No he doesn't. Neither did Trump.
Over the weekend some conservative commentators pushed back on my tweet-claim that President Trump has “threaten[ed] DOJ/FBI over and over in gross violation of independence norms.” The Justice Department and its component the FBI “aren’t independent, nor should they be,” argued Sean Davis of...
www.lawfareblog.com
When Trump wanted Mueller gone last summer, he did not issue the order himself, as the unitary executive theory would suggest. He told White House Counsel Don McGahn to make it happen, but McGahn “
refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead.” McGahn would have had to
ask DOJ to dismiss Mueller because the relevant statutes and regulations gave the control over Mueller’s termination to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, not Trump. Rosenstein, in turn, is hemmed in by law and especially regulations in his ability to fire Mueller. The situation never got this far, but Trump could have fired Rosenstein if Rosenstein had failed to carry out an order to fire Mueller or to alter the relevant regulations. And yet the need to go to DOJ to accomplish these acts, and the political costs of having to fire an insubordinate DOJ official (and possibly the White House Counsel), are checks on the President and a form of DOJ independence. (Compare the Saturday Night Massacre, where it took two high-profile DOJ resignations to terminate Cox, which only resulted in the appointment of an equally assiduous Special Prosecutor, Leon Jaworski.)