Trump testing limits of presidential power

Bloomberg

Donald Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller may be headed towards a Supreme Court battle that could test once and for all how much a president is above the law.
Trump’s legal team and Mueller’s prosecutors have been jockeying over a presidential subpoena after months of negotiations have yet to bring them to an agreement over terms of an interview.
Trump’s lawyers have been building a legal argument since late last summer for why Mueller shouldn’t be able to question Trump, the details of which were outlined in a
confidential January memo
to Mueller that was leaked to the New York Times.
The memo was drafted well before the arrival of Trump’s current lead lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who didn’t fully back the memo’s argument that a president couldn’t obstruct justice under the constitution. The former New York mayor said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he agreed “with about 80 percent” of the memo’s arguments.
Even so, the memo shows Trump’s legal team laying the groundwork to push the limits of presidential power. This approach, which could face its first real test in the coming weeks, could force the kind of constitutional showdown that two past presidents, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, essentially sidestepped.
Mueller hasn’t laid out his case publicly, but his team suggested to Trump’s lawyers in March that a subpoena is on the table.
The January memo pushes a theory, popular with conservative legal theorists, that a president’s power allows him to issue pardons for any reason, end probes into friends and open investigations into enemies, said Harry Sandick, a former prosecutor with the US attorney for the Southern
District of New York and now
a white-collar defense lawyer. Under that theory, the only check on that power is
impeachment.
“No president has stated it so boldly as this letter states it,” Sandick said.
Since taking over as Trump’s lead lawyer last month,
Giuliani has been laying out a growing list of demands
that Mueller must meet before advising his client to sit for questioning.