With the House of Representatives on the verge of drafting articles of impeachment, President Trump has tried to undermine the credibility of the Democrats' impeachment inquiry by complaining in effect that they have been gunning for him since the start of his presidency three years ago. He is right, but he has only himself to blame.
Trump has been inviting impeachment since the very first day of his presidency by, for example, his open violation of the Constitution's Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses. And now, even after getting wrist-slapped in the Russia investigation on foreign interference in the 2016 election and accused of obstruction, Trump recklessly abuses the powers of his office even more blatantly by actively seeking Ukraine's assistance in the 2020 election and stiff-arming the House impeachment inquiry.
On the Emoluments Clause issue, Trump has argued in federal court litigation that arms-length patronage of Trump properties by foreign governments or domestic groups does not constitute a prohibited "emolument." With the cases still pending, judges in three cases have rejected that argument. Heedless of the issue, Trump has failed to divest himself of his interest in the Trump Organization and has done nothing to discourage foreign governments from trying to curry favor by patronize the Trump Hotel in Washington.
The Emoluments Clause issue was one of five counts included in the first impeachment resolution against Trump introduced in what was then the Republican-majority House in November 2017. A dozen presidents before Trump had been named in impeachment resolutions — not just Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton — but no previous chief executive had been charged with impeachable conduct as early as his first year in office.
That unacted-on resolution by six Democratic representatives also charged Trump with obstructing justice by firing FBI director James Comey to thwart the then-ongoing Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller's eventual report cited the firing of Comey along with other actions as evidence of obstruction, but Mueller bowed to Justice Department policy by declining to bring a criminal charge against the president.
Having gotten away with a warning, a law-abiding president might have taken care to avoid any obstructive conduct later on. Trump chose instead to double down on obstruction by declaring the House impeachment inquiry unconstitutional and refusing to cooperate in any way. The House Intelligence Committee report released last week [Dec. 3] notes at page 28 that Trump is "the first president in the history of the United States to seek to completely obstruct an impeachment inquiry undertaken by the House of Representatives . . . " He did so, the report explains, by "instructing witnesses and agencies to ignore subpoenas for documents and testimony."
Trump escaped mostly unscathed in the Russia investigation after Mueller's staff failed to find evidence of direct collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian operatives who were carrying out Vladimir Putin's undisguised preference for Trump in the election. As with his obstructive conduct, Trump decided to double down on foreign interference in U.S. politics by directly soliciting "a favor" from the new Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the now infamous July 25 telephone — specifically, an investigation into Trump's political rival, former vice president Joe Biden.
Trump may sincerely believe that the telephone was "perfect," but hardly anyone — not even most Republicans — agrees. The telephone call, the House Intelligence Committee report notes at page 10, was "not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naive president." Trump, the report notes, was elected "with the benefit of an unprecedented and sweeping campaign of election interference undertaken by Russia in his favor."
With most of the facts in the Ukraine investigation undisputed, Republicans and Trump apologists were left at last week's House Judiciary Committee hearing [Dec. 4] to argue that the record is incomplete and the move to impeach rushed. Jonathan Turley, the George Washington University law professor who served as the Republicans' expert witness at the all-day hearing, wrongly claimed that the Trump impeachment would be the fastest presidential impeachment in U.S. history.
Even with the hearing in progress, reporter Emily Singer showed in an article for the progressive news site The American Independent that Turley's assertion was "demonstrably false." In fact, Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868 just three days after the House started the process; Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 75 days after the GOP-controlled House started the process. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi greenlighted the inquiry into Trump on Sept. 24, Singer noted — 71 days earlier.
Turley spoke after three other constitutional law experts — Harvard's Noah Feldman, Stanford's Pam Karlan, and the University of North Carolina's Michael Gerhardt — all agreed that Trump has committed impeachable conduct. Turley's performance drew a negative review from one of his former students, but at week's end he had yet to apologize for his misstatement or to convincingly reconcile his support for impeaching Clinton two decades ago with his stance toward Trump today.
In asking the House committee leaders to proceed with drafting articles of impeachment, Pelosi maintained on Thursday [Dec. 5] that Trump "gave us no choice." For a deeply divided country, the forecast for months ahead is more division, as Republicans in the Senate are challenged to act as "impartial" jurors in a constitutional test unlike any in previous U.S. history.
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