Mark Wilson/Getty Images mueller investigation Mueller's Done, And We Know Nothing. But We Know This About Trump. Whatever the special counsel concluded, expect the president to fight. And perhaps spark a constitutional crisis.

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

It’s in.

There are any number of ways that the Mueller report, which has been delivered as of Friday to Attorney General William Barr, could become the most anticlimactic event since Gerald Rivera drilled open Al Capone’s vault. It could summarize the many crimes and misdemeanors committed by a platoon of Donald Trump’s band of brothers and sisters; it could point to the many acts of the president to deflect the investigation into Russian collusion; it could note the president’s campaign to discredit Mueller’s own probe. It could do none of that and simply note that the special counsel has concluded that he has charged every crime he thinks has a reasonable chance of successful prosecution, and that’s that.


So far, all we know per an anonymous Justice Department briefer is that the report is “comprehensive”; that Mueller got everything he asked for; and that the special counsel is recommending no further indictments.

That hasn’t stopped Trumpworld from declaring victory. Donald Trump, Jr., the president’s son, is gloating on Twitter. Mark Meadows, the South Carolina Tea Partyer who has emerged as Trump’s fiercest enforcer on Capitol Hill, has declared a premature verdict of “no collusion”—as if that squishy term carries any legal weight whatsoever. And surely the president will declare victory no matter what it says.

That’s all the normal cut and thrust of politics, as much as anything can be normal in the Trump age. But there is one way in which Mueller’s report, the main conclusions of which will likely go public this weekend, could mark the beginning of a genuinely consequential crisis. If it offers evidence of potentially criminal or—more likely— impeachable conduct by the president, it could set either the courts or the House Judiciary Committee on a course to demand evidence Trump has no intention of providing.

Those in the president’s corner have offered an argument for a sharply limited accounting by Mueller that sets some sort of record for artfulness, if not pure chutzpah: Since Justice Department guidelines say a sitting president cannot be indicted, and since those guidelines also say that without indictments there should be no official comments—something former FBI director James Comey brushed aside when he called Hillary Clinton’s email use “extremely careless” back in 2016—then by definition Mueller should offer no comment at all about the president’s conduct. But if Mueller has found, for example “corrupt intent” in Trump’s use of executive power—say, to shut down a probe into collusion—or other conduct that fits the definition of “obstruction of justice” or “abuse of power” that may be impeachable, those findings have to see the light of day.

And if what Mueller has found prompts a U.S. attorney, or the House Judiciary Committee, to demand evidence from the White House? That’s when the often overhyped fears of a constitutional clash could move from paranoia to plausibility.

Why? Because this president has already smashed through so many once impregnable guardrails that it is highly imaginable that he would simply ignore what every recent president has done, which is to honor the mandates of the courts even at enormous cost. Keep in mind, too, that Mueller was forced to shutter his investigation without the benefit of an in-person presidential interview—an ill omen for future White House cooperation with Capitol Hill.

When Harry Truman, faced with a steel strike in the midst of the Korean War, tried to seize the steel mills, the Supreme Court said “no,” that he lacked the statutory or executive authority to do so. Truman fumed at the decision, but obeyed it. When a unanimous Supreme Court told President Richard Nixon in 1974 to turn over tapes and other materials related to the Watergate cover-up, Nixon had to know that following that subpoena would end his presidency. But he did so, and 16 days later, he was on his way to exile in California.

Nothing in Trump’s conduct suggests he would follow those examples. Indeed, he has made it part of his brand to sweep aside the practices that were more or less universally accepted by presidents past—whether by failing to release past tax returns, or concealing records of White House visitors, or entangling himself and his family in decisions that could affect their personal finances, or declaring a bogus national emergency to find money Congress specifically denied him. Trump has, to use the late Daniel Moynihan’s famous phrase, “defined deviancy down,” and what is more, he has done it with the more or less full backing of his party’s congressional and institutional wing, either out of their admiration for his boldness or their fear of his capacity to end their political lives.

Trump’s party has spent the better part of two years acting as an Amen corner, amplifying the president’s own insistence that any assertion of illegal or impeachable conduct on his part is by definition the product of a corrupt “Deep State,” out to stage a coup against the chief executive. So if Mueller’s report triggers a demand from courts or the Congress for evidence to follow up his conclusions, would a presidential refusal be turned into a partisan battle, rather than an institutional demand that the executive accede to a co-equal branch of government?

I’d be less willing to offer such a warning had I not heard the same concerns voiced privately just a week ago by one of the most prominent figures in the legal universe—concerns that the president would simply say “no” to the same kind of judicial command that presidents in the past routinely followed, and would face little resistance from his own party, thus turning a textbook case of executive authoritarianism into a partisan food fight. If there is anything in Trump’s history to make such fears unwarranted, they have been extraordinarily well hidden. I don’t think Steve Bannon meant to be taken seriously when he said, “Never in my life did I think I’d like to see a dictator, but if there’s going to be one, I want it to be Trump,” but the serious assertions among his followers that “God put Trump in the White House” suggest his base will be with him until Judgment Day.

Along with every other member of the Grand Army of Speculation, I don’t know whether anything in the Mueller report would trigger new demands for cooperation from the White House, though Hill Democrats are already hinting as much. But if there are such assertions, we may well be in dangerous new territory.