Donald Trump will probably resign over a constitutional crisis caused by his son-in-law and son, a leading professor of law at Columbia University predicts.
Philip Bobbitt describes the President’s resignation as a consequence of his family members being prosecuted as “the likeliest possibility.”
Emails released by Donald Trump Jr show that he met with a Kremlin-based lawyer last summer, along with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, the Republican campaign’s then chairman.
Trump Jr’s response to being offered compromising information about Hillary Clinton ahead of the November election was to write “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”.
“Whatever [Trump’s] policy goals, it has long been clear that creating a dynasty — having destroyed the two reigning political dynasties in the last campaign — is his greatest objective,” Professor Bobbitt writes in the Evening Standard.
“Resignation, as remote as it seems right now, might well be a choice the President would make to save his children from prison, and himself from future prosecution.”
He says resignation would be the best way out of the “mess” created by allegations of collusion with Russia over interference in the US Presidential election.
Professor Bobbitt is a nephew of former President Lyndon B Johnson and a well-respected constitutional theorist.
He has acted as special adviser to every US President since his uncle, except Nixon, George W Bush, and now Trump.
He holds degrees from Princeton, Yale and Oxford.
In the article, Professor Bobbitt also suggests that if Trump were to be impeached rather than resigning of his own accord, this would happen not on the basis of the President receiving a bribe but of him having offered one.
“By determining that the head of the FBI, James Comey, wished to continue in his post, the President came perilously close to violating the constitution when he then stated that he would “think about it”, and raised the subject of Comey terminating the Russia investigation.
“Indeed, the offering of such a bribe formed one of the counts in Richard Nixon’s impeachment when it was alleged he offered a judicial promotion to a judge for favourable treatment in court.”
