For what it's worth, though, here are some main points from the combined memos, which may or may not still be considered significant by the Trump team. Conventional wisdom among journalists following this closely seems to be coming down in favor of it having been leaked by the Trump team itself because they want to put these issues out there in the "court of public opinion."
That fits with what seems to be Giuliani's role: going on TV and spinning the news to sway public opinion to discredit the Mueller investigation and question any report that results from the investigation.
As one tv commentator said on Sunday: the purpose seems to be to get this all out into the public arena; get any anger about it out now, so that when something big happens later on, people will already be fed up with the controversy and won't care.
So what are the take-away points from the memo? This is based on MSNBC news programs with various legal guests who gave opinions about legal questions.
1. The document acknowledges that President Trump played a major part in crafting the press release put out as he was flying back from Europe just after the story had broken about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with the Russians promising "dirt on Hillary Clinton." The PR release was put out in Don, Jr.'s name, and it said that the meeting was primarily about adoption of Russian children.
Thus, we have an admission of an untruth being told by the president, although experts think there may be wiggle room, given that he was not in the room and was going on what others told him. But then he throws them under the bus if they lied to him.
2. The document, according to a range of legal expertsd, including Lawrence Tribe, is written in language and using such specious argument that it obviously was not written by top legal thinkers. For example, it asserts outmoded interpretations of some issues that have since been overruled by the courts.
My thought about that is that, yes, they many not be the top legal minds; but it also may be true that, in this case, there just is not a good legal case to be made, so they fall back on half-baked, outmoded reasoning.
3. The overall thrust of the argument is a very expansive presidential power that would essentially make the president a king. This includes:
a. The assertion that a president cannot commit obstruction of justice because he has the power to put an end to any case, for any reason or for no reason, since he is in charge of the entire justice system.
b. The assertion that a president cannot be forced to testify under subpoena because he can just put an end to the case (see a).
c. Rudy Giuliani has added to these his own interpretation that asserts that the president "probably" could pardon himself. He did acknowledge that it would probably lead to impeachment if he did; and, by the way, he's not going to do that.
So the sum and substance of the Trump team's interpretation is that he has no legal jeopardy, because essentially the president is above the law. In fact, it's only a small stretch to say that he is the law. If that's what the Founding Fathers intended, why did they bother to fight a war to become independent from King George III?
* * * * *
Here's how Matthew Iglesias reported the matter for Vox.com:
"Essentially all presidents sooner or later end up commissioning lawyers to put forward an expansive view of presidential power, but those lawyers take pains to argue that they are not making the case for a totally unchecked executive whose existence would pose a fundamental threat to American values.
"Donald Trump, however, is a different kind of president.
"In a 20-page memo written by Trump's legal team . . . they make an unusually frank case for a tyrannical interpretation of presidential power.
"The key passage in the memo is one in which Trump's lawyers argue that not only was there nothing shady going on when FBI Director James Comey got fired, there isn't even any potential shadiness to investigate because the president is allowed to be as shady as he wants to be when it comes to overseeing federal law enforcement. He can fire whoever he wants. Shut down any investigation or open up a new one. . . .
"This is a particularly extreme version of the "unitary executive" doctrine that conservative legal scholars sometimes appeal to . . . drawing on the notion that the executive branch of government -- including the federal police agencies and federal prosecutors -- are a single entity personified by the president.
"But to push that logic into this terrain would not only give the president casrte blanche to persecute his enemies but essentially vitiate the idea that there are any enforceable laws at all.
"Consider that if the memo is correct, there would be nothing wrong with Trump setting up a booth somewhere in Washington, DC where wealthy individuals could hand checks to Trump, and in exchange, Trump would make whatever federal legal trouble they are in go away. You could call it 'The Trump Hotel' or maybe bundle a room to stay in along with the legal impunity.
"Having cut your check, you'd then have carte blanche to commit bank fraud or dump toxic waste in violation of the Clean Water Act or whatever else you want to do. Tony Soprano could get the feds off his case, and so could the perpetrators of the next Enron fraud or whatever else.
"Perhaps most egregiously, since Washington, DC isn't a state, all criminal law here is federal criminal law, so the president could have his staff murder opposition party senators and inconvenient judges and then block any investigation into what's happening.
"Of course, as the memo notes, to an extent this kind of power to undermine the rule of law already exists in the form of the essentially unlimited pardon power. . . . Trump has started using the power abusively and capriciously early in his tenure in office in a disturbing way, but has not yet tried to pardon his way out of the Russia investigation in part because there is one important limit on the pardon power -- you have to do it in public. The only check on pardons is political, but the political check is quite real . . . and the new theory that Trump can simply make whole investigations vanish would eliminate it.
"Much of the argument about Trump and the rule of law has focused rather narrowly on the particular case of Comey's firing and the potential future dismissal of Robert Mueller.
"These are important questions, in the sense that an FBI Director is an important person and a special counsel investigation is an important matter; but the memo is a reminder that they offer much too narrow a view of what the real extent of the problem is here.
"One of the main purposes of the government is to protect the weak from exploitation at the hands of the strong by making certain forms of misconduct illegal. Trump's assertion that he can simply waive-away investigations into misconduct because he is worried that the investigation might end badly for his friends or family members is toxic to the entire scheme. Trump, like most presidents, has plenty of rich and powerful friends and a much longer list of rich and powerful people who would like to be his friends.
"If he really does have the power to just make anyone's legal trouble go away because he happens to feel likt it, then we're all in a world of trouble."
* * * * *
All in all, the Trump lawyers' memo is a poorly reasoned, unlawyerly document. But those aren't the lawyers in charge now. It will probably become clear eventually why they leaked it now -- to get rid of it? or to desensitize the public to its eventual use? But that is really a more interesting question to me than the substance of the document, which seems patently unsupportable in a Supreme Court argument.
We don't know what position on any of this Trump's new lawyer Emmett Flood is taking, because he has made no public statements, either written or oral. Giuliani's role has become clear; he is the "tv lawyer" who goes on air daily to create chaos, give out mixed messages, and generally to keep people talking about it but without any clarity or closure. If there is a strategy to this, they hope, by creating such confusion and doubt, that when Mueller's damning report comes out, people will not know whether to believe it and will just shrug it off.
Ralph
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