689

As we saw in Chapter A, Cohen was fingered for two felonies in yesterdays’ filings at Trump’s direction. 

This has led many to reopen the debate over impeachment.

Although I’m a fan of Jason Taylor-did his radio show once which was an honor and a pleasure-I have to agree with Janice.

I also don’t agree with his premise that impeachment would help Trump. I’m over those who are always worried about the allegedly big and bad Trump base-three million more of us voted for Hillary and that was after the Comey letter-the margin would have been considerably larger if not for that. What Democrats should fear is not the GOP base but the Dem base. If they don’t impeach Trump their base will be mightily disillusioned.

UPDATE: Over nine months later I made this point again this morning-there’s this illusion that Trump is so strong.

Right now-though the headlines betray nothing of it-he’s on his way to a landslide loss-if you get low 40s or even under 40%-he trails Biden 54-38 and the most he gets against any of the five is 40%-that’s a landslide loss-presuming there won’t be a third party candidate taking away a major chunk of the Dem votes-and there’s no reason to believe there will be.

Yes his base is extremely loyal but then by definition the base is always loyal-there is always a segment of support even a really unpopular President never loses-Nixon and W Bush had about 20% who never left them. But when you hear the MSM and Dem consultants discuss it they make it seem like they believe his own delusions-that he’s a political genius with exceptional instincts. who’s pure teflon. The empirical record cuts the other way-but again, the facts may not show it but that’s the MSM narrative and the Beltway always cares not about facts but only facts that confirm their own erroneous preconceptions-as for the Dem consultant class they’re the only ones who take the MSM narrative seriously.

Yes his base is loyal but they are with him already-Trump will tell his caustic lies wether they impeach him or not-if they don’t then he’ll declare that’s proof he did nothing wrong and the whole thing was a ‘witch hunt.’ But why is there such fear of him using that silly phrase? Where is the evidence that it’s devastatingly effective politically? Again this is a fake ‘President’ polling under 42% approval and at 40% or below head to head with the top 5 Dem challengers.

One problem with Democrats is they always worry more about the GOP base than their own. As I argued in (Chapter B) my suspicion is that after the Dems start public hearings in 2019 Trump’s ‘base’ will prove to be much smaller than many assume-closer to 23% than 43%. But as Janice says, impeachment is the right thing if that’s where the facts lead. 

UPDATE: As I’ve explained in other chapters my theory was that impeachment hearings could drop his approval into the 20s-we have yet to have these hearings-maybe the Democrats are finally starting when they get back, at least according to Nadler-

I do add that which is why unlike some, I’m not calling for impeachment now. 

Which is not to say the call for Trump’s impeachment today is outrageous-quite the contrary.  For any normal President-any legitimate President-this would be more than enough.

However, I don’t think impeachment should happen yet. \Ted Lieu rightly argued last night for letting it wait until we see the Mueller report-which may not be for another six months for all we know.

One reason is the country isn’t there-yet. As argued in Chapter B, the Dems probably shouldn’t impeach until Trump’s 43% approval rating is closer to 23%-which I think it will reach in the next two years-with the start of the Dems public hearings.

FN: My thinking since then has evolved. I don’t know if there’s an exact litmus test number it has to hit-they impeached Clinton with a 70% approval so for a ‘President’ with 42% approval who didn’t even ‘win’ it legitimately to be impeached doesn’t seem so outrageous. I mean at this point we’ve waited for Mueller and it’s time to get it done. We must do real public hearings-the Dems after criticizing the GOP’s lack of public hearings hasn’t had too many of them either till present-and make the case to the public for his impeachment. I think this can tank his numbers even lower but at this point there should be only one standard for impeaching the MFer-he’s committed impeachable offenses-pretty hard to argue that he hasn’t. That should be the only concern-not polls not Steve Israels dire warnings of doom-his base doesn’t care if he raped a reporter, abuses his power, engages in hate speech which incites violence, putting kids in cages and is now targeting children in hospitals about to undergo life saving surgery, is rolling back our democracy every day through executive overreach,  stole the election, it’s all just about winning back white Trump voters in the Midwest…

Trump has committed-a lot of-impeachable offenses and therefore he should be impeached. Full stop. As for politics I’m skeptical it will have the ill effects presumed by Kasie Hunt and Steve Israel but even if it did so be it. If the American people will riot over having an illegitimate ‘President’ who committed impeachable offenses-worst of all the ones he committed to steal his Office-then there’s something deeply wrong with their priorities. But let’s face it-numbers like the above make it pretty unlikely that will happen. IMO it’s more likely the Democrats will pay if they don’t impeach the MFer. 

End of UPDATE

Ironically the reason for this is that what we learned about Trump’s knowledge and direction of the payoff scheme while in itself are arguably impeachable offenses, they are just the tip of the iceberg. We shouldn’t impeach Trump solely over the hush payments because he’s guilty of so much else-and worse-besides. The biggest sin of all he’s accused of is Russia collusion-though the hush payments show that he’s fine in principle with conspiring to rig an election.

The issue of Russian collusion goes to the heart to our democratic process itself, our faith in our system of government, our elections itself and for that reason we can’t impeach Trump until we have an honest and comprehensive accounting of what happened. There’s also, the matter of Comeygate-which we also must get to the bottom of as it too goes to the heart of our faith in our system, that our elections are on the level, not with anyone manipulating them to promote on candidate-Trump-at the expense of another-Hillary Clinton-wether it be the Russians or the many anti Clinton rogue agents at the FBI.

Currently, Mueller is circling the wagons and has collusion clearly in his sights:

FN:

The idea that Mueller was coming proved a little too optimistic. He did release his 448 page report however that showed a ton of both obstruction and collusion-though he doesn’t think collusion is a crime. But that’s what impeachment is for-things that aren’t necessarily crimes but should be.

Regarding Mueller it’s ironic. Trump’s GOP co-conspirators are in a feverish pitch about the perfidy of James Comey of how he was a reckless and untrustworthy director. 

And you know-they’re calling him this for the wrong reasons but there’s truth in it-the way Comey ran Emailgate was reckless and untrustworthy. It’s stunning how ungrateful the GOP co-conspirators are-if it weren’t for Comey Trump wouldn’t be here at all.

But then you look at how reticent and conservative Mueller was in conducting the Russia investigation and it just figures-when a Democrat is investigated you have a cowboy running it but when it’s a GOPer suddenly there’s a boy scout in charge. Of course, Comey didn’t run the Trump-Russia collusion investigation like a cowboy either. The FBI-aka Trumpland-did everything they could to slow walk it-and for all their trouble the GOP co-conspirator conspiracies claim they were at the helm of a Deep State conspiracy to take down Trump. Substitute Clinton for Trump and you have the truth.

End of FN

What Congress should do is begin its own investigation-call back all the Trump co-conspirators who lied under oath, as they are now resolving to do.

“Democrats said they are planning to re-interview witnesses who provided testimony to the House Intelligence Committee following Thursday’s news that President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty for misstatements he made to Congress.”

“I think it may just be the tip of the iceberg,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said in an interview with Hill.TV, referring to other witnesses who “have not been fully truthful” in their testimony before the House and Senate Intelligence committees’ investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

House Democrats will have investigative and subpoena powers in January when they take control of the chamber.

When asked if other witnesses might have lied, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), another member of the House intel panel, told Hill.TV: “Yes, I think there’s no question.”

“We haven’t decided who we are going to call back, but there are a number of people we are confident lied to Congress that need to be called back,” she added.

Castro named one potential witness: Roger Stone.

“Based on what I heard, when we were listening to witnesses in the investigation, and what has come out in media reporting, there are inconsistencies with others,” he said. “One of them is Roger Stone.”

Between now and January, Democrats will need to scour transcripts of the earlier interviews to look for discrepancies, according to Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), another member of the Intelligence Committee.”

“We’ve taken hundreds of hours of testimony,” he said. “I think we need to go back to that testimony, look at it in light of the new facts and, by the way, make it public and provide it to the special counsel, because I doubt very much that Michael Cohen is the only one who lied to the Congress.”

“He wasn’t the only person close to the president who was asked questions about that development,” Himes said.

The Dems also want Erik Prince to come back:

“House intelligence committee members are eager to have the founder of mercenary company Blackwater back for another round of interviews about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, according to three members of its incoming majority.”

“Democrats have lots of outstanding questions about Erik Prince’s curious January 2017 trip to the Seychelles, where, at the invitation of a coterie around the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, he met with an influential Russian moneyman. They also have concerns about Prince’s candor during their prior interview last year.”

“But Prince, through a spokesperson, suggested the committee may have to force him to return to Capitol Hill.”

“Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, said he wants the panel to recall Prince for more questioning, indicating dissatisfaction with his November 2017appearance.”

“The first thing to do is subpoena all their emails, DMs, etc., and then I expect most of the witnesses in the Trump orbit will be asked to come back,” Speier told The Daily Beast on Thursday. “Many of their stories have been discredited. That includes Erik Prince, but obviously many others as well.”

 

Indeed, the House Dems should also bring in witnesses who didn’t testify at all to the Devin Nunes House-Papadopoulos, Manafort, and Michael Flynn.

UPDATE: Of course, Trump went on to offer blanket obstruction to all oversight requests-we will fight all the subpoenas. And as Al Green recently said so far the Democratic House has been more bark than bite-all Trump’s co-conspirators have ignored the subpoenas and the Democrats have failed to compel anyone-they are in court now-God only knows how long that will take. Richard Neal is in court and grandly refuses NY’s thoughtful offer of Trump’s state tax returns because it will supposedly mess up the fight for the federal returns then in the next breath tells us that gee we won’t be getting Trump’s federal returns before the election and I for one am fine with that. 

It’s true that Trump’s obstruction and defiance of even the most basic oversight is unprecedented but there were plenty of witnesses the Democrats could have had in the mean time-Schiff cancelled Felix Sater’s testimony after Barr’s fake exoneration letter then finally rescheduled Sater for July-then Sater skipped and that was that. Pelosi gets indignant when it’s suggested she’s running out the clock but how else would you define that fact pattern?

Ok let’s look at one more pro and con argument on impeachment. Here is an argument someone made on Twitter to me-presumably a Democrat:

https://twitter.com/AirborneChick/status/1071799349196324867

While I appreciate where Airborne is coming from I find this a really badly mistaken argument.

Her concern seems to be ‘Why impeach Trump as Pence is worse?’

https://twitter.com/AirborneChick/status/1071803925546889217

Well of course they won’t. I mean it’s open to question if the GOP will impeach Trump in the first place. Another bad argument you hear is that the Democrats shouldn’t impeach Trump if the GOP Senate won’t convict-as if because McConnell and the GOP Senate won’t do their jobs Democrats should also let Trump off the hook-if that’s where the facts lead. Campbell seems to presume that Pence would be worse for the LGBT community.

https://twitter.com/AirborneChick/status/1071800162543128576

That’s the problem-I’m pretty skeptical that he would be worse as it really isn’t possible. I mean Jeff Sessions was Trump’s DOJ for the last two years and his policies on the LBGT community are about as bad as they get. Trump himself has called for a LGBT ban in the military. The notion that he’s gentler on LGBT issues because he’s a libertine from NY is a zombie idea that won’t die apparently.

The reality is the entire GOP is anti LGBT so trying to figure out ‘who’s worse’ is a fool’s errand. And let’s face it-impeachment isn’t going to get you a Democratic Administration for that there will be the 2020 election. Impeachment is for the fact that Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors-if that’s where the facts lead.

Yesterday Jarrold Nadler made the rather complex argument that just because Trump has committed impeachable offenses doesn’t mean he should be impeached. Hopefully what he means is-yet. What is really important is getting to the bottom of the underlying charges-if Trump and his campaign colluded with a Russian interference effort to rig the election. Did he cheat to ‘win’ this office? It’s fairly ironic that the conventional wisdom is that the President can’t be indicted-for committing crimes anyone else would go to prison for-when he actually cheated to ‘win’ his office.  His successful crime shields him from the laws that would punish his crime.

But what really galls me about the idea that the Dems should let Trump off the hook-because of either misplaced fear of the Deplorable base or because Pence would somehow be ‘worse’ is the implication that Trump was right: he can shoot someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it-even Democrats are prepared to let him get away with it after Clinton was impeached for lying about a BJ.

If your position is that a GOP President can’t be impeached for anything then I quit. As a lifelong Democrat this is the one thing that would shake my faith.

Some other interesting developments from yesterday morning-Nadler said that he disagrees that a President can’t be indicted and logically it’s hard to disagree-why should the President be allowed to get away with any crime? And Adam Schiff suggests that the moment Trump leaves the Russia House he may be indicted.

UPDATE: In retrospect however, I’ve come to see this sort of talk as yet another attempt by the Dem leadership to abdicate their own responsibility-rather than indict Trump themselves the hope maybe a court somewhere will. Ok but why did we work so hard to elect the in 2018 if all they were going to do is say ‘I don’t want him impeached I want him to go to prison’ with Nancy Pelosi.

Nadler for his part seems to have largely gotten religion-thanks in part perhaps to a primary challenger who’s strong on impeachment. Still Nadler is unwilling to push Pelosi in public-he claimed back in late July that no one wants the ‘President’ held accountable more than the Speaker-the inverted comma is naturally mine; really? She hides it well.

Finally John Dean argues the Dems now have to impeach Trump. 

“John Dean, a White House counsel under President Richard M. Nixon convicted for his role in the Watergate scandal, said Friday that allegations against President Trump detailed in new court filings give Congress “little choice” other than to begin impeachment proceedings.”

“Dean’s comments, made during CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” segment, follow the release of a legal memo from federal prosecutors in New York regarding Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Prosecutors wrote Cohen had implicated Trump in the arrangement of hush-money payments to women during the 2016 election.

“I don’t know that this will forever disappear into some dark hole of unprosecutable presidents,” Dean said. “I think it will resurface in the Congress. I think what this totality of today’s filings show that the House is going to have little choice, the way this is going, other than to start impeachment proceedings.”

The only thing I would argue with that is timing-they shouldn’t impeach him in the first three months or anything like that-they should wait for Mueller and do their own-public-investigations for now. But they probably should already be studying and preparing for impeachment-which may at some point need to begin.

But while I-as the guy who ran as the impeachment train guy in the NY2 Dem primary-am arguing against doing it yet, it is also a fact that any other President could and would be impeached for what we learned from SDNY on Friday. Trump unfairly and illegally attempted to influence his own election-which is what Russian collusion is also all about.

As former GOPer Tom Nichols says, the GOP absolutely would have impeached Trump already if he were a Democrat. And as Dem Senator Chris Murphy said yesterday morning-Bill Clinton was impeached for far less. 

For those squishy Democrats worrying that impeaching Trump will incite the big, bad, Trump base, they don’t seem to realize that impeaching Trump is already far more popular than impeaching Clinton ever was. As noted in (Chapter A), 49% of Americans already want to impeach Trump.

FN:  At least in one poll which may be something of an outlier

While I agree we probably want the number to go up before impeaching him-if that’s where the facts lead-it’s already far more popular than impeaching Clinton. The week the Senate failed to convict him, Clinton’s approval was 81%-per Gallup.

The irony is that if Trump weren’t accused of even worse things potentially than what SDNY fingered him on, he’d already be impeached. But because we need closure on Russian interference-and Comeygate-we are holding off.

UPDATE: So Comey just called for the Democrats to end Trump’s reign in 2020. Yet he argues against impeachment. 

Still, Comey said he hoped that Trump would be swept out of office without being impeached. Framing the rise of Trumpism as a political ill the country needed to exorcise at the ballot, he expressed a hope that Americans would “in a landslide rid ourselves of this attack on our values.”

“Removal by impeachment would muddy that,” he said, and potentially leave a third of the country feeling like their chosen leader had been removed in a “coup.”

Ironically, as noted elsewhere in this book, Comey was actually part of Ken Starr’s investigation. Was Bill Clinton’s impeachment a ‘coup’ seeing as it was much more unpopular than impeaching Trump already is?

I just disagree vociferously with the idea that Trump gets a pass. If he has committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors he must be impeached. Put it this way-if Trump with all that he is potentially guilty of isn’t impeached then what President ever could be? Should we simply change the Constitution and take out impeachment as an option?

Again, there’s a reason a Congress has the impeachment option-why didn’t the framers simply say ‘Well no matter what he does you can always vote him out next time?’ It’s because an abusive President needs to be sanctioned and punished. Simply beating him in the next election doesn’t sully his name. Impeachment does more than simply removes him from office-it puts an asterisk next to the time he did serve in office. It’s a public judgment and gives the public a sense of accountability and closure. We really need to not make the same mistakes Ford made in pardoning Nixon- Bill Clinton and the Democrats made in 1993 on Bush-Reagan crimes-and Obama and the Dems made in 2009: this time, ‘letting bygones be bygones’ won’t get it done.

Comey says he wants to exorcise Trump from American life. Couldn’t agree more but simply voting him out wont exorcise him only impeachment can do that.

Why is it in the Constitution? Clearly for someone who has abused his power outrageously-ergo Trump.

Have to disagree-Trump if guilty deserves an asterisk next to his name. And quite honestly, for simply symmetry it’s wrong for Trump to escape impeachment over Russia collusion after impeaching Clinton for lying about a BJ-what the GOP now calls ‘a mere process crime.’

 

Ironically, the previous GOP Presidents were let off the hook under the guise that this would let the nation heal and move on but actually caused the opposite. For years after 2009, many liberals were still disaffected from Obama because he let everyone in Bushworld off the hook, and Clinton was rewarded for killing a legitimate investigation into a Republican President with a fake investigation into his own Administration.

By the way, regarding ‘revenge’ that’s part of justice. People have a right to be angry. The public was angry in 1974 when Nixon was let off the hook for crimes that would have sent any of the rest of us to prison for years. The nation could have healed if they were given a pound of flesh so to speak. Then they would have felt like there was accountability and really could have moved on. Moving on can’t happen through a whitewash. And I hope and pray the Democrats understand that. If not they themselves will pay the price.

It is very possible that the president of the United States is a criminal. And it is very possible that his criminality aided and abetted his assumption of the position. Let that sink in. It is a profound revelation.

Last week, prosecutors made clear in a sentencing memo for Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, that Trump himself had directed Cohen to break campaign finance laws.

Stop there.

Yes, there is still information dribbling out about Trump’s efforts to build a tower in Moscow during the election and about his campaign’s ties with Russians during the campaign. Yes, there is the question of obstruction of justice, which I believe has already been proven by Trump’s own actions in public. Yes, there are all the people in Trump’s circle who have been charged with or have admitted to lying about any number of things, including their contacts with Russians.

But beyond all that, we now have an actual, and one assumes provable, crime. A federal crime. And the president is its architect.”

Trump likes to say on the issue of immigration that if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country. I say that if we don’t have justice, we also don’t have a country.

“America is a country of laws, and if we are to believe that, and not allow that to become a perversion, no man or woman can be above the law.”

As Thomas Paine wrote in his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense”:

“In America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

And yet, Trump, his team and to some degree his supporters in Congress seem to view Trump as very much above the law — or at least some laws. The defense is bizarre: Since he is the president, there are laws he isn’t obliged to obey. In other words, it is permissible for him to break some laws, but not others.

And Democrats who don’t want to impeach him for any reason-wether fear of the Trump base, or the idle speculation that Pence could be worse-as if Trump’s illegitimate Presidency is somehow protecting LGBT, etc. If you say ‘Trump is guilty of impeachable crimes but don’t impeach him’ you are also placing him above the law-it’s why the framers gave Congress the option of impeachment-rather than simply saying ‘He’s abusing his power? Vote him out in two years.’

Ok, it’s such a great piece, I’ll quote more.

Last year, one of the president’s lawyers went even further, claiming that the “president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution’s Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case.”

This all holds the potential to further make a mockery of a system of justice that already privileges power.

America’s jails are already filled to the brim with people who have been charged with a crime but not yet convicted of one. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, “70 percent of people in local jails are not convicted of any crime.” Their primary infraction is that they are poor and powerless. The justice system doesn’t coddle them; it crushes them.

And yet, people keep making excuses for Trump: “We haven’t yet seen evidence of collusion.” “Yes, he lies, but that’s mostly rhetoric.” “So what; he paid off a porn star to spare his family shame.”

No, no, no.

“According to prosecutors, Trump directed Cohen to commit a felony. Then he lied about it and either allowed or instructed others to lie about it on his behalf. He misled the American people through a conspiracy of lies, and he did so to help attain, and then maintain, his presidency.”

You might have noticed that in every page of this book Trump’s legitimacy is questioned: the most I ever do is call him ‘President Trump’ as he’s not legitimate. If you think I’m off base in saying this Blow correctly notes that the SDNY has now done the same.

As The New York Times pointed out on Saturday, prosecutors have “effectively accused the president of defrauding voters, questioning the legitimacy of his victory.”

There simply must be consequences for such a brazen act of lawlessness.”

Yes-but! For some reason Blow rules out impeachment.

Now, I am under no illusion that Trump will be indicted as a sitting president or that any efforts to impeach him will prove successful.”

It’s not hard-all you need is for the House Dems to bring it to the floor. Perhaps what he means is that the Senate won’t convict. But that while quite possibly correct is besides the point. You indict someone if that’s where the facts lead, and you let conviction take care of itself. Again, Dems must impeach Trump is he’s found guilty of High Crimes and Misdemeanors-and arguably the SDNY charges qualify-regardless of Senate math. Let the GOP Senate failure to hold him accountable be on them not on the Democratic party.

In the end it comes down to this-as Trump’s legitimacy is in question, simply voting him out next time isn’t enough. There needs be a public censure of the illegitimate way he won his office.

UPDATE: Happy to say Blow later changed his mind on impeachment-find quotes Mike.

License

October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

Share This Book