Can the President be convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors while sitting in office? If Mueller finds something, will Republicans call for impeachment?

The President has a certain level of what's referred to as sovereign immunity but does that extend to the President actually committing crimes, particularly before he was in office? Because some of these allegations are coming from late December of last year.

For example, the Logan Act violations.

The Logan Act is a law that was passed in 1799. It's a real old law and what they were concerned about back then was, first of all you had about a third of America who'd been opposed to the American Revolution to begin with and still wanted us to be part of England. And the founders and framers and the early legislators were very conscious of that.

So probably by the time the Logan Act was passed there was a broad consensus that this is America, but they were worried about anybody trying to go out and do foreign policy on behalf of the United States when foreign policy is the province of the President of the Executive Branch, the State Department.

And so the law says that if you're engaging in foreign policy with a foreign government, you have broken the law. Now, only two people have ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act in the 200 years it's been on the law books and nobody's ever been convicted.

But it looks like that's the big one, that Kushner and Flynn may have breached by talking to the Russian ambassador and saying don't overreact to the sanctions that President Obama's putting in. Keep in mind, Barack Obama was President of the United States at the time that Mike Flynn was reaching out to the Russians and saying don't freak out about the sanctions.

That's a fairly clear Logan Act violation for Flynn.

If Trump ordered it, it's also a clear Logan Act violation for Trump.

-Thom


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