It may not be popular to say here, but it’s a truth we need to face. Even though I greatly respect Rep. Al Green, who has vowed to have an impeachment vote before Christmas, and my own House Rep. Maxine Waters, who in February said that “Trump is moving toward impeachment,” the moment for taking that ultimate step has not yet arrived.
Donald John Trump has done quite a bit to show that he’s completely unfit for office. He has made it clear that he’s a disgrace to our nation with his tendencies for authoritarian neo-fascism, nativistic bigotry, racism, white supremacy, neo-conferderalism, his blatant neglect of Puerto Rico, he and his staff’s callous attack on yet another Gold Star family, and his overall malignant narcissism. His various staff members may have stacked up a literal litany of serious crimes against the nation, from perjury to conspiracy, money laundering, and trading with the enemy. But as yet, definitive proof the he himself participated in those crimes—with the possible exception of obstruction of justice—remains lacking.
We’ve had a set of impressive electoral wins in Virginia and around the nation this week. We have good reason to gloat and to be proud that we can indeed reverse the slow slide in control of the state houses and the Congress we’ve suffered over the last decade.
But we aren’t there yet, and the opposition still remains wildly energized and motivated.
Friday, Nov 17, 2017 · 5:22:19 AM +00:00
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Frank Vyan Walton
One point on the emoluments clause which several have brought up — yes, its’ true Trump has violated it, but it’s also true that Congress rendered him exempt from it.
Since the moment President Donald Trump finished his oath of office on Friday, some ethics experts argue he’s been violating the Constitution.
The breach stems from the massive conflicts of interest between his presidency and his business empire. Trump has a huge stake in a real estate holding underwritten with a loan from the Chinese government. He has tens of millions of dollars riding on building projects in Saudi Arabia. Foreign diplomats have already admitted to spending money at his hotels to curry favor with the president.
Trump has said that the president is exempted from the federal conflict-of-interest regulations that usually bind elected officials — and he’s right about that.
So it’s somewhat difficult to build an impeachment case over something that Congress specifically allowed in the occupant of the White House.
As special counsel Robert Mueller continues his investigation and slowly tightens the noose around various Trumpian figures, starting with former Trump campagn chair Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates and now apparently moving on to former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his son, there is a growing chorus of those who argue that Mueller himself is the unfit one, and should be summarily thrown from office.
"I'm calling for Mr. Mueller's resignation or his firing" pic.twitter.com/rEpobJCn8V
— RepMattGaetz (@RepMattGaetz) November 8, 2017
Freshman Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) took to a nearly-deserted house floor Wednesday to demand Mueller end his investigations into conduct by President Donald Trump’s administration and 2016 campaign.
“We are at risk of a coup d’état in this country if we allow an unaccountable person with no oversight to undermine the duly-elected President of the United States,” Gaetz said. “And I would offer, that is precisely what is happening right now with the indisputable conflicts of interest that are present with Mr. Mueller and others at the Department of Justice.”
“I join my colleague, the gentleman from Arizona, in calling for Mr. Mueller’s resignation or his firing,” Gaetz continued.
“Moreover, we absolutely have to see the Department of Justice appoint a special counsel to look into the Clinton Foundation, the Uranium One deal and the FusionGPS dossier,” Gaetz suggested.
The Clinton Foundation, Uranium One, and the Fusion GPS dossier, yet again. These are there go-to arguments of deflection. It’s actually surprising that he didn’t bring up Benghazi and the “33,000 missing emails.”
No matter what the actual person occupying the Oval Office does right in front of us, and no matter what allegations (including openly confessing to sexual assault) are hurled his way, the move is always Clinton, Clinton, Clinton.
It doesn’t matter that Hillary wasn’t part of the Clinton Foundation until 2013, months after she had left the Department of State, and that she had no control or influence over the Uranium One decision, or any knowledge or involvement in the DNC decision to hire Fusion GPS after they had been dropped by the conservative website Washington Free Bacon.
Also, she isn’t the president.
Despite all that, there are those who argue that impeachment will lead to civil war, be they Alex Jones or Jim Bakker. And although we may be tempted to ignore their deluded prattle, the fact is that considering the level of cray cray that Trump tends to inspire, they probably aren’t completely wrong. If impeachment hits the floor of the House, there probably will be blood in the streets. Not every street, but some. If it hits the Senate, that bloodshed will grow—perhaps beyond Charlottesville, but probably not as bad as Las Vegas or Sutherland Springs. But that alone isn’t a valid reason to put the issue aside for now.
The thing is that impeachment shouldn't be used purely for partisan reasons. It shouldn’t be used just to damage one party over another, as was the case with Bill Clinton in the ‘90s.
Despite years of hunting him down, then-special prosecutor Kenneth Starr never actually had a legitimate case against Clinton because none of his alleged misstatements were material to the case at hand, and they weren’t likely to generate a true case of perjury or obstruction of justice. After $50 million spent and years of investigation, all that Bill Clinton ultimately suffered legally was an apology to the judge on the Paula Jones case and a temporary suspension of his law license. That’s it.
This is ultimately why Bill Clinton may have been impeached, but he wasn’t removed from office. And the fact of the matter is, if you’re not going to actually remove the threat and if you’re not going to have a conviction in the Senate, you aren’t really accomplishing anything. If that is all that gets done, then it is merely political, merely partisan. Impeachment isn’t the goal: removal is the goal.
The problem is we simply aren’t even going to get an impeachment vote in the House if a conviction in the Senate isn’t highly likely, and right now that’s simply not possible. Even if Democrats take the House and (even more unlikely) the majority in the Senate in 2018, this will still be the case since it requires 67 Senate votes for conviction and removal.
And particularly since Nancy Pelosi remains pretty much totally against it.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says if Democrats retake the House of Representatives in 2018, they should focus on unifying the country, not impeaching President Trump.
Pelosi: “If you’re talking about Impeachment, what are the facts that you would make a case on? What are the rules that he may have violated? If you don’t have that case, you’re just participating in more hearsay, and that’s not the basis of what we — the American people [need] — some stability in all this.
This is the time when he’s supposed to be having his honeymoon. What a marriage? His honeymoon, so we watch and see what he’s going to do — and it’s been, sloppy”
The idea of Trump in the White House, steering this nation into one guardrail of impropriety, incivility, and deluded self-rationalism into the next, and the next, is heinous. But Pelosi is absolutely right. Even though I’ve been meticulously documenting the case against Trump for months and we have lots of solid evidence and allegations against former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, Manafort, Gates, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, along with Sam Clovis, Flynn, Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, we don’t yet have concrete verified proof that Trump himself has committed high crimes or misdemeanors while in office.
Not yet, that is, beyond James Comey’s personal word that Trump demanded his loyalty and that he drop the case against Michael Flynn which was clearly obstruction of justice. But that simply isn’t enough by itself.
It’s clear that Trump has had an affinity for Russia for decades all the way to the 80’s when he first suggested that he could serve as a negotiator for Ronald Reagan and end the cold war in an hour. After he delt with multiple bankruptcies in his New Jersey casinos in the early 90’s he turned to Russian sources for financing ultimately selling and renting over $98 Million worth of property to various oligarchs, and even making a profit of more than $40 Million on the sale of one Palm Beach estate just two years after he bought it.
The core of the criminal case against Trump’s connections to Russia personally begins with the cybercrime of stealing the DNC emails beginning in 2015. We now know that George Papadopoulos was personally informed that the Russian had “thousands of Clinton’s emails” in April of 2016, months before the hack was confirmed by the Washington Post, and even before the hack of John Podesta’s emails had even taken place. We know that Papadopoulos, based on his guilty plea for lying to the FBI, stayed in contact with several Russians and even travelled to Moscow then informed several members of the Trump campaign of this, including Trump himself during a National Security meeting making the pitch that Trump should go to Moscow for a meeting with his contacts with the Kremlin — only to have that suggestion shut down by Jeff Sessions.
We know that all of them repeatedly lied about every bit of this. Some of them like Sessions, under oath. Papadoplous could have been charged with Conspiracy, Misprision of a Felony or Aiding and Abetting a Crime — but he wasn’t. They only charged him for lying about it, which suggests they gained his cooperation in order to file additional charges against his co-conspirators such as Manafort, and then they filed charges against Manafort which were specifically not about the campaign in order gain his co-operation in the larger conspiracy case. It’s likely that Flynn and his son are dangling on the same hook and will be hit for their various efforts at money laundering and conspiracy to kidnap a Turkish cleric for $15 Million, but not yet for their actions in the campaign.
Once Papadopoulos was informed of Russia’s cybercrime he and anyone he informed had a positive duty to inform the FBI or else become accessories after the fact to that crime. We don’t yet know how far that information spread to Manafort, Lewandowski and Gates, whether Trump was personally informed of the hack at that time, or whether his various actions in support of Russia, such as having JD Gordon spike the RNC’s pro-Ukraine plank, and multiple attempts by his staff including Flynn to have sanctions over Crimea dropped stem specifically from an effort to pay Russia back for the benefit that their hacks and influence campaign in his favor, or just from his general attitude of trying to be nice to Russia in order to meet his other goals involving North Korea, Syria and ISIS. Based on the information that has been revealed so far, it could be either and unfortunately that’s reasonable doubt.
There may be more information tying Trump’s actions and knowledge directly to the DNC hack which would explain his later actions such as personally dictating the first — and false — press release about Don Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer and former Russian intelligence operative over the Magnitski Act sanctions in exchange for additional political “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — but we don't have it.
Not yet.
Manafort and Flynn were both compromised as foreign agents working for Russia and Turkey respectively. Either one of them could potentially provide the key to whether Trump was a knowing and willing participant in a conspiracy to gain Russia’s help during the election in exchange for favors lifting their sanctions or not but neither has provided that information so far. All of this is why it’s critical that the Mueller investigation continue forward, to answer these questions, gather this evidence and provide these facts for better or for worse.
Without conclusive evidence no articles of impeachment based on what we now know would even get out of committee, let alone pass the House floor and get into the Senate. And barring some significant revelations confirming Comey’s story, or perhaps directly linking Trump to the mass of corruption surrounding those in his campaign, staff, and cabinet, we still won’t have enough to convict in the Senate—not even with Democratic majorities in both Houses.
But that doesn’t mean we might not eventually get there.
Impeachment and removal is a steep mountain to climb and it should be for good reason, which is why a president has never been removed. We’re partway along the ascent at this point and the summit is far above us, but it’s not completely out of reach.
We have to understand that this should only be done for the good of the nation. Not to make us feel better, not for the benefit of the Democratic Party, and not for our own individual personal agenda items. It can’t just be because of his racism and xenophobia (which are reasons why he shouldn’t have been elected in the first place), or his incompetence, or his general malfeasance. It can’t be just because he has a disastrous tax plan, or even that he is a threat to the health care of millions, no matter how much that pains me to admit.
All of that is politics. It has to be for larger reasons than that.
It has to be because of his crimes against the nation. It has to be because he’s a clear and present danger to the country. I already believe that is the case, but it’s not up to me. Sadly, but also correctly, it’s ultimately up to at least a plurality of Republicans to come to that conclusion as well.
Not all of them, but some of them. And that’s where the real challenge exists: in making the case that our criticisms of Trump are not just partisan complaining. It’s not just sour grapes. It’s not just that we plain don’t like him, even though we obviously don’t. It’s not just that we disagree with his agenda, that we think he’ll fail the middle class while rewarding his fat cat cronies with trillions in tax payer funds. It has to be greater than all that.
It has to be because there’s literally no other choice. No more excuses. It has to be when even those with an endless fetish for all things #Hillary understand that Trump is far worse, and all these diversions are pale and inconsequential by comparison.
It has to be the absolute last resort.
We have to know that and make it plain. We have to have a rock solid case, then get a significant portion of the nation and a super majority of the Senate to do the unthinkable thing anyway because it simply has. to. be. done.
Or else we shouldn’t bother, not until we have what it requires to get the job done right. Swing for the fences, or go home.