HOUSE OVERSIGHT 030403 claim the right to haul the president into court. The Mueller team, according to sources both near the investigation and the White House, has prepared a case, but it requires the approval of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who—with the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the Russia-related investigation—oversees the Mueller team. He would need to set aside He could do this based on a finding that the former opinion was inaccurate re the president being above the law. ttherby creating an inability to indict a sitting president. Indeed, Rosenstein, as recently as April, publicly declared that the President was not a target. This may have been a form of fig leaf to soothe a President who regularly demands aides assure him he is not being pursued: the President does not become a formal target until Rosenstein agrees to designate him as one. Any proposed indictment would confront Rosenstein with matters with which he has been intimately involved. The case, according to my conversations , is fundamentally Trump versus the FBI, Justice Department, and Mueller investigation itself. In many ways, it boils down to the word of former FBI Director James Comey against the word of Donald Trump. Rosenstein, at the President's behest, drafted a memo justifying the Comey firing for how the former FBI Director handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But that justification, in an embarrassment for Rosenstein, was shortly brushed aside by the President when he admitted that he fired Comey to disrupt the Russian investigation. What's more, the indictment is said to charge that the firing of Andrew McCabe, the former Deputy Director of the FBI, who reported directly to Rosenstein after the Comey dismissal, was an instance of illegal retaliation tampering or consipracy by the President against a potential witness. According to a source with knowledge of the strategy, it will be all the more controversial because if fin