Neither of the two Donald Trumps should sit down with Mueller

Great piece by Andrew McCarthy at NRO today on why DJT should not sit down for an interview with Robert Mueller.

I like his two-Trumps-to-consider formulation:

See, there are two Trumps to consider here. There is the very eccentric and volatile man who is the subject of Mueller’s amorphous investigation. And there is the president of the United States, who has responsibilities to that vital public office. Here, the interests of both happen to align.

Trump's personality is such that the highly trained  Mueller team would know how to make mincemeat of any and every off-the-wall utterance that came out of such a meeting:

Trump is litigious and cocky. He has been in lots of lawsuits and has taken the measure of lots of lawyers. He may be very confident that he can handle an interview. He may be certain he has not colluded with Russia and thus convinced there’s no need to worry.

Trust me, though: He has not been sweated before like he would be in a special-counsel interview. It would be a mistake to assume that because Mueller’s team overflows with Democratic partisans, they are just like the political hacks Trump jousts with all the time. These particular prosecutors are extraordinarily good at what they do. They are not going to be cowed or charmed. If Trump agrees to speak to them, he will not be able to control the direction of the questioning; and if he loses his cool and says things that are dubious or flatly untrue, they will clean his clock.

In other words: Trump the man could walk out of an interview with Mueller in real jeopardy, despite walking into it in nothing more than a bad mood. 

Then there is the office to be considered, along with the little mater of there not being any crime at the core of Mueller's investigation:

A president of the United States should never be the subject of a criminal investigation, and should never be asked to provide testimony or evidence in a criminal investigation, in the absence of two things: solid evidence that a serious crime has been committed and a lack of any alternative means to acquire proof that is essential to the prosecution.

There is a simple reason for this: The awesome responsibilities of the presidency are more significant to the nation than the outcome of any particular criminal case. There is an exception: When there is reasonable cause to believe the president is complicit in a serious criminal offense, and that he has evidence or knowledge that would be admissible and probative. Only in those circumstances should a president be subject to subpoena, and only then should he submit to questioning. Trump has a responsibility to the office to enforce that standard.

As we have noted here since before Mueller was appointed, the Justice Department has improperly assigned a prosecutor in the absence of grounds to believe a crime has been committed. “Collusion with Russia” is not a crime, and there are presently no grounds to believe the president conspired with Putin’s regime to violate any American law.

And again, it is not criminal obstruction for a president to weigh in on whether a subordinate (such as Michael Flynn) should be investigated, or to fire a subordinate — including a subordinate (such as James Comey, or theoretically Mueller himself) who is involved in conducting an investigation, particularly an investigation that continues uninterrupted despite the firing. Whether we think these are foolish things for the president to have done is beside the point. We are talking here about whether they are criminal actions, and they are not. If the voters are repulsed and want to take it out on Trump and his party come election time, that’s democracy. It is not, however, the business of prosecutors.

Every other independent-counsel investigation in which an American president has been a subject was triggered by an actual crime. Those presidents were on notice of the contours of the probe, and of the criminality that rendered it appropriate for a prosecutor to be appointed and for a president to be questioned. That is not the case in Mueller’s probe. It has been formally described as a counterintelligence investigation, which is a national-security inquiry about a foreign country’s designs against the United States, not a criminal investigation targeting an American for prosecution on a known offense.

So, between the matter of DJT lacking a filter between his brain and mouth, and, for better or worse, his holding the office that he does, it is ill-advised of him to submit to such an interview.