(Credit: Daily Beast)
“U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told President Donald Trump last week that he is not a target of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, according to a source familiar with the probe.
After the April 12 conversation with Rosenstein, Trump told advisers that he was not inclined to seek the ouster of either man since he is not the target of Mueller’s probe.”
(…) “Under Justice Department policy, a target is someone who is believed to have committed a crime and is likely to face charges, while a subject is someone whose conduct is within the scope of an investigation, said Lisa Kern Griffin, a former federal prosecutor and a professor at Duke University School of Law.
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that Trump is a subject of the probe.
Griffin said the assurance from Rosenstein is not significant because the president could yet become a target of the investigation.
“It is possible to progress from being a subject to being a target if the necessary substantive and structural support emerges later,” she said.” (Read more: Reuters, April 19, 2018)