The real reason it’s too late for Donald Trump to stop Robert Mueller

| 9:10 pm EDT April 18, 2018
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Donald Trump faced reporters today for what was supposed to be a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but instead quickly turned into a Q&A about Trump’s cascading criminal scandals. The media once again asked Trump if he’s planning to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and/or Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Trump responded with a meandering and ridiculous rant, before finally answering the question by saying “They’re still here.” Maybe even Trump now understands why it’s too late.

Trump and his legal team have spent the week in court trying to convince a judge not to let the Feds have access to communications they seized between Trump and his “attorney” Michael Cohen. Trump is losing that battle to the Feds, and almost comically, it’s now dragged Trump allies like Sean Hannity and the National Enquirer into the middle of the criminal scandal. But what’s truly remarkable is that Robert Mueller and his team are not a party to these legal proceedings.

Mueller handed off the Michael Cohen case to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. That means it’s still a federal case, but it’s now in the hands of an entirely different set of prosecutors. Even if Trump found a way to fire Rosenstein and Mueller tomorrow, it still wouldn’t put a dent in anything that’s currently playing out against him and Cohen in court. To derail that, Trump would have to start firing everyone at the SDNY office until he found someone willing to shut down the Cohen investigation, which he probably wouldn’t be able to find anyway.

So now, in addition to Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump and dozens of his associates, the SDNY investigation is ongoing into Trump and his other associates. Trump can’t just fire one person and make this go away. If such a window of opportunity even did exist to begin with, it doesn’t now. It’s not that Trump’s antics will cease. It’s just that even he now seems to understand that he screwed up by waiting so long to make a move, and now he’s in a position where there isn’t a move that can get him out of this.