Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would likely refuse to fire special counsel Robert Mueller if President Donald Trump insisted on it, veteran conservative pundit Patrick J. Buchanan told Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
"If the president stepped in and ordered Rosenstein to fire Mueller, I don't think he would do it – and he would have to get someone else to do it," Buchanan, author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever," published by Crown Forum.
"Certainly the attorney general couldn't do it, and he would have to move further down the line, and you'd have a massive firestorm on your hands, and I do think Donald Trump would be abandoned by a number of folks on Capitol Hill. There's no doubt.
"Mueller looks to me like someone who's got some great measure now of immunity given to him by the deputy attorney general. And it's given to him by the media, and it's been given to him by the folks on Capitol Hill who have been praising his work, inhaling his work, inhaling him and his record."
Buchanan, a senior adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, also said the atmosphere surrounding the probes into Russia's interference with the 2016 presidential race and whether there was collusion with the Trump campaign is beginning to look like déjà vu.
"This is starting to looking familiar with what happened back in Nixon days, but in those days at least you had crimes committed and people had resigned and people had been convicted," Buchanan told Malzberg.
"And then you had a special prosecutor, but now you've got a special prosecutor already and apparently he's hiring Democratic contributors as his agents to investigate the president of the United States . . .
"You've got the deputy attorney general appointing a special counsel, and he's been picking out people to investigate Trump. And once you get the independent prosecutor, they start rummaging all through everything they can look at."
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