Nancy Pelosi says ‘new laws’ could help to indict a sitting President

At the heart of the still-raging debate over the Mueller report on Russian “collusion” is the question of whether or not a sitting president can be indicted in a  court of law.

For many, the Office of Legal Counsel’s previous take on the subject indicates that no, a fairly elected and on-duty President will not be subject to such legal machinations as indictment, but that’s not the entire story.  Democratic leaders who oppose President Trump have taken this to mean that Robert Mueller and his team were never going to make a decision on charging the Commander in Chief with a crime.  It’s a “they can’t so they won’t” sort of concept.

The subsequent confusion on the matter still hasn’t resolved itself, now several months removed from the initiation of the argument, so House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is taking another route.

In an exclusive interview with NPR, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she has not changed her mind on pursuing impeachment but she is ready to change the law to restrain presidential power and to make it clear that a sitting president can, in fact, be indicted.

“I do think that we will have to pass some laws that will have clarity for future presidents. [A] president should be indicted, if he’s committed a wrongdoing — any president. There is nothing anyplace that says the president should not be indicted,” Pelosi told All Things Considered host Ari Shapiro and NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis on Friday. “That’s something cooked up by the president’s lawyers. That’s what that is. But so that people will feel ‘OK, well, if he — if he does something wrong, [he] should be able to be indicted.’ ”

The California Democrat said that while it is Justice Department protocol not to pursue any charges against an incumbent — the reason former special counsel Robert Mueller said he couldn’t charge President Trump with a crime no matter the outcome of his report — that should be changed.

Pelosi has long railed against her fellow democrats’ cries for impeachment, believing that such measures would fail in the Senate and subsequently bolster the President’s reelection chances.