’re Mueller, you’d want to know from Priebus what the president told him after that meeting. And you’d want to know what he told Jared,” Goldberg said. “All the senior staff are potential grand jury witnesses.”

Presidential interference

Some of Trump’s leading surrogates, including Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich, have urged the president to consider dumping Mueller, which Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said was under discussion by senior aides during his visit to the White House on Monday.

Trump could certainly make it happen, though it wouldn’t be without controversy.

Under the DOJ’s special counsel regulations, Mueller could be removed “only by the personal action of the Attorney General.” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has that role because of Sessions’ recusal from all-things-Russia, and Rosenstein testified on Tuesday that he’d ignore calls to oust Mueller unless the orders were “lawful and appropriate.”

Democrats and even some Republicans are warning that should Trump fire Mueller, it would trigger a crisis on the magnitude of the Saturday Night Massacre — the 1973 moment when Nixon fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general after both refused to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said on Twitter that if Trump fired his special counsel, Congress would re-establish a law that lets it pick an independent prosecutor and “appoint Bob Mueller.” Ruddy, meantime, said in an interview he disagreed with the idea of going after Mueller. “I think firing Mueller could trigger an impeachment process,” he said.

Indictments

The special counsel probe could be wide-ranging. Trump’s firing of Comey has prompted speculation he’s opened himself up to an obstruction of justice charge. Mueller also may find himself digging into any connections between the Trump Organization and Russian banks or how WikiLeaks obtained stolen emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

“It’s all fair game,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who worked at DOJ during the Wilson investigation.

As Mueller brings the probe to a close, he could face perhaps the most explosive of all decisions: whether to prosecute the president himself.

John Carlin, a former senior Obama-era Justice Department official, published a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month that ticked through the complicated scenario. While Mueller may find it appropriate to indict Trump, Carlin noted DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel “has long taken the position that the president cannot be prosecuted or even indicted while still in office.”

That’s how DOJ dealt with Nixon in 1973 and Clinton in 2000, though Carlin said the topic remains subject to heated legal debate.

“If Mueller closes his investigation without bringing charges against Trump, does that mean that evidence might exist of a presidential crime left unprosecuted?” he wrote. “And what would happen next? As of now, it is anybody’s guess.”