Story Highlights
- Matthew Whitaker: The finances of Trump or his family are beyond Mueller's purview
- If Rod Rosenstein doesn't rein in probe it will look like a political fishing expedition
Editor's Note:Matthew Whitaker is a CNN legal commentator and former US attorney who directs the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a conservative ethics watchdog group. He ran in the Republican primary for Iowa Senate in 2014. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) — (This article was originally published on August 6, 2017. On November 7, 2018, President Donald Trump announced that he was naming Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general.)
Last month, when President Donald Trump was asked by The New York Times if special counsel Robert Mueller would be crossing a line if he started investigating the finances of Trump and his family, the President said, "I think that's a violation. Look, this is about Russia."
The President is absolutely correct. Mueller has come up to a red line in the Russia 2016 election-meddling investigation that he is dangerously close to crossing.
According to a CNN article, Mueller's investigators could be looking into financial records relating to the Trump Organization that are unrelated to the 2016 election. According to these reports, "sources described an investigation that has widened to focus on possible financial crimes, some unconnected to the 2016 election." The piece goes on to cite law enforcement sources who say non-Russia-related leads that "involve Trump associates" are being referred to the special counsel "to encourage subjects of the investigation to cooperate."
This information is deeply concerning to me. It does not take a lawyer or even a former federal prosecutor like myself to conclude that investigating Donald Trump's finances or his family's finances falls completely outside of the realm of his 2016 campaign and allegations that the campaign coordinated with the Russian government or anyone else. That goes beyond the scope of the appointment of the special counsel.