Confident that he can use the U.S. Department of Justice as his personal chew toy, Donald Trump has again decided that he can trample the thickest red line in American rule of law and that nobody is going to lift a finger to stop him.

The president demanded that Justice launch an investigation designed to torpedo another criminal investigation - the one in which Trump is the principle subject, which is probably his most audacious act of obstruction since he fired the FBI director who led another investigation against him.

Somehow, that doesn't seem like the way the Founders drew it up.

But this is the same president who said, "I have absolute right to do what I want with the Justice Department," despite the prevailing consensus that DOJ has operational independence from the executive branch.

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 20, 2018

And as long as Congressional Republicans issue strategic yawns rather than exercise their Article II duties, the administration of fair and impartial justice will be corrupted, and Trump will use federal law enforcement as a political truncheon to escape legal jeopardy.

It's all very predictable, given the jaw-dropping scorecard of an investigation which Trump has tried to disturb, derail, and delegitimize. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has extracted guilty pleas from Trump's national security adviser, deputy campaign manager, and foreign policy adviser, and indicted his campaign manager, 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies.

Mueller has bagged all that in just 12 months. And he hasn't even frog-walked Michael Cohen and Roger Stone out of their caves yet, or shown whether Donald Trump Jr. tried to solicit anything of value in all those visits with foreign agents during the 2016 campaign.

So playing off distrust of law enforcement and a Fox News blurb, Trump's weekend Twitter tirade called for an investigation of the investigators, because an FBI agent was engaged in a counter-intelligence operation with Russian campaign interference in July 2016. On Monday, Trump summoned Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray to the White House, and they agreed to let the Inspector General look into whether the FBI surveilled Trump's campaign for "inappropriate purposes," even though no such evidence exists.

Legal experts are split on whether Rosenstein's concessions are appropriate under the circumstances. Chief of Staff John Kelly will meet with the FBI, DOJ, and congressional leaders to review classified material on the matter, but if Trump turns it over to his Congressional lap dogs for the purpose of discrediting Mueller's investigation, that probe could be in jeopardy.

Rosenstein, apparently stalling for time, probably felt he is providing something worthless that could appease the president and save his job as Mueller's supervisor. Or so one hopes. But he did create a precedent in which Justice would surrender info from an investigation to the subject of that investigation, and that is dangerous and daft.

The state of play remains the same: We are still facing a civic stress test.

Gripped by victimhood and paranoia, Trump will use anything to kill the Mueller probe. The corrupt House Intelligence Committee, dominated by the fringe right, has drafted articles of impeachment against Rosenstein. And congressional leadership has less allegiance to the integrity of judicial independence and constitutional norms than to a president who has no use for either.

Yet as the special counsel shoves it into fifth gear, the possibilities still seem endless. The last thing America needs is for its Justice Department to be complicit in this vandalism of democracy.

The word, from Alexander Hamilton, 1792. It never gets old. pic.twitter.com/LaJpJeoMD8 — Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) July 12, 2017

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