But let’s slow down a bit. Although Mueller has warned Trump’s lawyers that he might subpoena the president if he refuses to testify voluntarily, he might well elect not to. The two sides could compromise on a deal for testimony on limited subjects or only in written interrogatories. Or Mueller might see the risks, delay, and other costs of starting a subpoena battle as outweighing the benefits—especially if the evidence he has gathered does not clearly implicate Trump in any serious crime. Mueller’s risk in starting a subpoena fight is that he might win less in the Supreme Court than he could have gotten in negotiations, or even lose entirely.

This last possibility is something that Trump’s critics greatly underestimate. The popular analysis is that the Supreme Court’s decisions in U.S. v. Nixon (1974) and Clinton v. Jones (1997) require the president to obey a subpoena to testify before Mueller’s grand jury. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe exemplifies those who hold such presumptions. “The Supreme Court held in the Nixon Tapes Case that executive privilege cannot overcome a grand jury subpoena,” he told Business Insider in March. “So Trump would have to answer every question or be held in contempt—unless he takes the Fifth Amendment.”

We are far less confident in this reading of Nixon and Clinton and that the Supreme Court would award Mueller an unqualified win. If Mueller subpoenas Trump to testify, and Trump fights, then the Court may well decide to limit the questions that the president must answer, if not quash the subpoena altogether. It would have leeway to deal such a setback to the special counsel within the parameters set in the Nixon and Clinton decisions. And whatever the justices may think of this particular president, they will show more care for the needs of the presidency than have the analysts who favor a total victory for Mueller in any battle with Trump.

Let’s begin with U.S. v. Nixon, in which the Supreme Court rejected President Nixon’s assertion of executive privilege in the face of special prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s subpoena for tapes, documents, and other materials relevant to the criminal trial of the Watergate burglars. The Court unanimously ordered Nixon to turn over to Jaworski the secretly recorded Oval Office tapes that he had subpoenaed. While the Court recognized that executive privilege provides some protection for a president’s confidential communications, it also ruled that this protection must give way to the prosecutor’s need for evidence “demonstrably relevant” to the pending criminal trial of several indicted Nixon co-conspirators.

Analysts like Tribe construe this as a blanket rule enabling the special counsel to subpoena not just Nixon’s tapes, but also the current president’s testimony. “US v. Nixon (1974) held the president must comply with a grand jury subpoena for his Oval Office tapes,” Tribe tweeted recently. “There is no basis for treating a grand jury subpoena for the president’s live testimony any differently.” This ignores the key limits and nuances of the justices’ analysis in the 1974 case. The Court did not conclude that the criminal process always outweighs executive privilege; rather, it concluded only that “the legitimate needs of the judicial process may outweigh Presidential privilege” (emphasis added).

Nixon’s mistake was in asserting too categorical a privilege—too broad in scope and too far removed from the specific case at hand. The Court rejected his assertion of “an absolute privilege as against a subpoena essential to enforcement of criminal statutes on no more than a generalized claim of the public interest in confidentiality of non-military and nondiplomatic discussion.” And it then struck a careful balance: Absent a showing of military or diplomatic need for executive confidentiality, a subpoena for documents for which there was a “demonstrated, specific need . . . in a pending criminal trial” must be obeyed.

It is not hard to see defenses that Trump’s lawyers could mount. They could attempt to distinguish the two investigations by stressing that the case against Trump actually involves diplomatic sensitivities. It is, after all, a Russia investigation. And they could argue that U.S. v. Nixon only requires them to disclose documents for which the special counsel can provide a “demonstrated, specific need” in a “pending criminal trial.” Requesting information for matters not directly tied to an already-filed indictment could fall short.

And whereas Tribe and others discount the difference between a trial subpoena for tapes and a grand jury subpoena for testimony, the distinction seems important to the Court’s own analysis in U.S. v. Nixon for at least two reasons. First, in 1974, the Court stressed that the president’s tapes were to be screened first by the trial judge in camera—that is, secretly—so as to minimize the risk of improper disclosure. Could today’s justices feel confident that presidential testimony would not be leaked by someone, no matter Mueller’s directives or promises? Second, the Court stressed that merely divulging tapes would not expose Nixon to a risk of “being harassed by vexatious and unnecessary subpoenas” by Jaworski or others. Again, could today’s Court feel so confident that Trump would not face a flurry of subpoenas? The ex-New York attorney general’s myriad legal actions against Trump—more than 100, as of last December—suggest otherwise, especially concerning at a moment when the president’s diplomatic and national-security burdens are every bit as sensitive as Nixon’s foreign-policy responsibilities in 1974.

And any president’s preparation for testimony before a grand jury on the broad range of topics allegedly proposed by Mueller’s team would be far more burdensome than simply requiring Nixon to hand over some tapes. The proc­ess of preparing for and giving sworn testimony under questioning by a special counsel who has already indicted Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and George Papadopoulos would be time-consuming and arduous.

If Mueller does subpoena the president’s testimony, we should expect a more nuanced outcome than the unqualified victory envisaged by Trump’s most confident critics. Perhaps Mueller would succeed in compelling the president to testify, but only if his questions are tailored narrowly, clearly justified in terms of his investigation’s specific needs, and constructed to minimize their impact on U.S. diplomatic or military sensitivities. It is worth remembering that, as former U.S. attorney Harry Litman observed recently on Lawfare, “no sitting president has ever been forced to provide testimony as a target of a criminal investigation.” Bill Clinton received a subpoena from independent counsel Kenneth Starr, but Starr eventually withdrew it after the two sides struck a voluntary deal for limited testimony.

* * *

Which brings us to Clinton v. Jones, the Supreme Court’s 1997 decision rejecting a presidential claim of immunity from civil suits while in office. Like Nixon, Clinton asserted a categorical privilege: “temporary immunity from civil damages litigation arising out of events that occurred before he took office,” in “all but the most exceptional cases.” Again, the Court rejected the absolutist approach. And again, it took care to define its ruling very specifically rather than giving prosecutors a blank check to subpoena presidents. Citing previous presidents’ cooperation with civil lawsuits, the Court reaffirmed that executive privilege cannot “bar every exercise of jurisdiction over the President” (emphasis added), but stressed that the courts must be cognizant of—and even give “utmost deference” to—the executive’s own responsibilities.

The justices struck a careful balance in 1997: “The high respect that is owed to the office of the Chief Executive, though not justifying a rule of categorical immunity, is a matter that should inform the conduct of the entire proceeding, including the timing and scope of discovery.” It predicted that its decision, “if properly managed by the District Court,” would not “occupy any substantial amount of [President Clinton’s] time.”

In hindsight, the Court’s confidence can be justly mocked. But regardless of whether today’s Court would emulate the Clinton-era Court’s naïveté, we expect that the justices would at least announce a similar rule: If the president shows that the special counsel’s requests, and the threat of other actions against the president, “could conceivably hamper the President in conducting the duties of his office,” then the lower courts should “manage those actions in such fashion (including deferral of trial) that interference with the President’s duties would not occur.”

Again, the Court’s cautious approach in Clinton v. Jones seems to point towards its strictly managing Mueller’s demands for answers, as well as managing other legal proceedings brought against Trump. Justice Stephen Breyer was particularly sensible of these risks in 1997, which he stressed in an emphatic concurring opinion, and one trusts that he would reason from those concerns if the issue returned to the Court today.

Thus, when critics assert, as Loyola law professor Jessica Levinson recently did to Vox, that “I consider this case all but settled by Clinton v. Jones,” it is less careful analysis than wish fulfillment.

The facts of the current situation, moreover, might well reinforce the justices’ appreciation for the need to carefully calibrate rules governing the president’s susceptibility to legal process.

First, they will be aware that the risk of being indicted by a zealous prosecutor for perjury, even for what might in fact have been an unintentional misstatement of fact, is so great that criminal defense lawyers now routinely advise clients to invoke the Fifth Amendment. The president’s habit of telling bald-faced lies on an almost daily basis would make grand jury testimony especially perilous before a special counsel who has already indicted multiple Trump subordinates. If the Court required President Trump to testify, it would be setting the stage for an unprecedented and politically explosive invocation of his Fifth Amendment right not to testify.

Second, the justices may recognize that Trump’s recent statements and actions suggest a willingness to use his pardon power broadly, to preemptively immunize people within Mueller’s crosshairs—perhaps including his own self. Again, the justices might well act to avoid such a cataclysm.

Neither of us relish taking such considerations into account. The fact that Trump is a persistent liar and that there is genuine risk that he would wield the pardon power as a weapon of self-protection are sad reflections on the character of this president. The Court’s decisions in the Nixon and Clinton cases were emphatically contextual, and so likely would be any Trump-related decision. Such considerations might well incline at least some on the Court to see a decision to order Trump to answer Mueller’s questions as more dangerous to the president’s ability to do his job than anyone foresaw at the time of the Nixon and Clinton decisions.

Again, a Supreme Court win for Trump does not seem to us likely, but it is far from impossible. And a split decision, with two or more justices siding with the president, might embolden Trump. The president might simply defy the order and direct U.S. marshals not to enforce it, setting up a risky constitutional standoff between the executive and judicial branches.

The president may also be immune to an actual indictment while in office, as the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded during both the Nixon and Clinton years. (Other experts strongly disagree.) To the extent that Mueller’s questions are aimed at the president’s own conduct, the Court might conclude that presidential immunity to indictment renders such questions superfluous and thus an unjustified burden on the president. It would further, probably, be deemed improper for a criminal investigator to gather evidence solely for possible use in a House impeachment proceeding.

* * *

For all these reasons, we doubt that the justices would without qualification order Trump to answer every question Mueller wishes to ask. The Court might well put a time limit on any questioning, which Trump could use to run out the clock before the prosecutors get to many of the questions that they want to ask. The president’s latest defense lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, suggested such a limit in his May 2 interview on Fox News: “Some people have talked about a possible 12-hour interview. If it happens, that’s not going to happen—I’ll tell you that. It’d be, max, two to three hours around a narrow set of questions.”

And the justices might limit the subject matter that Mueller could ask about. The president’s lawyers would surely argue that many or even most of Mueller’s proposed questions, especially those inquiring into Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey, should be ruled out if Mueller cannot give the Court a “demonstrated, specific need” for answers to those questions—the standard in U.S. v. Nixon.

Trump would no doubt tie his objections to questions about the firing of Comey—and threats to fire Mueller and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein—to his power under Article II of the Constitution to fire subordinates. It is so broad, some serious legal experts argue, that even an allegedly corrupt motive, such as firing a subordinate to squelch revelations of misconduct, cannot be obstruction of justice or any other crime.

This is a hotly contested topic. Scholars such as Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law in Houston have detailed the argument that the exercise of a core presidential power cannot be obstruction of justice. While others emphatically disagree, some lawyers who are no fans of Trump also caution that it might be unwise for the Court “to demand that any president account to a prosecutor for his intent in making a personnel change,” as William Taylor, a respected criminal-defense lawyer, told us. Taylor added that a “president might have good reason to fire a law enforcement official who persists in an investigation the president thinks is improper or politically motivated.” Indeed, even Comey himself noted to Trump during an early 2017 meeting “that he could fire me any time he wished.” Giuliani has raised this point in public.

In addition, there remains the controversy surrounding the propriety of the investigation itself. Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein’s extremely broad original grant of power to Mueller—to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump”—has been assailed as improperly reaching beyond suspected crimes of the Trump campaign and beyond the terms of the Justice Department regulation that Rosenstein invoked. U.S. District Judge T. S. Ellis told Mueller aide Michael Dreeben during a May 4 hearing on the charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort: “If I look at the indictment, none of that information has anything to do with links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals [or] anything the special prosecutor is authorized to investigate.” “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud,” Ellis added. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment or whatever.”

The composition of the special counsel’s team and the exposure of private anti-Trump comments by two former members have additionally spurred critics to accuse it of partisan bias. Might some justices share that suspicion? And is this the context in which the Court would take the unprecedented step of granting a special counsel unqualified power to subpoena the president’s testimony?

As the Supreme Court showed in the Nixon and Clinton cases, it knows well how to protect the president’s privileges and responsibilities without putting him above the law.

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The December 1 guilty plea of former national security adviser Michael Flynn will have only intensified Trump’s fears that the special counsel is focused on his family. Trump’s lawyers continue to claim that the president has nothing to fear from Mueller, but on December 3, Christopher Ruddy went on ABC’s This Week and said, “Robert Mueller poses an existential threat to the Trump presidency.” Ruddy heads the conservative media outlet Newsmax and is a close Trump confidant. Back in June, just after visiting the White House, he claimed on the PBS NewsHour that the president was “weighing” firing Mueller. Trump and his aides never explicitly disputed the claim, and proxies like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh called for Mueller’s firing at the same time.

Flynn admitted lying to the FBI—a federal crime—about his phone conversations last December 29 with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He falsely denied that he had talked to Kislyak about Russia’s refraining from responding to the sanctions being imposed by the Obama administration and about help with delaying or defeating a pending U.N. Security Council resolution about Israel’s settlements program. In his plea agreement, Flynn promised to cooperate fully with the special counsel.

Signs that Jared Kushner may be next in Mueller’s sights include reports that he was involved in telling Flynn what to say to Kislyak about the sanctions and was the “very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team” who, according to the court papers, “directed Flynn to contact officials from foreign governments, including Russia, to learn where each government stood on the resolution and to influence those governments to delay the vote or defeat the resolution.” Mueller’s investigators interviewed Kushner last month about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian government and a December 2016 Kushner-Flynn-Kislyak meeting.

Trump can certainly pardon Kushner if it came to it—and Don Jr.—but experts disagree on whether a president can constitutionally pardon himself. A self-pardon would provoke a bigger backlash and louder clamor for impeachment than any effort to fire Mueller. Trump seems unlikely to go the self-pardon route before the waning days of his administration. It is groundwork for firing Mueller that many think is being laid.

Since May, Trump has repeatedly trashed the criminal investigation into his campaign’s suspected collusion with Russia as a “witch hunt,” a “made-up story,” and a “hoax.” In recent days, conservative media outlets and politicians and various Trump allies have also begun asserting that Mueller and the FBI are biased against Trump and that they, along with the Justice Department, have dodged subpoenas by congressional Republicans that would have turned up such discrediting documents as anti-Trump texts from a top FBI investigator on the Mueller probe, Peter Strzok. (Adding to the conspiracy theories is that Strzok was previously one of the top figures in the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server.) Mueller removed Strzok from his team last summer to avoid accusations of partisan bias. But the suspicions among Trump supporters are growing. In its lead editorial on December 5, the Wall Street Journal claimed that the special counsel “is too conflicted to investigate the FBI and should step down in favor of someone more credible.” The same day, Fox News’s Sean Hannity, one of the most vehement critics in the media of Trump’s perceived enemies, called Mueller “a disgrace to the American justice system” and said his team was “corrupt, abusively biased, and political.”

Flynn’s plea bargain and cooperation with Mueller suggest the possibility that the special counsel is developing allegations of criminality—such as complicity in Flynn’s alleged lies to the FBI—against figures at or near the highest levels of the Trump transition.

Trump fired Flynn as his national security adviser on February 13. The purported reason was Flynn’s false statement to Vice President Mike Pence that he had not discussed the sanctions with Kislyak in December. But Flynn’s “resignation” did not come until after the Washington Post had reported his discussion with Kislyak and not until 17 days after acting attorney general Sally Yates had warned White House counsel Don McGahn—who in turn told Trump—that Flynn had lied to Pence and was vulnerable to blackmail by Russia. Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, has admitted that the president knew by late January that Flynn’s account of the Kislyak interview to the FBI had probably been false.

On February 14, Trump had an Oval Office meeting with FBI director James Comey. According to Comey’s sworn testimony (which Trump has contradicted), the president said to him: “I hope you can see your way to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy.”

Trump fired Comey in May and later told Russian officials in an Oval Office meeting that this had relieved “great pressure” from the Russia investigation. On December 3, Trump touched off renewed accusations of obstruction of justice when he tweeted that he had fired Flynn because “he lied . . . to the FBI” as well as to Pence. This amounted to an admission that Trump knew Flynn had lied to the FBI before the president’s alleged request to Comey about “letting Flynn go” and before Trump said in a February 16 news conference: “I don’t think [Flynn] did anything wrong.” Bizarrely, defense lawyer Dowd later claimed that he had drafted the self-damaging tweet for Trump.

* *

If Trump comes to feel threatened enough to try to fire Mueller and weather the backlash, he will find it much trickier as a legal matter than it was to fire Comey.

Comey served at Trump’s pleasure. But Mueller was appointed by acting attorney general Rod Rosenstein under a 1999 Justice Department regulation that limits the president’s power to remove him. (Attorney general Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the Russia investigation.) The regulation provides that a special counsel can be removed only by the attorney general— not the president—and only “for misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause, including violation of Departmental policies.”

Mueller is also protected by a much older general principle—reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 2010—that when Congress has empowered a department head, such as the attorney general, to appoint his own subordinates, “it is ordinarily the department head, rather than the President, who enjoys the power of removal.” The president clearly could order Rosenstein to fire Mueller and could claim that the special counsel has a conflict of interest because of his longstanding, close professional relationship with Comey. But Rosenstein knew about that relationship and saw no conflict when he appointed Mueller. And he has assured Congress that absent “good cause,” he would refuse a Trump order to fire Mueller.

Such a refusal would end with Rosenstein resigning or being fired by the president. In that event, under the order of succession provided by Congress, associate attorney general Rachel Brand would become acting attorney general. It’s quite possible that Brand, an experienced Washington hand, would also refuse to fire Mueller. Trump could then proceed on down the Justice Department chain of command in the hope of finding someone willing to violate the regulation and fire Mueller—and, in the process, to do grave damage to his or her own professional reputation. This embarrassing charade would amplify calls for Trump’s impeachment.

Trump’s other option, perhaps better suited to his self-image, would be to tell Mueller personally, “You’re fired.”

But that, too, would be contrary both to the 1999 regulation and to the principle that only department heads can fire their own subordinates. Trump might avoid the first problem (but not the second), noted Neal Katyal in an op-ed for the Washington Post, if he ordered the special-counsel regulations repealed and then fired Mueller himself. (Katyal headed the Justice Department working group that wrote the 1999 regulation.)

Putting aside the resulting outcry and impeachment efforts in Congress, would that be the end of the criminal investigation? Legal experts have offered differing opinions.

Marty Lederman, a Georgetown law professor who held a high-level position in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President Obama, stressed on the Just Security blog that “the President himself cannot remove Mueller.” He cited both the principle that only department heads may remove their own appointees and the 1999 regulation, dismissing as weak the argument that the Constitution empowers the president to abrogate the regulation and then fire Mueller.

There’s a Watergate parallel here, with the famous firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox—the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973. Lederman suggested that the reason “why Richard Nixon did not try to personally remove Archibald Cox” was that the president knew he lacked the power to do so.

Instead, Nixon ordered attorney general Elliot Richardson to fire Cox; Richardson refused and resigned; this made deputy attorney general William Ruckelshaus the acting attorney general; he, too, refused and resigned; and finally solicitor general Robert Bork, the next in the line of succession as acting attorney general—who unlike Richardson and Ruckelshaus had not promised Congress that he would protect the special prosecutor—fired Cox. Bork then appointed Leon Jaworski to replace him.

Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law argued on the Lawfare blog that, contrary to Lederman, Trump has the constitutional authority to “revoke the regulation itself and in so doing obliterate Mueller’s whole office. . . . The protection against removal is ultimately a political one, not a regulatory or legal one.”

Blackman argued that the detailed history showed that Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Bork all assumed that Nixon had the constitutional power to fire Cox personally, despite the regulation then in force that Cox could be fired only by the attorney general and only for “extraordinary impropriety.” That said, Blackman acknowledged that to the public at large, “the termination of Mueller would amount to an admission of guilt and obstruction of justice.”

Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush, wrote on Lawfare that there are “good constitutional arguments” both for and against the idea that Trump has the power to “blow through the regulation and fire Mueller himself.”

In any event, thought Goldsmith, if Trump did that, “I would predict massive resignations within the DOJ and White House. . . . Congress would rise up quickly to stop the President, and the pressure on the cabinet would be enormous as well. If I am naïve in thinking this, then we are indeed in trouble.”

Amidst the political firestorm, would Mueller take Trump to court to challenge the legality of the firing? The answer is unclear. But he would be strongly urged by many colleagues and friends that it was his duty to the rule of law to fight Trump in court—especially if Trump tried to fire Mueller’s entire staff, leaving allegations of presidential criminality hanging over the nation with no resolution in sight.

Purely as a legal matter, a Mueller lawsuit would get little help from the 1999 regulation, which states that it “may not be relied upon to create any rights, substantive or procedural, enforceable [in court] by any person or entity.” In other words, the regulation is not judicially enforceable. Mueller might thus base any lawsuit mainly on the older principle that because an attorney general appointed Mueller, only an attorney general can remove him.

* *

The high stakes of any Mueller-Trump lawsuit, together with the legal uncertainties debated by Lederman, Blackman, and Goldsmith, might well propel the case quite rapidly through the federal district and appeals courts and into the Supreme Court.

It could lead to a historic decision, reminiscent of United States v. Nixon in 1974 or Clinton v. Jones in 1997. The former ordered President Nixon, by an 8-0 vote, to turn his White House tapes over to Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski and doomed his presidency. The latter, a unanimous decision in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, rejected Clinton’s claim that he could not be sued while he was president. It would indirectly force him to testify about what he did with Monica Lewinsky and lead, in turn, to his impeachment in 1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice.

Fueling the detailed arguments in a Mueller-Trump battle would be a longstanding dispute pitting conservative scholars and jurists who believe the Constitution empowers the president to fire any federal prosecutor or other executive branch official at will against more liberal jurists who see restrictions on the firing power as essential to presidential accountability.

In a third historic win for champions of presidential accountability, the Court upheld in Morrison v. Olson the 1978 Ethics in Government Act provision sharply restricting presidential power to remove court-appointed “independent counsels.” (The 1988 decision was 7-1, with the late Antonin Scalia offering a passionate dissent.) But the 1978 provision lapsed in 1999, amid a bipartisan consensus that it had created incentives for overzealous prosecution. The 1999 Justice Department regulation under which Rosenstein appointed Mueller is less potent. But the regulation is not nothing. And the Court might reinvigorate, as a valuable check on presidential arbitrariness, the principle that a chief executive who cannot persuade his own political appointees to fire a subordinate may not go over their heads and do the firing himself.

How might the Court rule in a Mueller-Trump case?

It would not be surprising to see the four more liberal justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan) side against Trump. It’s also quite possible, if less likely, that all four of the more conservative justices (John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch) would side with Trump. That would leave Justice Anthony Kennedy in his accustomed role of casting the deciding vote. Not many Kennedy-watchers would bet on his siding with Trump.

But it’s also quite possible that the justices—especially if they were closely divided on the question—might dust off the so-called “political question doctrine” to rule that the Court should leave the fate of the Mueller investigation, and its impact on the Trump presidency, to the political process. That would of course include the impeachment process, which would be well under way by the time any Trump effort to fire Mueller came before the Supreme Court.

* *

Robert Mueller has surely long since begun drafting the confidential report that the 1999 regulation requires him to provide at the conclusion of his work to the acting attorney general. Political pressure will likely see it then shared with Congress and the public.

If it comes down to little more than ordering or encouraging Flynn to lie to the FBI, and gratefully welcoming Russian hacking and dissemination of dirt about Hillary, then the Mueller investigation will probably end with no blockbuster prosecutions and the calls for impeachment will fade.

If, on the other hand, the evidence revealed by Mueller and congressional investigators were ugly enough to turn even most Republicans against Trump, he might be on his way out, by impeachment and removal. Then it would be time to ponder the constitutionality of the self-pardon.

Stuart Taylor Jr., a Washington, D.C.-based writer and lawyer, is the coauthor, with KC Johnson, of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities .

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