Wittes: Trump Should Think Hard About How Much He Really Wants to ‘Alienate’ Judge Who May Decide Mueller Case

EXCERPT:

WITTES: "I think it’s probably a little bit of both. Trump, of course, does delegitimize institutions that are inconvenient to him. The Chief Justice, of course, would be hard to make that case. This is the man who both personally swore Donald Trump into office, if you go back to Trump's inauguration, he’s also the guy who wrote the opinion upholding Trump’s travel ban, so he’s not somebody who’s been disrespectful to Trump’s presidency despite a lot of controversy around it. But at the end of the day, John Roberts, people think of him as a conservative, people talk about him as a swing vote, whatever. At the end of the day, John Roberts is an institutionalist. He runs an institution, the U.S. Federal Judiciary that the President is attacking. When that happens, the head of an institution feels an obligation to say this is what we do. This is what we don’t do and by the way, the appointments process for federal judges is such that there are going to be some judges at any given time that any president may not like and may not agree with and that’s the way the system works and the process for dealing with opinions we don’t like is called appeals. Roberts is just reminding people of the way the judiciary works and will that have the effect of causing tension if there’s ever a Mueller issue before the Supreme Court, I don’t know. I think Trump should think hard about how much he really wants to alienate the people who might have to decide those cases."