It looks like Donald Trump may have officially become a “target” in Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation

| 5:05 pm EDT July 20, 2018
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While some people have questioned why Donald Trump and those closest to him have not yet been subpoenaed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to testify before a grand jury, some experts have pointed out this is rather bad news for those yet to be called upon. This should make individuals such as Roger Stone, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr. especially frightened. Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and former ARMY JAG, recently laid out his professional opinion in an article for NBC News.

While Trump admitted during an interview with Lester Holt that his reasoning for firing former FBI Director James Comey was because of “this Russia thing,” some close to Trump say another reason was Comey’s refusal to announce publicly that Trump was not the target of the Trump-Russia investigation. Kirschner explains that the lack of a subpoena for Trump could likely indicate that “evidentiary developments in the investigation may have moved the president from being a ‘subject’ of the investigation to being a ‘target’.”

It is important to recall that many of those already indicted by Mueller – Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Alex van der Zwaan – were not subpoenaed prior to their indictments. However, when Manafort’s house was raided by the FBI, it was clear he was a target and about to be indicted, so a subpoena to testify was not necessary. As is common in investigations such as this, the prosecutor starts at the bottom, working up through the “small fish” until there is enough evidence to go after those at the top.

A regulatory standard commonly used by prosecutors is not to subpoena targets of an investigation. Because the U.S. Attorney’s manual states that a target is someone who the prosecutor possesses “substantial evidence linking him/her to a crime” and has become someone the prosecutor intends to indict, the lack of a subpoena to testify is further bad news for Trump and those closest to him.