As I was waking up this morning, I was thinking about impeachment. Specifically, the question of exactly which of Trump’s actions could be considered “high crimes and misdemeanors,” enabling Congress to impeach and successfully convict him and remove him from office. Over the course of at least an hour, the following list organized itself. For a while, I attempted to provide links to each of my claims, but the number of claims started to rise exponentially as I proceeded. All of these claims have been documented in the mainstream media and are not too hard to find via Google.
The first class of crimes that arose in my mind were in the class of emoluments, that is using the office of the president for the sake of one’s own profit, explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. The fact that he has not put his business and investments in a blind trust (instead of handing it all over to his sons, as he has done) is a clear violation. The Trump International Hotel in Washington, through leasing federal property, does double duty in violating the Constitution. It gets even worse when profit through foreign dealing is considered. Trump threatened China with a trade war until after the Chinese provided a $500 million loan to a Trump property in Indonesia. I’m sure that there are many others of these sorts of deals, either reported or unreported, which I just haven’t been able to keep track of.
As one looks further into these (cough) questionable foreign deals, one discovers it bleeds into the next category of impeachable offenses, that is, treason. The foundation of the whole Russian conspiracy was Trump’s desire to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Deal-making on this venture continued throughout the election campaign and well into the first year of Trump’s White House occupancy. The ongoing deal-making during the campaign and after was illegal, and knowledge of this compromises Trump as it gives the Russians leverage to make Trump do what they want him to do (and he has been doing it). Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, there has been all kinds of deal-making between the Trump clan and the Saudis, with results creating the horror that is the war in Yemen, as well as the torturous murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now Trump is in a rush to provide the Saudis nuclear secrets, in violation of national security rules, in order to profit off of that. The profits of Trump come before the national interests of the US, even if it benefits other nations whose objectives are not the same as ours, and in the case of the Russians, virtually diametrically opposed.
Of course, once you open the trap door to the Russians, the hole goes ever deeper. The prosecution of Paul Manafort and the indictment of Roger Stone now make it clear that there was communication and coordination and cooperation between the Trump campaign, Russian intelligence, and Wikileaks in the theft and release of DNC e-mails. Given that Trump asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s lost e-mails on the day the DNC was first hacked, it strains credulity to think that Trump didn’t know about this. Russian intelligence orchestrated a complex and effective social media campaign of trolls and bots aimed at either swaying voters on the fence toward Trump, or discouraging Democratic and progressive voters from voting for Hillary. There was a quid pro quo: dropping the sanctions the Obama Administration had placed on Russia for their incursion into Ukraine. The one substantial modification to the Republican platform that the Trump campaign wanted before the Republican National Convention was to drop exactly those sanctions. In addition, there were the many, many Trump campaign officials who had contacts with Russian government officials and oligarchs throughout the campaign: Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and so on. Then there was the Trump Tower meeting, where Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr. met with Russian lawyer and government agent Natalia Veselnetskaya, as well as other Russians, in a purported discussion about “Russian adoptions,” (clearly a false cover) while Trump Sr. was just one floor away. Everywhere you turn there appear to be Russians involved in the campaign, and very important ones at that. There was the visit to the Oval Office by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, where Trump shared methods intelligence, damaging our ability to collect information. There were, what, three meetings between Trump and Putin where there were either no American witnesses, or the translator was not allowed to take notes? Trump’s actions on the European stage have done severe damage to our relations with European democracies in a way that benefits the Russians over the US, and he has unilaterally ordered a withdrawal of troops from Syria, again, in a move that benefits Russia and not the US. Trump has stated he trusts the word of Putin over the word of US intelligence agencies. The only logical conclusion to draw from this series of actions is that Trump himself, as well as most (if not all) of his close family, are Russian agents. No wonder the intelligence agencies were, and continue to freak out. This is treason, plain and simple.
This brings us to obstruction of justice. He even admitted that his firing of James Comey was to bring an end to the Russia investigation during a live TV interview. We have learned that Trump’s actions in early 2017 after Comey’s firing so alarmed intelligence officials that they began investigations into the likelihood that Trump was, in fact, a Russian asset. This set in motion the Mueller investigation. From its start, Trump as tried to end this investigation while discrediting those conducting it. He has threatened firing Mueller multiple times. The principal reason he fired AG Jeff Sessions is because Sessions recused himself from the investigation, making it impossible for Sessions to follow Trump’s order to fire Mueller. He has claimed the motivations for the investigation are purely political, calling the group that consists mostly of lifelong Republicans “17 angry Democrats.” Probably the words he has tweeted most since he’s been in the White House are “NO COLLUSION!” as though that would convince us he was telling the truth. He has attempted to tamper witnesses (threatening Michael Cohen’s father-in-law, for example) in order to prevent evidence of illegal activities from coming to light. He has tried to put an ally in charge of the SDNY investigation into his businesses, which was not possible because that ally (properly) recused himself from that investigation. All of these actions are clearly meant to obstruct the process of the investigations into his various nefarious activities.
Being racist is not an impeachable offense, but providing encouragement to violent white supremacists who seek to establish a racist Christian totalitarian regime in this country, essentially overthrowing the Constitution, ought to be. It seems to me to be a violation of his constitutional oath. Most monstrous has been his policy on refugees, separating children from their parents and placing them in cages, and not making any effort to keep track of which children belong to which parents. This has caused months-long separations between very young children and their parents causing possible long-term emotional and psychological damage to the children. The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t even know how many children were separated from their parents, or where they might be. This is the behavior of Nazis. (Let’s go full Godwin here.) This violates international human rights policies and the bounds of human decency. Like G. W. Bush’s torture regime, for me, this has changed my perception of what this country is and has become.
He has threatened and insulted the press and the media for telling the truth or making fun of him. His intimations of violence have real consequences. (Recall the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue, where Trump-enabled conspiracy theories served to goad the shooter to act.) Roger Stone’s posting of a photo of his judge with the image of crosshairs could have resulted in his being sent to prison before his trial; surely the sorts of threats of violence coming out of the Oval Office ought also to have consequences.
I am aware that not every act I’ve listed is impeachable, though I would submit that these acts are unbecoming of a president. I’m certain I’ve missed quite a few impeachable acts, of which you’re welcome to remind me in the comments. The disgrace of the Republican Party is that the full list of Trump’s heinous acts is not enough to move them to defy him, and to support his removal from office. When this ordeal is finished, history will hold them all in contempt.
Well, that leaves me all ranted out. The comments are below the fold. But first, we have a message from our sponsor:
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