Sheldon Whitehouse: We Are ‘Moving Toward Indictment and Charges of the President’

Appearing Tuesday evening on CNN’s Cuomo Primetime, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told host Christopher Cuomo that prosecutors are “moving toward indictment and charges” against President Donald Trump.

A partial transcript is as follows: 

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: I think that if there are crimes that he [President Trump] has committed, he should be indicted. I do not at all subscribe to the OLC theory that a president can’t be indicted. I think that the Office of Legal Counsel and Department of Justice bends over backward to take the most executive branch-friendly position that it possibly can. I think a court taking a look at this would say “no, no, no, no, no,” and if you look at the Nixon precedents and others, they don’t align with a president not being answerable to the public in this way. And it would create a terrible situation. You have a president, who the public knows is the subject of a criminal investigation, may very well be involved in criminal activity, and you don’t get a resolution of that question? You don’t get pressure on him to answer questions and get out? That doesn’t seem like an appropriate way to deal with it.

CHRISTOPHER CUOMO: Based on what you know right now, do you think you could bring a case against the president?

SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I would want to know a lot more. I’m at the stage, based on what I know, that I would be sitting down with the agents and say “okay, we need to run down this, we need to run down that, we need to pin down some things before we go.” We are certainly in a mode, I believe, of moving toward an indictment and charges of the president, but I do not believe, based on what I know — Mueller may know more — that we’re at the stage of actually being able to make the charge.