Top Mueller prosecutor: John Roberts might respond to Trump attack on liberal Supreme Court justices

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Will Chief Justice John Roberts speak out against President Trump after he said two liberal Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves in all future cases involving him?

One of Robert Mueller’s former top prosecutors said it’s not a far-fetched idea.

“You could imagine Justice Roberts doing that,” Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official who was known as Mueller’s “pit bull” during the Russia investigation, said on Tuesday when asked by MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace.

In a late-night tweet on Monday, Trump said Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg should step back from “all Trump, or Trump related, matters,” citing their past remarks. Sotomayor, who was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009, issued a strong dissent to the Supreme Court’s decision released Friday on Wolf v. Cook County, a case dealing with immigration policy. In her opinion, Sotomayor wrote that her conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court, who have the majority, are “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of” the Trump administration.

Trump should be held accountable for his claims of bias, Weissmann said, adding, “I know his followers may not want to hear it, but I do think that it’s still an important function to ask for a factual basis.”

Back in November 2018, Roberts defended the federal judiciary in a rare rebuke of comments from Trump, saying there are no “Obama judges” as the president claimed.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement distributed by the Supreme Court. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

He went on to say an “independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for” in the statement issued one day before Thanksgiving.

Weissmann, a former FBI general counsel who is now an NBC News legal analyst, also commented on the Roger Stone case, which is a spinoff from Mueller’s investigation.

Trump’s pointed tweets about the presiding judge and the forewoman in the case, in which his longtime friend was convicted for lying to Congress and received a 40-month prison sentence, has disrupted the process. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama-era appointee who is presiding over the proceedings in Washington, D.C., even rebuked Trump on Tuesday, warning that his tweets could lead to juror intimidation and harassment.

Weissmann said U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell could again respond to Trump’s “direct attack” after he released a rare statement earlier this month, dismissing the idea that outside pressure may influence judges’ decisions.

“I think that is concerning,” Weissmann said.

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