Schumer: Trump Firing Mueller Would Cause a ‘Constitutional Crisis,’ ‘Echoes of Richard Nixon’

Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” when asked about reports President Donald Trump was considering terminating Robert Mueller as special counsel, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said such a move “would cause a constitutional crisis.” “echoes of Richard Nixon in the Saturday Night Massacre.”

He went on to add the move would have “echoes of Richard Nixon in the Saturday Night Massacre.”

Schumer said, “We’ve had two people now who have devoted themselves to law enforcement to the country for most of their lives, most of their professional lives—first Comey, now Mueller. When they—when Comey does things the president doesn’t like, when Mueller, who seems that he will pursue this wherever it leads, gets under the skin of some people, they say, maybe they’ll fire him. That is just such, such a dereliction of the separation of powers—so against what the Constitution is like. If he were to fire Mueller, first, it would cause a Constitutional crisis. Rosenstein said today he would not fire Mueller.”

“So we’re getting echoes of Richard Nixon in the Saturday Night Massacre where they would have to go deep into the Justice Department to find someone who would do such a pernicious and despicable act of firing Mueller,” he continued. “And it will backfire. I believe in that case, there would be such a reaction of Democrats and Republicans in Congress that what Adam Schiff said, that we’d resurrect the independent counsel law and have judges appoint an independent counsel beyond the president’s reach. Hopefully, Mueller once again would take effect, would happen. So this is absurd. Again, if the president—I’d say this to the president and all the people around him. If you’ve done nothing wrong, why are you so afraid of people looking into it?”

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