Visiting American Bar Association head Hilarie Bass sits down with the ‘Post’.
American Bar Association president Hilarie Bass, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post, took a variety of strong stances regarding the probe of President Donald Trump’s election campaign, defining treason and factual accuracy and the state of the US and Israeli legal systems.
Regarding the investigations of Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Bass said that regardless of the outcomes of the probes, the message is “the threat that no one is above the law. That anyone who crosses the line with be prosecuted. This is also a critical tenet of democracy.”
Bass, who also co-chairs the 2,000-lawyer Greenberg Traurig firm, said that “both in Israel and in the US, as far as ongoing investigations of the senior political officer, that is something unique to democracy because under the rule of law… the law applies equally to everyone.”
“In a democracy, it is important… whether, regarding senior political officials… an independent prosecutor has unfettered independence to determine whether laws have been broken,” she said.
At the same time, the president of the ABA, which boasts more than 400,000 lawyer-members, was less clear about what Trump’s fate would be in the theoretical scenario where US Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller finds that he obstructed justice.
President Richard Nixon was on track to be “impeached for obstruction of justice… the question is whether this Congress would take action if there was evidence of obstruction. That story remains to be told. In large part that depends on what the special prosecutor concludes,” Bass said, though she hinted it could be difficult for Congress to resist a recommendation from a prosecutor as respected as Mueller.
As reported by The Jerusalem Post