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Back in October 2017, Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman professor of law and leadership at Harvard Law School, penned a short speculative essay about What should happen if the unthinkable happens — that is, what steps the U.S. government should take if the investigation by Robert Mueller, head of the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, should find specifically damaging evidence about the President regarding a conspiracy with the Russians to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The gist of Lessig's piece was that in the case of a tainted presidential election, the U.S. Constitution provides no mechanism for holding a new election or otherwise installing the proper winner in office — the most that could happen under current law would be for the sitting President to be impeached and removed from office (or resign), with the Vice President (or someone else in the line of succession) taking his place: Lessig thereupon provided a possible (if far-fetched) scenario under which losing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could still become president under existing law: Lessig's essay was picked up by Newsweek magazine, and as the law professor noted in a preface he added to the original, their reference to his piece prompted some rather vitriolic reaction: Newsweek revisted Lessig's essay in January 2018, and the author pointed out that he was not declaring that President Trump had been part of some conspiracy to steal the election, nor was he asserting that the scenario he described for putting Hillary Clinton in office would (or should) happen; he was merely speculating about what could happen in one very specific circumstance: Nonetheless, some dubious web sites pushed out clickbait headlines inaccurately blaring to viewers that: Newsweek Reports That Trump Will Be Impeached and Replaced by Hillary Clinton: But Newsweek neither reported that President Trump would be impeached, nor that, if so, he would be replaced by Hillary Clinton — they simply offered one person's hypothetical musings about how those events could occur (even though it was admittedly highly unlikely they ever would).
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