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On 13 May 2017, Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor (both of whom have appointed themselves citizen investigators on the topic of Russia's meddling into U.S. political affairs) made the explosive claim that a sealed indictment has been issued against President Donald Trump. In a blog post on the web site Patribotics.com, they reported: Initially, Taylor reported on Twitter that the indictment had been issued by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court: This aspect of the claim is demonstrably not true. New York University law professor Christopher Jon Sprigman told us in a phone interview that the FISA court exists for one purpose only, and that is to grant surveillance warrants: Taylor later backtracked, noting he had erred in claiming a FISA court had issued an indictment, and added more detail, saying the story is based on two sources: When asked about the story, Mensch sent us an e-mailed response that seemed to contradict Taylor: Some attorneys seemed doubtful that an indictment against the president had been issued, in part because in 1973 during the Watergate scandal, the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) determined that a president is immune to criminal prosecution while in office: In 2000, Randolph Moss, assistant attorney general for the OLC concluded that opinion was still valid, with the caveat that it hasn't been adjudicated in court: Sprigman pointed out that five months after President Richard Nixon was named as an unindicted co-conspirator by prosecutors, he resigned from office before impeachment proceedings could be resolved. On 14 May 2017, Taylor updated his claim to say the indictment was coming out of Eastern District of Virginia-under Dana Boente. Trump, Manafort and Flynn-among others under sealed indictment. We asked the spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern Virginia District whether this was true. He declined to comment. Even an opponent of the president didn't buy into the indictment rumor. Seth Abramson, an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire who used to work as a public defense attorney (and often rails against Trump on Twitter), told us subpoenas issued to associates of Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, as reported by CNN on 10 May 2017, indicated that the investigation was still in its early stages: On 17 May 2017, a week after President Trump fired FBI director James Comey amid the Bureau's investigation into whether Trump's campaign colluded with Russia's election interference, Newsweek published an analysis on the subject. Comey's firing has raised questions about obstruction of justice: Whether or not an indictment has been issued against the president remains unclear, because the blog post is so vague and the sources anonymous. But as Sprigman pointed out, in terms of the investigation into accusations of collusion with the Russian government between President Trump and his associates, the country is in terra incognita — uncharted land. While no one really knows for certain (or the ones who do aren't saying anything) legal experts are unconvinced an indictment has been made against Trump, because according to precedent, a sitting president would have to be fully impeached before being charged with a crime. It seems unlikely federal prosecutors would contradict the Department of Justice. But as Sprigman noted, the current situation defies precedent in many ways:
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