JONATHAN CHAIT
Impeachment and the Stone Verdict Show Trump Is
Surrounded by Criminals
But as Trump’s constant boil of rage attests,
those efforts have hardly failed. The legal ring surrounding him is
collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and
criminality.
Day two of the House impeachment hearings,
featuring Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, may have
appeared on the surface to focus on a sideshow. Yovanovitch was not directly
involved in Trump’s efforts to extort Ukraine for political advantage, the main
charge he faces. What her testimony instead accomplished was to put the lie to
Trump’s ludicrous defense that
he was pursuing an anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine — that his demands that
Kiev investigate his rivals were simply about cleaning the country up.
The lawyer for House Republicans asked Yovanovitch
to affirm that “the president has long-standing concerns about corruption in
the Ukraine.” Her response was savage: “That’s what he says.” Her testimony was
devoted to proving the hypocrisy of Trump’s claim. She testified how she had
worked in Ukraine to promote reform, how her efforts to do so alienated corrupt
oligarchs there, and how those oligarchs then worked in tandem with Rudy
Giuliani to foment a backlash against her. She explained that the fired
Ukrainian prosecutor that Trump praised to Ukraine’s president in a July phone
call was in fact totally corrupt.
Yovanovitch recounted that she learned of her
firing while presenting an award for a Ukrainian attacked for her reform
efforts, a completely fitting juxtaposition. Trump fired Yovanovitch because
she stood in the way of the corruption he and his allies were promoting. To
the extent corruption motivated Trump’s diplomatic posture in Ukraine, it was
that he wanted to encourage more of it.
During Yovanovitch’s testimony, a federal court
registered a guilty verdict on all seven counts for Trump’s adviser Roger
Stone. Stone’s crimes involved lying and covering up Trump’s awareness of
Democratic emails stolen by Russians. Rick Gates, Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign
chairman, told investigators that he personally witnessed a July 31, 2016,
phone call between Trump and Stone shortly after WikiLeaks published a tranche
of stolen emails. After hanging up with Stone, Trump announced more information
was on its way.
As president, Trump has enjoyed an advantage that
in his days in business he could only have dreamed of: He can pardon anybody,
giving him a powerful tool to induce his henchmen to avoid incriminating him.
The two figures in his campaign who most directly colluded with Russia, Paul
Manafort and Roger Stone, both refused to cooperate with Mueller. Whatever they
know about Trump’s full collusion with Russia’s campaign hacking will remain
secret, probably forever.
And yet, even if he pardons Manafort and Stone,
and all his other loyalists, the plain fact will remain that his inner circle
is marked by endemic criminality. In addition to his close adviser Stone,
his campaign manager (Manafort), his deputy campaign manager (Gates), his
lawyer (Michael Cohen), and his national security adviser (Michael Flynn) have
all been convicted of felonies. Trump may have persuaded his hard-core base
that all these convictions represent a fraudulent witch hunt. But outside the
Trump cult, which is not by itself large enough to win the election, being
surrounded by criminals is not an admired quality.
In all probability, the parade of charges is
probably not over. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is reportedly being
investigated for a number of alleged federal crimes, including bribing foreign
officials, conspiracy, violating federal campaign-finance laws, and failing to
register as a foreign agent. The Wall Street Journal reports today that federal
prosecutors are investigating whether Giuliani personally stood to profit from
a natural-gas shakedown run by his partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
Parnas and Fruman, two figures linked to the
Russian mob who have been arrested, were helping Giuliani run his off-the-books
diplomatic work in Ukraine. The benefit to Trump, who was not paying Giuliani
anything, was getting muscle on the ground who would get the Ukrainians to
understand a message regular diplomats had been too squeamish to convey
directly: that Trump wanted investigations of his enemies. But at the same time
they were doing this work for Trump, they were allegedly working to
get themselves a taste of the proceeds from the shakedown. Parnas and Fruman
were pushing Ukraine to give them some natural-gas importing business as a kind
of payoff, and using their connection to Trump as clout.
If Rudy himself was involved in the gas shakedown,
as the Journal story
suggests, it would be an even deeper form of corruption. Trump’s lawyer and
personal representative would have sent gangsters to extort Ukraine for Trump’s
political gain and his own profit. The false accusations Trump has hurled
against Biden are pale versions of the very real crimes Trump’s cronies have
tried to carry out.
American politics has rarely been a pristine affair.
Trump exploited widespread cynicism to indict the entire political
Establishment in hyperbolic terms as wholly corrupt, presenting himself as a
reformer from the outside. Surely nobody expected him to fulfill this promise
literally. Yet the full scale of his betrayal is staggering. Trump will
probably not become as the first president to be impeached and removed from
office, but he will go down in history as the most criminal president in
American history.
This Is No Ordinary Impeachment
By Andrew Sullivan
This is
not just an impeachment. It’s the endgame for Trump’s relentless assault
on the institutions, norms, and practices of America’s liberal democracy for
the past three years. It’s also a deeper reckoning. It’s about whether the
legitimacy of our entire system can last much longer without this man being
removed from office.
I’m
talking about what political scientists call “regime cleavage” — a decline in
democratic life so severe the country’s very institutions could lose legitimacy
as a result of it. It is described by one political scientist as follows: “a
division within the population marked by conflict about the foundations of the
governing system itself — in the American case, our constitutional democracy.
In societies facing a regime cleavage, a growing number of citizens and
officials believe that norms, institutions, and laws may be ignored, subverted,
or replaced.” A full-on regime cleavage is, indeed, an extinction-level event
for our liberal democratic system. And it is one precipitated by the man who is
supposed to be the guardian of that system, the president.
Let us
count the ways in which Trump has attacked and undermined the core legitimacy
of our democracy. He is the only candidate in American history who refused to
say that he would abide by the results of the vote. Even after winning the 2016
election, he still claimed that “millions” of voters — undocumented aliens —
perpetrated massive electoral fraud in the last election, and voted for his
opponent. He has repeatedly and publicly toyed with the idea that he could
violate the 22nd Amendment, and get elected for three terms, or more.
He
consistently described a perfectly defensible inquiry into Russia’s role in the
2016 election as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax,” demonizing Robert Mueller, even
as Mueller, in the end, couldn’t find evidence to support the idea of a
conspiracy with Russia (perhaps in part because Trump ordered no cooperation,
and refused to testify under oath). Trump then withheld release of the full
report, while his pliant attorney general distorted its content and wrongly
proclaimed that Trump had been entirely exonerated.
In
the current scandal over Ukraine, Trump is insisting that he did “nothing
wrong” in demanding that Ukraine announce investigations into Joe and Hunter
Biden, or forfeit desperately needed military aid. If that is the president’s
position — that he can constitutionally ask any other country to intervene on
his behalf in a U.S. election — it represents a view of executive power that is
the equivalent of a mob boss’s. It is best summed up in Trump’s own words:
Article 2 of the Constitution permits him to do “anything I want.”
We have
become so used to these attacks on our constitutional order that we fail to be
shocked by Trump’s insistence that a constitutional impeachment inquiry is a
“coup.” By any measure, this is an extraordinary statement, and itself an
impeachable offense as a form of “contempt for Congress.” We barely blink
anymore when a president refuses to cooperate in any way, demands his
underlings refuse to testify and break the law by flouting subpoenas, threatens
to out the first whistle-blower’s identity (in violation of the law), or
assaults and tries to intimidate witnesses, like Colonel Alexander Vindman.
He seems
to think in the Ukraine context that “l’état c’est moi” is the core American
truth, rather than a French monarch’s claims to absolute power. He believes in
the kind of executive power the Founders designed the U.S. Constitution to
prevent. It therefore did not occur to Trump that blackmailing a foreign
country to investigate his political opponents is a classic abuse of power,
because he is incapable of viewing his own interests and the interests of the
United States as in any way distinct. But it is a core premise of our liberal
democracy that the powers of the presidency are merely on loan, and that using
them to advance a personal interest is a definition of an abuse of power.
There
are valid criticisms and defenses of Trump’s policy choices, but his policies
are irrelevant for an impeachment. I actually support a humane crackdown on
undocumented immigration, a tougher trade stance toward China, and an attempt,
at least, to end America’s endless wars. But what matters, and what makes this
such a vital moment in American history, is that it has nothing to do with
policy. This is simply about Trump’s abuse of power.
He
lies and misleads the American public constantly, in an outright attempt to so
confuse Americans that they forget or reject the concept of truth altogether.
Lies are part of politics, but we have never before seen such a fire hose of
often contradictory or inflammatory bald-faced lies from the Oval Office. He
has obstructed justice countless times, by witness tampering, forbidding his
subordinates from complying with legal subpoenas, and by “using the powers of
his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and
agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct”
both the Mueller and now the Ukraine investigations. (I quote from Article 1 of
Nixon’s impeachment.) Trump has also “failed without lawful cause or excuse to
produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by
the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives … and willfully
disobeyed such subpoenas.” (I quote from Article III of Nixon’s impeachment.)
He has declared legal processes illegitimate if they interfere with or
constrain his whims and impulses.
This
is not just another kind of presidency; it is a rolling and potentially
irreversible assault on the legitimacy of the American regime. If the CIA finds
something that could reflect poorly on him, then the CIA is part of the “deep
state coup.” Ditto the FBI and the State Department. These are not
old-fashioned battles with a bureaucracy over policy; that’s fine. They are
assaults on the legitimacy of the bureaucracy, and the laws they are required
to uphold. These are definitional impeachable offenses, and they are part and
parcel of Trump’s abuse of power from the day he was elected.
And
most important of all, Trump has turned the GOP — one of our two major parties
with a long and distinguished history — into an accomplice in his crimes. Senator
Lindsey Graham, perhaps the most contemptible figure of the last couple of
years, even says he will not read witness transcripts or follow the proceedings
in the House or consider the evidence in a legal impeachment inquiry, because
he regards the whole impeachment process as “BS” and a “sham.” This is a
senator calling the constitutional right of the House of Representatives to
impeach a president illegitimate.
And the
GOP as a whole has consistently backed Trump rather than the Constitution.
Sixty-two percent of Republican supporters have said that there is nothing
Trump could do, no crime or war crime, no high crime or misdemeanor, that would
lead them to vote against him in 2020. There is only one way to describe this,
and that is a cult, completely resistant to reason or debate. The tribalism is
so deep that Trump seems incapable of dropping below 40 percent in the national
polls, and is competitive in many swing states. The cult is so strong that
Trump feels invulnerable. If Trump survives impeachment, and loses the 2020
election, he may declare it another coup, rigged, and illegitimate. He may
refuse to concede. And it is possible the GOP will follow his lead. That this
is even thinkable reveals the full extent of our constitutional rot.
Trump
has fast-forwarded “regime cleavage.” He is appealing to the people to render
him immune from constitutional constraints imposed by the representatives of
the people. He has opened up not a divide between right and left so much as a
divide over whether the American system of government is legitimate or
illegitimate. And that is why I don’t want to defeat Trump in an election,
because that would suggest that his assault on the truth, on the Constitution,
and on the rule of law is just a set of policy decisions that we can, in time,
reject. It creates a precedent for future presidents to assault the legitimacy
of the American government, constrained only by their ability to win the next
election. In fact, the only proper constitutional response to this abuse of executive
power is impeachment. I know I’ve said this before. But on the eve of public
hearings, it is vital to remember it.
None
of this presidential behavior is tolerable. If the Senate exonerates Trump, it
will not just enable the most lawless president in our history to even greater
abuses. It will deepen the regime cleavage even further. It will cast into
doubt the fairness of the upcoming election. It will foment the conspiracy
theory that our current laws and institutions are manifestations of a “deep state”
engineering a “coup.” It will prove that a president can indeed abuse his power
for his personal advantage without consequence; and it will set a precedent
that fundamentally changes the American system from a liberal democracy to a
form of elected monarchy, above the other two branches of government.
I wish
there were another way forward. But there isn’t. And this, though a moment of
great danger, also contains the glimmers of renewal. Removing this petty,
shabby tyrant from office goes a long way to restoring and resetting the
Constitution as a limit on power and a guarantee against its wanton future
abuse. It must be done. With speed, with vigor, and with determination.
Is Trump the Worst President in History?
by Richard Striner
Richard Striner, a professor of history at Washington College, is
the author of many books including Father
Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery and Lincoln’s
Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power.
As the
chance of getting rid of Donald Trump — through impeachment or by voting him
out — continues to dominate the headlines, the historical challenge
is compelling. No president has been a greater threat to the
qualities that make the United States of America worthy (at its best) of our
allegiance.
The rise of
Trump and his movement was so freakish that historians will analyze its nature
for a long time. From his origins as a real estate hustler, this
exhibitionist sought attention as a TV vulgarian. Susceptible
television viewers found his coarse behavior amusing. Then he announced that he
was running for the presidency and it looked for a while like just another
cheap publicity stunt.
But
his name-calling tactics struck a chord with a certain group of
voters. Our American scene began to darken. Before
long, he was hurling such vicious abuse that it ushered in a politics of
rage. As his egomania developed into full megalomania, the “alt-right”
gravitated toward him.
The
“movement” had started.
More
and more, to the horror of everyone with power to see and understand, he showed
a proto-fascist mentality. So alarms began to spread: mental health
professionals warned that he exemplifies “malignant narcissism.”
Never
before in American history has the presidential office passed into the hands of
a seditionist. And the use of this term is
appropriate. With no conception of principles or limits — “I want”
is his political creed —he mocks the rule of law at every turn.
At a
police convention in 2017, he urged the officers in attendance to ignore their own
regulations and brutalize the people they arrest. He pardoned
ex-Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt of
court. He appointed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA so he could wreck
the agency and let polluters have the spree of their lives.
Trump
is fascinated by powerful dictators with little regard to human rights or
democracy. He compliments Vladimir Putin and hopes to invite that murderer
to stay in the White House. He likes Rodrigo Duterte of the
Philippines, a tyrant who subverts that nation’s democracy.
So,
Trump certainly has the personality of a fascist. But he is not
quite as dangerous as other authoritarians in history.
In the
first place, he lacks the fanatical vision that drove the great tyrants like
Hitler and Stalin to pursue their sick versions of utopia. He is
nothing but a grubby opportunist. He has no ideas, only
appetites. The themes that pass for ideas in the mind of
Donald Trump begin as prompts that are fed to him by others — Stephen Miller,
Sean Hannity, and (once upon a time) Steve Bannon. To be sure, he would fit
right in among the despots who tyrannize banana-republics. But that
sort of a political outcome in America is hard to envision at the moment.
Second, American
traditions — though our current crisis shows some very deep flaws in our
constitutional system — are strong enough to place a limit on the damage Trump
can do. If he ordered troops to occupy the Capitol, disperse the
members of Congress, and impose martial law, the chance that commanders or
troops would carry out such orders is nil.
Third,
Americans have faced challenges before. Many say he is our very worst
president — bar none. And how tempting it is to
agree. But a short while ago, people said the same thing about
George W. Bush, who of course looks exemplary now when compared to our
presidential incumbent.
The
“worst president.”
“Worst,”
of course, is a value judgment that is totally dependent on our standards for
determining “badness.” And any number of our presidents were very
bad indeed — or so it could be argued.
Take
Andrew Jackson, with his belligerence, his simple-mindedness, his racism as
reflected in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Take all the
pro-slavery presidents before the Civil War who tried to make the enslavement
of American blacks perpetual: John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James
Buchanan. Take James K. Polk and his squalid war of aggression against
Mexico. Take Andrew Johnson, who did everything he could to ruin the
lives of the newly-freed blacks after Lincoln’s murder.
The
list could go on indefinitely, depending on our individual standards for
identifying “badness.” Shall we continue? Consider
Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, so clueless in regard to the
comparatively easy challenge of preventing corruption among their
associates. Or consider Grover Cleveland and Herbert Hoover, who
blinded themselves to the desperation of millions in economic
depressions. And Richard Nixon, the only president to date who has
resigned the office in disgrace.
Which
brings us to Trump.
However
incompetent or even malevolent some previous American presidents were, this one
is unique. The Trump presidency is a singular aberration, a defacement of norms
and ideals without precedent. However bad some other presidents were
all of them felt a certain basic obligation to maintain at least a semblance of
dignity and propriety in their actions.
Not
Trump.
Foul
beyond words, he lurches from one brutal whim to another, seeking gratification
in his never-ending quest to humiliate others. He spews insults in every
direction all day. He makes fun of the handicapped. He
discredits journalists in order to boost the credibility of crackpots and
psychopathic bigots. He accuses reporters of creating “fake news” so
he can generate fake news himself: spew a daily torrent of hallucinatory
lies to his gullible followers.
He
amuses himself — with the help of his money and the shyster lawyers that it
pays for — in getting away with a lifetime’s worth of compulsive frauds that
might very well lead to prosecutions (later) if the evidence has not been
destroyed and if the statute of limitations has not expired.
So
far, however, he is always too brazen to get what he deserves, too slippery for
anyone to foil.
Anyone
with half of ounce of decency can see this wretched man for what he
is. They know what’s going on, and yet there’s nothing they can do
to make it stop. And that adds to Trump’s dirty
satisfaction. Any chance to out-maneuver the decent — to infuriate them —
quickens his glee. It makes his victory all the more rotten, incites
him to keep on taunting his victims.
It’s
all a big joke to Donald Trump, and he can never, ever, get enough of
it.
The
question must be asked: when in our lifetimes — when in all the
years that our once-inspiring Republic has existed — have American institutions
been subjected to such treatment? How long can American morale and
cohesion survive this?
Nancy
Pelosi has said that in preference to seeing Trump impeached, she would like to
see him in jail. Current Justice Department policy — which forbids
the indictment of presidents — makes it possible for Trump to break our
nation’s laws with impunity. Impeachment is useless if the Senate’s
Republicans, united in their ruthlessness and denial, take the coward’s way
out.
So the
prospect of locking him up may have to wait. But the day of
reckoning for this fake — this imposter who will never have a glimmer of clue
as to how to measure up to his office — may come in due time. Then
the presidential fake who accuses his victims of fakery will live with some
things that are real: stone walls, iron bars, a nice prison haircut,
and the consequences of his actions.
Field of
Anonymous Trump Donors Getting Crowded
|
WASHINGTON
-- Last year, when a "senior administration official" wrote an
anonymous New York Times opinion piece -- "I Am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administration" -- the unknown author's essay prompted
praise and approbation.
Now, we
learn, it has spawned a book.
"The
dilemma -- which (Trump) does not fully grasp," Anonymous wrote in
September 2018, "is that many of the senior officials in his own
administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his
agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them."
Critics
on the right called the author a coward for penning a piece under the cloak of
anonymity. Critics on the left pounced on the author's failure to openly
denounce Trump -- the only act that they would consider courageous.
Trump
branded the piece "TREASON" and urged then-Attorney General Jeff
Sessions to find the dirty rat.
Journalists
did not miss the irony in the author's identification as a "senior administration
official." The Trump White House was indignant, even though the press
office routinely conducts briefings after directing reporters to identify the
briefers as "senior administration officials." Then Team Trump
denounced the press for relying on unnamed sources.
I saw
the piece as confirmation that good people worked in the administration out of
a sense of public service -- and that some stayed because they felt a duty to
curb Trump's worst instincts. The book deal, alas, suggests the unknown civil servant has
a hunger for self-promotion, as well as a poor sense of timing.
For one
thing, the Mueller report tells voters everything they need to know about
Trump. To wit: There was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. And
Trump frequently pushed those around him to do his dirty work, and they often
failed to do his bidding.
Former
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, for example, chose not to tell Sessions to
"unrecuse" himself from the Russian probe, lest Trump fire him.
Instead, Lewandowski passed on the assignment to a White House aide, who also
chose not to act.
In
words that echoed the New York Times piece, special counsel Robert Mueller
wrote, "The president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly
unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the
president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests."
Trump
voters don't care. They believe the Russian probe was a witch hunt. Who can
blame them? Mueller allowed the investigation to slog on long past any
reasonable suspicion that Moscow was pulling Trump's strings. Federal officials
throwing everything they've got at Trump isn't really a good look right now.
The field
of anonymous Trump accusers is getting crowded. In August, an identity-shielded
whistleblower came forward with a complaint that "the president of the
United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a
foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election." It was in reference to a July
25 phone call during which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
to look for political dirt that could be used in next year's presidential race.
The
unidentified whistleblower's lawyer said he represents another unidentified
whistleblower. Democrats argue these individuals must be shielded for their own
protection, but everyone knows they'll be feted as heroes when their identities
-- predictably -- are revealed.
Book
deals? You know it.
Perhaps
the anonymous New York Times author decided to cut a deal to beat the pack of
Ukraine scolds.
House
Democrats have even been holding impeachment hearings behind closed doors to
question known individuals. After releasing damning tidbits, they've yet to
release full testimony. In contrast, Trump made public a rough transcript of
the July 25 conversation.
If
there's something voters don't know that Anonymous thinks they need to, he or
she could pen another op-ed, not a bestseller -- or better yet, with an
election a year away, come forward and face the wrath of the right in the light
of day.
Of
course, Anonymous has an agent. Matt Latimer told CNN that the author of the
272-page "A Warning," published by Twelve, a division of Hachette,
"refused the chance at a seven-figure advance and intends to donate a
substantial amount of any royalties to the White House Correspondents
Association and other organizations that fight for a press that seeks the
truth."
As a
member of the association, I suppose I should be grateful and not at all
curious about how much of the proceeds will go to worthy causes. If only I knew
whom to thank.
Contact
Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow
@DebraJSaunders on Twitter.
The Kitchen-Table Case for Impeaching Trump
The president’s abuses of power are
materially hurting regular people.
After months of waiting, the House
Judiciary Committee has finally voted to open an impeachment inquiry into
President Donald Trump. With that tedious “will-they-or-won’t-they” question
out of the way, the logical next question is: can impeachment succeed? The
answer is a resounding yes. But getting there will require a strategic
reorientation away from a sluggish and legalistic examination of Trump’s
offenses via recalcitrant witnesses and toward a broader consideration of how
his systemic abuses of power have materially hurt regular people.
The continued
reticence of so many Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to support
impeachment is based on two premises. The first is that impeachment is modestly
unpopular, which is true, so far as it goes. The second is the
conventional wisdom that impeaching President Clinton backfired on House
Republicans.
Look a little
closer at the second contention, however, and it quickly falls apart. The case
against Trump is vastly stronger than that against Clinton. While Clinton’s alleged
crimes were largely committed in the interest of avoiding embarrassment,
Trump’s represent clear abuses of power with malignant implications. The second
flank of the argument—that impeaching Clinton “backfired” on Republicans—is
more myth than reality. Republicans may have
lost the House in the next election cycle, but Clinton’s impeachment was a
nontrivial factor in Al Gore’s 2000 loss. Therefore, we join other observers in choosing to view this “example”
as evidence in support of impeaching Trump.
But the
polling argument is particularly short-sighted. Voters take cues from political
leaders about how to react to political events. For months, the overwhelming
cue on impeachment from Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe
Biden has been to stand down. This inhibition has created a negative feedback
loop in which impeachment-phobic lawmakers convince voters not to support
impeachment, and then point to lukewarm public support to justify their
passivity. Rinse and repeat.
Five months
after the release of the Mueller report, this message has pretty well stuck.
After all, if the special counsel’s findings were so serious, they should have
been acted on immediately, right? Much as a gourmet meal is never as good
reheated, Democrats cannot expect to ignore evidence of impeachable conduct in
the spring and have it be as fresh and tasty when zapped in the autumn. Just
take a gander at this week’s House Judiciary hearing with Corey Lewandowski to
see how unappetizing this fare has become.
While the
Mueller report surely provided enough evidence to justify impeaching Trump on
substantive grounds, hesitant lawmakers have largely drained it of much of its
political force (and impeachment is an inherently political process).
To overcome
this damage, impeachment backers will have to make opposition to impeachment
untenable with voters, thereby short-circuiting the aforementioned negative
feedback loop. That means focusing on the ways in which Trump’s corruption has
made life harder and more dangerous for millions of Americans. In other words,
impeachment should focus above all on his failure to carry out his
constitutional duty under Article II, Section 1 of the
Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” By
emphasizing how impeachment is relevant to the “kitchen-table” issues that keep
regular people up at night—like low wages or exorbitant healthcare premiums—the
House Judiciary Committee can inspire a swell of grassroots pressure that will
give reluctant legislators no choice but to back the effort.
The issues tackled in Mueller’s report,
like obstruction of justice, are removed from people’s day-to-day lives. Of course,
there is nothing inherently insufficient with such a basis for impeachment;
were it not for the Democratic leadership’s opposition, impeachment proceedings
would have begun in April. Still, more Americans agonize over how to pay back
their student loans, or whether to incur the costs of seeing a doctor when
uninsured, than discuss “the role of law.” The Mueller report, therefore.
likely strikes most Americans as “political” and is less likely to
inspire new broad-based support for impeachment.
The same goes
for the proposed lines of inquiry in Judiciary’s newly expanded investigations. The committee will
reportedly examine Trump’s alleged abuse of presidential pardons, hush-money
payments, and use of office for personal enrichment. While these scandals are
undoubtedly important, they don’t penetrate the lives of ordinary people.
That doesn’t
mean that Democrats should not pursue any of these alleged crimes; the public
deserves to know as much as possible about any president’s corruption, and
Congress is best suited to furnish those answers. But these matters should not
sit alone at the center of the Democrats’ case for impeachment. An impeachment
inquiry is a way to control the national conversation. While bills passed by
House Democrats predictably get little attention from most of the media, an
impeachment hearing is guaranteed to achieve the scarcest political resource in
2019—the attention of voters.
Given that
platform, lawmakers have a lot to choose from. In light of recent revelations
that the number of uninsured people has risen for the first time since 2009, lawmakers might want to
start by investigating how Trump has undermined the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
You might say
that Trump’s health care moves are reprehensible, but are they really
impeachable? Ask Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania representative who was the
catalyst behind Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and the author of an article of impeachment
accusing Johnson of failing to “take care” that the Tenure of Office Act be
faithfully executed. Other articles accused Johnson of offenses including
insulting Congress and unlawfully firing his Secretary of War, but this one got
at his most serious transgression: failing to honor and enforce the laws as
Congress had intended.
Trump has made
no secret of his disdain for Obama’s healthcare law, but whether he likes it or
not, it’s his duty to administer it unless and until Congress passes a new one
or repeals it. Rather than faithfully carrying out that responsibility, Trump
has sought to destroy the law. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order directing agencies to use all of the tools at their
disposal to undermine the statute—and they have faithfully complied. His
administration also shortened the open enrollment period,
cut ACA’s advertising budget, and slashed tax credits for enrollees. Trump
is not coy about his intentions. “I have just about ended Obamacare,” he once said. Congress should
demonstrate its commitment to improving Americans’ health care access by
nailing Trump for his considerable efforts to “end” a lawful program by
executive action that he could not repeal legislatively.
There are
other matters that need a deeper probe. Lawmakers should investigate whether
Trump’s administration has intentionally slowed the allocation of aid to Puerto
Rico. Last week, as Puerto Ricans braced for Hurricane Dorian’s potential
landfall, many did so without a proper roof over their heads, surrounded by many other reminders of
Hurricane Maria’s destruction. This hardly seems like an accident: two years
after Maria, the scandal-riddled Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) has only approved funding for nine projects out of
10,000 applications. Meanwhile, in an unprecedented move, the executive branch
is holding up a Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery
(CDBG-DR) headed for the U.S. territory. The administration’s refusal to
effectively administer this recovery aid is not some distant problem. Puerto
Ricans (including the diaspora living in Florida and elsewhere on the U.S.
mainland) feel it every day in the way of destroyed roads, damaged schools, the
lack of a proper roof over many of their heads, or having been forced to leave
the island altogether.
It seems
impossible to imagine that Trump’s failure “to take care” is unrelated to the
animus he has shown toward Latinx communities since the day he announced his presidential campaign. More
broadly, it is even harder to argue that a president can faithfully execute the
law under our Constitution when he openly views the government’s obligations to
people as dependent on their race or religion—as his “Muslim ban” makes
evidently clear.
Lawmakers
should also look into Trump’s decision to allow three unconfirmed, unqualified,
Mar-a-Lago members to essentially run the Department of Veterans’
Affairs from the resort. Has Trump’s reliance on his paying customers to run
the VA in any way hurt the millions of veterans who rely on the department’s
services each year? The public has a right to know. The House Committee on
Veterans’ Affairs opened an investigation into these
puppeteers last winter, but the administration’s stonewalling appears to
have hindered meaningful progress.
Trump’s
appointees have harmed regular people in myriad other ways. Take, for example,
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ failure to administer loan forgiveness
programs, even after having been ordered by a court to do so. That has left thousands
of people suffering under the crushing yoke of student loans they were promised
would be discharged. At the same time, her department’s laughable oversight of loan servicers
is delaying forgiveness for hundreds of
thousands more. Given her absolute disregard for her responsibilities as
Education Secretary, why has she not been removed? Quite clearly, Trump feels
no compunction about running afoul of his obligation to “take care” to execute
the law, even if that means flat out ignoring court orders.
House members must not only persuade
voters to embrace impeachment with the righteousness of their case, but also
with the urgency of their actions. That means issuing subpoenas far more
liberally—and suing when necessary to enforce them without delay. Indeed, the
fact that Trump admits “we are fighting all the
subpoenas” reflects acknowledgement that he is undermining Congressional
oversight, which was itself a key
element of the
third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon.
Basic
political horse sense suggests that investigating how Trump’s team is hiding
evidence of their alleged lawlessness would help generate attention to the
actions they are covering up. If pursued effectively, such a probe can impose a
steep political cost.
Ultimately,
Congress should view its investigatory scope broadly. It should vigorously
examine as many instances of Trump’s corruption as possible. But his crimes
against the American people should sit at the center of their effort.
To treat them
as secondary, as lawmakers have done thus far, misses the larger point. The
intentional harm Trump has inflicted on Americans, whom he is tasked with
protecting, represents by far his most egregious violation of his
Constitutional oath of office. Lawmakers should respond accordingly.
The (Full) Case for Impeachment
A menu of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The crimes for which impeachment is the prescribed punishment are notoriously undefined. And
that’s for a reason: Presidential powers are vast, and it’s impossible to
design laws to cover every possible abuse of the office’s authority. House
Democrats have calculated that an impeachment focused narrowly on the Ukraine
scandal will make the strongest legal case against President Trump. But that’s
not Trump’s only impeachable offense. A full accounting would include a wide
array of dangerous and authoritarian acts — 82, to be precise. His violations
fall into seven broad categories of potentially impeachable misconduct that
should be weighed, if not by the House, then at least by history.
I. Abusing Power for
Political Gain
Explanation: The single most
dangerous threat to any democratic system is that the ruling party will use its
governing powers to entrench itself illegitimately.
Evidence: (1) The Ukraine scandal is fundamentally about the president abusing his authority
by wielding his power over foreign policy as a cudgel against his domestic
opponents. The president is both implicitly and explicitly trading the U.S.
government’s favor for investigations intended to create adverse publicity for
Americans whom Trump wishes to discredit. (2) During his campaign, he threatened to
impose policies harmful to Amazon in retribution for critical coverage in
the Washington Post. (“If I become president, oh do they have problems.”) He has
since pushed the postmaster general to double rates on Amazon, and the Defense Department held up
a $10 billion contract with Amazon, almost certainly at
his behest. (3) He
has ordered his officials to block the AT&T–Time Warner
merger as punishment for CNN’s coverage of
him. (4) He
encouraged the NFL to blacklist Colin Kaepernick.
II. Mishandling
Classified Information
Explanation: As he does with
many other laws, the president enjoys broad immunity from regulations on the
proper handling of classified information, allowing him to take action that
would result in felony convictions for other federal employees. President
Trump’s mishandling of classified information is not merely careless but a
danger to national security.
Evidence: (5) Trump has habitually
communicated on a smartphone highly vulnerable to foreign espionage. (6–30) He has reversed 25 security-clearance
denials (including for his son-in-law, who has
conducted potentially compromising business with foreign interests). (31) He has turned
Mar-a-Lago into an unsecured second White House and even once handled news of North Korea’s
missile launch in public view. (32) He gave
Russian officials sensitive Israeli intelligence that blew “the most valuable source
of information on external plotting by [the] Islamic State,” the Wall Street Journal reported. (33) He tweeted a
high-resolution satellite image of an Iranian launch site for the sake of
boasting.
III. Undermining Duly
Enacted Federal Law
Explanation: President Trump has abused his authority either by distorting the
intent of laws passed by Congress or by flouting them. He has directly ordered
subordinates to violate the law and has promised pardons in advance, enabling
him and his staff to operate with impunity. In these actions, he has undermined
Congress’s constitutional authority to make laws.
Evidence: (34) Having failed to secure
funding authority for a border wall, President Trump unilaterally ordered funds to be moved from other budget accounts. (35) He has undermined regulations on
health insurance under the Affordable Care Act
preventing insurers from charging higher rates to customers with more expensive
risk profiles. (36) He
has abused emergency powers to impose tariffs, intended to protect the supply chain in case of war, to seize
from Congress its authority to negotiate international trade agreements. (37–38) He has ordered
border agents to illegally block asylum seekers from
entering the country and has ordered other aides to
violate eminent-domain laws and
contracting procedures in building the border wall, (39–40) both times
promising immunity from lawbreaking through presidential pardons.
IV. Obstruction of
Congress
Explanation: The executive branch
and Congress are co-equal, each intended to guard against usurpation of
authority by the other. Trump has refused to acknowledge any legitimate
oversight function of Congress, insisting that because Congress has political
motivations, it is disqualified from it. His actions and rationale strike at
the Constitution’s design of using the political ambitions of the elected
branches to check one another.
Evidence: (41) Trump has refused to abide by a
congressional demand to release his tax returns, despite an unambiguous law granting the House this authority.
His lawyers have flouted the law on the spurious grounds that subpoenas for his
tax returns “were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage
through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses and the private
information of the president and his family, and to ferret about for any
material that might be used to cause him political damage.” Trump’s lawyers have
argued that Congress cannot investigate potentially illegal behavior by the
president because the authority to do so belongs to prosecutors. In other
litigation, those lawyers have argued that prosecutors cannot investigate the
president. These contradictory positions support an underlying stance that no
authority can investigate his misconduct. (42) He has defended his refusal to
accept oversight on the grounds that members of Congress “aren’t, like,
impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” (43) The president has
also declared that impeachment is
illegal and should be stopped in the courts (though,
unlike with his other obstructive acts, he has not yet taken any legal action
toward this end).
V. Obstruction of Justice
Explanation: By virtue of his control over the federal government’s
investigative apparatus, the president (along with the attorney general) is
uniquely well positioned to cover up his own misconduct. Impeachment is the
sole available remedy for a president who uses his powers of office to hold
himself immune from legal accountability. In particular, the pardon power gives
the president almost unlimited authority to obstruct investigations by
providing him with a means to induce the silence of co-conspirators.
Evidence: (44–53) The Mueller report contains ten instances of President Trump engaging in
obstructive acts. While none of those succeeded in stopping the probe, Trump
dangled pardons and induced his co-conspirators to lie or withhold evidence
from investigators. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified to
Congress that Trump had directed him to lie to it
about his negotiations with the Russian government during the campaign to
secure a lucrative building contract in Moscow. And when Cohen stated his
willingness to lie, Robert Costello, an attorney who had worked with Rudy
Giuliani, emailed Cohen assuring him he could “sleep well tonight” because he
had “friends in high places.” Trump has publicly praised witnesses in the
Russia investigation for refusing to cooperate, and he sent a private message
to former national-security adviser Michael Flynn urging him to “stay strong.”
He has reinforced this signal by repeatedly denouncing witnesses who cooperate
with investigators as “flippers.” (54–61) He
has exercised his pardon power for a series of Republican loyalists, sending a
message that at least some of his co-conspirators have received. The
president’s pardon of conservative pundit
Dinesh D’Souza “has to be a signal to Mike
Flynn and Paul Manafort and even Robert S. Mueller III: Indict people for
crimes that don’t pertain to Russian collusion and this is what could happen,”
Roger Stone told the Washington Post. “The special counsel has awesome powers, as you know, but the
president has even more awesome powers.”
VI. Profiting From Office
Explanation: Federal
employees must follow strict rules to prevent them from being influenced by any
financial conflict. Conflict-of-interest rules are less clear for a sitting
president because all presidential misconduct will be resolved by either
reelection or impeachment. If Trump held any position in the federal government
below the presidency, he would have been fired for his obvious conflicts. His violations are so gross and
blatant they merit impeachment.
Evidence: (62) He has
maintained a private business while holding office, (63) made decisions
that influence that business, (64) and
accepted payments from parties both domestic and foreign who have an interest
in his policies. (65) He
has openly signaled that these parties can gain his favor by doing so. (66) He has refused
even to disclose his interests, which would at least make public which parties
are paying him.
VII. Fomenting Violence
Explanation: One of the
unspoken roles of the president is to serve as a symbolic head of state.
Presidents have very wide latitude for their political rhetoric, but Trump has
violated its bounds, exceeding in his viciousness the rhetoric of Andrew
Johnson (who was impeached in part for
the same offense).
Evidence: (67) Trump called for locking
up his 2016 opponent after the election. (68–71) He has clamored for the deportation of
four women of color who are congressional representatives
of the opposite party. (72) He
has described a wide array of domestic political opponents as treasonous,
including the news media. (73–80) On
at least eight occasions, he has encouraged his supporters — including members
of the armed forces — to attack his political opponents. (“I have the support
of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump
— I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a
certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”) (81) He has threatened
journalists with violence if they fail to produce positive coverage. (“If the
media would write correctly and write accurately and write fairly, you’d have a
lot less violence in the country.”) (82) There
have been 36 criminal cases nationwide in which the defendant invoked Trump’s
name in connection with violence; 29 of these cited him as the inspiration for
an attack.