Here's why 'even ardent Trump die-hards' won't be able to dismiss next Mueller charges: Legal expert

Harry Litman, a former deputy assistant attorney general and a constitutional law scholar at UC San Diego and UCLA, has written an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times laying out the evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller is about to drop a major bombshell on the Trump White House.

Litman notes that Mueller spent the first half of 2018 working on securing evidence to indict Russian nationals who interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and now he's turned his attention to whether any Americans worked to help them out.

"There are concrete indications that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is now about the business of laying down the last big pieces of the puzzle of Russian intervention in the 2016 election," he writes. "The actual charges are likely to be one of three criminal conspiracies: violating federal election laws, violating computer laws, or soliciting or receiving something of value from a foreign government. Charges, in other words, that not even the most ardent Trump die-hard could trivialize."

Litman then says that Mueller could even name Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in upcoming indictments if the evidence warrants it.

Litman points to a recent court filing Mueller's team made regarding former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who this past summer pledged to cooperate with investigators.

"Mueller requested a 10-day delay in submitting a status report on the ground that the later report would 'be of greater assistance' to the court’s work determining what sentence Manafort deserves," he explains. "Mueller’s request strongly suggests that we’ll soon see important additional information bearing on the value of Manafort’s cooperation, up to and including a potential role as a key witness in a soon-to-be-unveiled criminal case."

This suggests that Manafort could implicate some of the people in the Trump campaign who were "higher up in the food chain," Litman writes, which would only include "Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner or Trump himself."

Read the whole analysis here.