Strap in, impeaching Trump is going to be a bumpy a ride
On Tuesday night, speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry into the unlawful conduct of the US President.
Donald Trump is therefore almost certainly going to become the third American President in history to be impeached by the House – the first step in a long process that could signal the end of his time in office.
Impeachment has been a long time coming for a President who has treated rule of law as an inconvenience to be bent to his whims or broken altogether, not followed. But this week, new revelations emerged about an egregious abuse of power that threatens Trump’s presidency.
The short version is this: Trump is accused of effectively extorting Ukraine, using military aid to the beleaguered country as leverage to try to force the government to cook up bogus allegations about his prospective political opponent in next year’s presidential election, former vice president Joe Biden.
Biden’s son previously worked in Ukraine, though there has been no evidence that he did anything improper in his business dealings there. Trump nonetheless seemed to hope he could pressure the Ukrainian government into concocting an investigation that would be politically useful to him for the 2020 race.
On Tuesday, it was confirmed that Trump told his chief of staff to withhold roughly $400m of military aid and national security support to Ukraine days before his phone call with Ukraine’s President on 25 July. According to White House notes of that call released yesterday, he told Ukraine’s President multiple times to investigate Biden and his son.
The implicit quid pro quo is obvious and glaring. Using core national security interests of the United States to bully a foreign government into drumming up phony dirt on a political opponent makes Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal look positively virtuous.
The Democrats now argue that they have no choice but to initiate impeachment proceedings. Those proceedings are long overdue. Trump is already linked to a number of unrelated crimes.
The US Department of Justice has named Trump as “Individual-1”, the figure who orchestrated and directed a felony criminal conspiracy to make illegal hush money payments during the 2016 campaign to his alleged mistress, Stormy Daniels.
Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence partly for his involvement in that scheme that he says he carried out on Trump’s orders. This is not disputed; the Department of Justice released cheques that Trump signed from the Oval Office as part of the criminal conspiracy.
The reason that Trump was not charged with crimes and put on trial is because of an obscure decades-old Department of Justice memo which argues that a sitting President cannot be indicted.
Furthermore, the Mueller Report into Russian interference in the 2016 election identified 10 separate occasions in which Trump allegedly committed criminal obstruction of justice. All 10 counts would be felonies, if proven. A large bipartisan group of former prosecutors – Republicans and Democrats – signed a letter stating that Trump would be charged with those crimes if he were anyone but the President of the United States.
So what happens now? Because the Democrats control the House of Representatives, it is likely that they will vote to impeach Trump. At that stage, the Senate would be tasked with holding a trial – overseen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court – in which senators decide whether or not to find Trump guilty of impeachable offences.
If 67 out of 100 senators vote to remove Trump from office, his presidency would end.
But despite evidence that Trump has committed serious crimes, that remains unlikely – because Republicans control the Senate. They have shown sycophantic levels of devotion to their party leader, although a few lone Republicans have spoken out in favour of impeachment.
Still, even if Trump is not removed from office, the impeachment proceedings are likely to damage him politically, making his re-election in 2020 less likely.
Much remains uncertain, but one thing is guaranteed: the next 14 months will be a circus, with Donald Trump performing as both ringmaster and freak show. Get ready for one hell of a bizarre spectacle.
Main image credit: Getty