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Impeachable Offenses?

~ Examining the Case for Removal of the 45th President of the United States

Impeachable Offenses?

Tag Archives: Putin

Roger Stone Arrested and Indicted

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by crosbysamuel in Articles, Uncategorized

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arrested, Collusion, Conspiracy, cooperation, DNC, donald trump, Emails, hillary clinton, indicted, investigation, president, Putin, Randy Credico, Robert Mueller, roger stone, russia, russian hackers, Special Counsel, wikileak

Roger Stone was arrested and received a seven count indictment this morning which included charges of misleading lawmakers about his communications with Wikileaks, the organization that released the emails which scandalized Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and intimidating fellow witness Randy Credico, who was also in contact with Wikileaks. Credico ultimately pleaded the 5th at Stone’s urging.

The emails released by Wikileaks were stolen by Russian hackers, and Stone is a long time friend and supporter of President Trump. If Stone chooses to cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller, he could provide the evidence need to finally establish collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. However, if Stone’s past comments are to be believed, he will not be cooperating. Much is yet to be seen.

stone.jpgAlex Wong/Getty Images

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The Case for Impeachment of Donald Trump, Part 3 (Foreign Policy)

15 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by impeachableoffenses in Uncategorized

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Bolingbroke, Duke of Buckingham, Earl of Danby, Erdogan, George Mason, impeachment for foreign policy, James Madison, mattis, Mohammed bin Salman, NATO, Orban, Oxford, Paris Climate Accords, Putin, Strafford, TPP, Warren Hastings, William Blount, William de la Pole, WTO

By Frank Bowman

Among the most persistent misconceptions about impeachment under the United States constitution is that indictable criminal conduct is a prerequisite for impeachment. The prevalence of this error is easy to understand inasmuch as the textual standard for impeachable conduct is “Treason, Bribery, or other other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” — a phrase that sounds like it refers to crime of the customary sort. However, as has been repeatedly discussed on this blog and as virtually all serious students of impeachment recognize, the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was adopted by the Framers from British and early American impeachment practice and extended to a wide variety of non-criminal official ineptitude or misbehavior. There is powerful evidence that the Framers included conduct severely damaging to U.S. foreign policy interests in the category of impeachable behavior.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the delegates decided that presidents and other federal officers could be impeached, but they wrestled over what conduct should be impeachable. Various formulations were advanced.  As the convention rounded into the home stretch, the phrase that had taken hold was “treason or bribery.”

George Mason objected because he thought “treason and bribery” far too narrow.  Mason was a student of British impeachment and had authored the post-revolutionary impeachment provisions of the Virginia state constitution.  He wanted a federal impeachment remedy analogous to British practice at least in the conduct it covered, even if not in the sorts of brutal personal punishments Parliament could impose.

“Treason,” Mason said, “will not reach many great and dangerous offences. Hastings is not guilty of treason.” He was referring to the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, Governor General India, just about to start in England. Mason wanted American impeachments to reach beyond the two indictable crimes of treason and bribery to important breaches of public trust in both the domestic and foreign sphere, the kinds of offenses charged against Hastings.

Mason’s solution was to add the word “maladministration” after bribery. But James Madison rose to object, saying, “So vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.”

Mason thought the matter over and came back with a compromise. Omit “maladministration” but add to treason and bribery “other high crimes and misdemeanors.”  The new language passed 8 states to 3.

Mason’s choice of “high crimes and misdemeanors” was not whimsical.  Rather, he lifted it from British practice where, beginning in the 1600s, Parliament increasingly (though not invariably) used this phrase to describe conduct it charged as impeachable.  My study of British and American impeachments convinces me that “high crimes and misdemeanors” does not limit Congressional impeachment power to the necessarily idiosyncratic and antique list of misdeeds Parliament had addressed by 1787.  Both Parliament and the Framers were acutely conscious that the sorts of dangerous public misconduct for which impeachment is a necessary remedy could not easily be described in advance. However, the Framers’ choice of “high crimes and misdemeanors” does set the baseline minimum for the scope of American impeachments. In other words, American officials are properly impeachable for at least the range of conduct covered by British practice.

A persistent theme in British impeachments was the charge that the impeached minister had pursued a policy at odds with the nation’s basic foreign policy interests.  Impeachments on this ground were a constant beginning with the charges against William de la Pole in 1450 for his role in arranging the marriage of Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou.  The Duke of Buckingham was impeached in 1626 in part for loaning English ships to the French to employ against the Protestant Huguenots at Rochelle.  In 1678, the Earl of Danby was impeached for assisting King Charles in negotiations with France for British neutrality in the Franco-Dutch War.  Lords Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Strafford were impeached in 1715 for their advocacy of the Treaty of Utrecht, which was widely despised as selling out Britain’s Dutch allies in favor of making accommodations with Britain’s traditional enemy France. And Warren Hastings’ 1787 impeachment, so central to George Mason’s thinking, centered on fundamental disagreements about the proper relationship of Great Britain to its Indian possessions and the states that abutted them.  

Over and over again, Parliament employed impeachment to assert an authority independent of the royal executive to define the nation’s true foreign policy interests. That Congress has believed itself to have similar authority is demonstrated by the first impeachment in American history, that of Senator William Blount, charged in 1797 with conspiring to assist the British in acquiring Spanish territory in Florida.  Blount was acquitted, but only because there were doubts that senators are “civil officers” subject to impeachment and because he had already resigned.

During the 1788 ratification debates on the federal constitution, James Madison insisted that a president who made a treaty that “violated the interest of the nation” and convinced the Senate to ratify it could be impeached. 3 Jonathan Elliot, The Debates in Several State Conventions of the Adoption of the Federal Constitution 500 (1827).  If, in the considered opinion of the architect of the American constitution, a president can be impeached for inveigling the Senate into one bad treaty, we surely can impeach a president for heedlessly shattering a basket of good treaties and the entire intricate web of foreign relationships they support without so much as a by-your-leave.

Consider Mr. Trump’s rolling destruction of American foreign policy.  (And assume that his actions flow merely from caprice or bad judgment, and are not, bizarre though it seems to say such a thing, the result of his having been compromised by Russia.)

To summarize, in the seventy-odd years since the Second World War, generations of American presidents, legislators, soldiers, and diplomats have labored to create a world order of multilateral institutions and agreements with the United States at its center.  That order has averted nuclear annihilation, prevented conventional war between the major powers, secured a stable, democratic Europe and an increasingly prosperous and stable East Asia, managed the fall of Soviet communism, and overseen a fairly universal rise in human material welfare, all while maintaining the United States as the single indispensable world power.  All has not been wine and roses for everybody, of course.  Humanity is on the verge of destroying the world’s ecosystem through climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction.  And global overpopulation and income inequality pose continuing threats to individual well-being and regional peace.  However, the looming existential crises of the age can only be addressed (if they can be at all) through increased collaboration and cooperation across borders. Most importantly for present purposes, whatever else one may think about the post-World War II world order, it has been hugely advantageous for the United States, placing this country at the center of all important decisions about international trade, finance, technology, and security.

Since his election, Mr. Trump has moved steadily in the direction of unilaterally dismantling the United States’ foreign policy, trade, and security architecture by formally abandoning or denigrating every form of multilateral engagement from the Paris Climate Accords, to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to the Iran Nuclear Accord,to the World Trade Organization,[ to a nuclear weapons treaty with Russia, to the United Nations, not to speak of our most fundamental military alliance, NATO.[ He has consistently quarreled with our oldest democratic allies, while cozying up to autocracies across the globe: Duterte’s Philippines, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, and, of course, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.  The result is that, if allowed to continue, Trump will, singlehandedly, transform America’s position among the nations, from being the leader (however imperfect) of the free world and indispensable fulcrum in every realm of hard and soft power to a diminished, cranky, ungenerous, avowedly self-absorbed friend of tyrants and oligarchs. 

It is of particular moment that Trump is taking the country down this path singlehandedly.  The policies he is pursuing are not the policies of the party under whose banner he ran.  They are not the policies recommended to him by the vast bulk of civilian and military leaders and experts in his administration.  Indeed, as recently demonstrated by the resignation of Secretary of Defense Mattis following Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw entirely from Syria and partially from Afghanistan, they are often undertaken against the explicit opposition of those persons.  They do not emerge from any process of study or consultation. They proceed from his personal whims (or, though I shudder to to contemplate it, perhaps from directions or suggestions provided by Vladimir Putin), abetted by a very small coterie of courtiers. In the case of the Syrian withdrawal, the decision apparently occurred literally in the middle of a phone conversation between Trump and Turkish President Erdogan.  Trump’s position on foreign policy is “l’état c’est moi.” That is not the design of the United States Constitution.

President Trump can do these things in part because Congress has, quite unwisely, acquiesced in the doubtful doctrine that, while two-thirds of the Senate must vote to ratify a treaty, a president may withdraw from it without consent of Congress or anyone else. As pernicious as this legislative timidity has been in principle, one could excuse it on the ground that Congress has assumed with some justice that presidents would be cautious, judicious, and consultative before taking so drastic a step.  While that confidence has not always been justified, it generally has. 

However, in Mr. Trump, the country has for the first time a president who combines a near-complete lack of understanding of history, finance, trade, military affairs, or diplomacy with supreme confidence that he, and no one else, knows exactly how to arrange matters in all these arenas.  In short, the electoral system has placed in the White House the ignorant demagogue that the Framers feared at a time when the system of institutional checks they installed to deal with such an eventuality has atrophied so far as to be nearly useless.  Catastrophe looms unless Congress recognizes the danger and reasserts the powers the Constitution gave it. 

Some of the foreign policy damage Trump is doing could be prevented or at least ameliorated if Congress woke up and employed the tools short of impeachment at its disposal.  That said, there is little question that the constitutional impeachment power includes a situation in which a president is inflicting irreparable harm on the nation’s position in the world and will not be dissuaded. 

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If When he Denies he Lies…

14 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by crosbysamuel in Articles, Uncategorized

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Conspiracy, denial, dishonest, donald trump, finland, impeach, Impeachment, interpreter, investigation, lies, lying, Mueller, president, public trust, Putin, russia, russian collusion, vladmir putin

President Trump today denied that he has worked for Russia in what has been described as his “most direct response” to the accusations of collusion. This denial came in the wake of a report that after a meeting he had with Russian President Vladmir Putin last summer in Finland, Trump took their interpreter’s notes and instructed him not to discuss the meeting with any other officials.

One theory is of course that Trump did work for, or at least with, Russia, which if true means that what he said today was a lie. Which begs the question, what consequences may come to a President for lying to the public? Professor Bowman has written at length on this subject, and his writings can be found here. However, in the way of summary, Prof. Bowman noted three kinds of lies which he believes could warrant impeachment: criminally indictable falsehoods,  unindictable official falsehoods, and chronic or pervasive falsehoods. The lie at hand is neither indictable or official, as it was not given under oath and is not a communication with Congress. However, the lie could fit in the third category if added to the pool of President Trump’s many other falsehoods, which, in aggregate, Bowman has suggested, are potentially impeachable. He wrote: “chronic presidential lies do not merely render the president himself ineffectual, but also damage every other branch and function of American government.” In essence, Trump’s constant lies are one of the things which make him unfit. For an in-depth analysis of this novel idea, the reader should check out Bowman’s article, which can be found here.

ap_19014539944750_wide-234bee0b5652fad844256e61c76821ab6b04c988-s1600-c85.jpgEvan Vucci/AP

 

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12 Agents, Butina, and Helsinki

17 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by crosbysamuel in Articles, Uncategorized

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12, 2016, agents, channels, clinton, Collusion, Conspiracy, defraud, democratic national convention, denial, DNC, Election, hacked, hacking, helsinki, hillary, Impeachment, mariia butina, Meeting, nra, Putin, russia, russian meddling, secret, tweet, unfitness

Good news! The Russian scandal now officially can be sung to the tune of the Twelve Days of Christmas: 12 Russian agents, Butina’s russian channel, election interference, PUTIN “STRONG AND POWERFUL!”  Which is good, because everything else is not sounding quite so festive.

The indictments of 12 Russian agents, for the hacking of the Democratic National Convention and the Clinton Presidential Campaign, and the filing of charges against Mariia Butina, a Russian woman who allegedly tried to broker secret meetings between President Putin and President Trump, further confirm  what the intelligence community already knew: that Russia interfered with the 2016 federal elections. As if that wasn’t frightening enough, our President doesn’t seem to mind. After meeting with Putin in Helsinki and asking him about the Russian meddling, Trump could only comment about the strength of Putin’s denial. Needless to say, Americans are feeling a bit miffed. But where does this leave us in the impeachment debate?

There are two arguments to be made here. The first and, most obvious, is that all this adds to potential charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States. The more certain we are that Russia interfered with the election, the stronger the case for collusion becomes. Of course to establish collusion, it would have to be shown that there was some agreement between Trump and Russia. To that point it helps that there are ties between the indicted Russians and members of Trump’s campaign. In addition, though Trump’s ongoing support of Putin is not direct evidence of conspiracy, it does have a suggestive quality and could indicate a more nefarious relationship between the two.

One may also consider Trump’s reaction as an example of his unfitness. It can be argued that a failure to reprimand the leader of a country which has taken action to defraud the United States is a failure of one of the most basic duties of the President: that of the Chief Diplomat. This can be added to the list of the President’s other shortcomings; however it is unclear how long a list is required to lead to removal.

download.jpgYURI KADOBNOV/AFP/Getty Images

 

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The G-7 plus 1?

09 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by crosbysamuel in Articles, Uncategorized

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annual, canada, Collusion, economic policy, france, G-7, G-8, germany, impeach, Impeachment, italy, japan, Meeting, president, Putin, russia, summit, the united kingdom, trump, united states

President Trump, at the annual summit meeting, suggested that Russia be readmitted into the G-7, the group of 7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) which meet to discuss world-economic policy. Russia was ousted from the then G-8 in 2014 for seizing parts of the Ukraine. Trump defended his suggestion, stating as follows:

“You know, whether you like it or not — and it may not be politically correct — but we have a world to run. And in the G-7, which used to be the G-8, they threw Russia out. They should let Russia come back in. Because we should have Russia at the negotiating table.”

President Trump acted antagonistically at the summit meeting, rendering himself an outsider, and causing some to refer to it as “G-6 plus 1.”  For some this is a cause of concern: Trump treating allies as enemies and enemies as allies. And it could further bolster the theory that there was and is collusion going on between Russia and Trump; however, it is unclear that that rejoining the G-8 is actually on Putin’s agenda. In response to the news, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said that “we are putting emphasis on different formats,” insinuating that Russia is not particularly interested in rejoining the G-7. Russian officials made similar comments in 2014 when they were removed: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia was “not attached to this format and we don’t see a great misfortune if it will not gather.” So if Trump is acting on behalf of Russia, it is the result of some very coy maneuvering. Regardless of the reason for his stance, however, it betrays more of the same peculiar friendless we have seen since the beginning of Trump’s presidency. We will find out exactly what it means in due time.

g7-summit-trump-may-merkel-macron-809690.jpgexpress.co.uk

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A Meeting of Casual Agents

09 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by crosbysamuel in Articles, Uncategorized

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administration, Collusion, Conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the united states, dmitriev, emirates, erik, george, grand jury, Impeachment, kirill, kremlin, lebanon, Mueller, nader, prince, Putin, trump

George Nader, a Lebanese American businessman, is now cooperating with the Mueller investigation. Nader has ties to the Emiratis, and significantly, was at the ‘Seychelles Meeting’. Previous reports have shown that Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, had met with with Kirill Dmitriev, a man who runs an investment fund for Vladmir Putin. Prince has claimed that the meeting was pure coincidence and very casual. But Nader’s attendance casts the encounter in a new light.

Prince has close ties with the Trump Administration; ties which could be said to mirror those of Nader’s to the Emiratis and Dmitriev’s to the Kremlin. So what is one to make to make of such a meeting? The Washington Post claims that this development substantiates the idea that the meeting was intended to set up a “back-channel” between Trump and Russia. If that is so, the implications of the meeting for the emerging pattern of Trump-Russia connections are intriguing.

Image result for erik prince trump

Getty Images/AFP/Mark Wilson

 

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Mueller to Interview Trump

09 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by crosbysamuel in Articles, Uncategorized

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2018 midterms, Collusion, Comey, FBI, firing, impeach, Impeachment, interview, investigation, Mueller, Obstruction of Justice, Politics, Putin, Special Counsel, trump

Special Counsel Mueller intends to interview President Trump soon, a decision which some believe signals the nearing of the end of his investigation. Though Trump has said that he is happy to talk about Russian collusion, a conversation he believes he will clear his name, his lawyers are scrambling to find a way to avoid or limit Mueller’s interview. Commentators believe what they are trying to avoid are questions about obstruction of justice: namely the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, and the lies former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, told the FBI.

Regardless of the motive for the interview, however, the timing could not be better for Democrats. With the 2018 midterms fast approaching, should Mueller’s investigation come to a close soon, its results may be a boon to Democrats running for Congress. And of course, if Democrats are able to obtain a majority in the House and Senate, impeachment will become more likely.

robert-mueller-mckelvey_j4wbro.jpegAlex Wong/Getty Images

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Poor US-Russia Relations and What to Make of Them

24 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by crosbysamuel in Articles, Uncategorized

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cold war, Collusion, conspiracy to defraud the united states, eastern, militias, Putin, trump, ukraine, weapons

One does not have to be an avid reader to know that Trump’s presidency has been marred with suspicions of and evidence of collusion between the President’s campaign and Russian officials; which makes the deteriorating relationship between the United States and Russia all the more confusing. Conflict between the two nations has been heating up through the proxy of the Eastern Ukraine, where Russia is battling for control. The United States has given the Ukraine weapons to fight off Russian Militias, and has condemned the Russian interference in a National Security Strategy report. Despite these actions, however, Trump still speaks of Putin as if they are chummy. So, what is one to make of this double-speak (and double-action)? If there was collusion between Putin and Trump, has their relationship deteriorated since? Did Putin simply bet on the wrong horse? Or could this conflict be part of a larger plan?

06321985_2ffbc90ce085561de1c79b7098820fdb.nbcnews-ux-2880-1000.jpgMIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/KREML /EPA

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The Russian collusion investigation: Bumbling grifters & the risks of keeping it all in the family

12 Sunday Nov 2017

Posted by impeachableoffenses in Uncategorized

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Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., emoluments, George Papodopoulos, Hope Hicks, J.D. Gordon, jared kushner, Jeff Sessions, Lewandowski, Manafort, Michael Flynn, nepotism, Putin, Robert Mueller, Sam Clovis, scheme of peculation, Stephen Miller

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of doing an interview with Canada’s CTV network on developments in, and speculations about, the progress of the Mueller investigation.  The anchor wanted to talk about the testimony of  former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor, Carter Page, to the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Attorney General Session’s upcoming appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, and the rumor that an indictment of former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (and possibly his son) will soon be forthcoming.

I can’t say that I had anything particularly novel to tell Canada’s TV audience about any of these subjects, but reflecting on the interview has provoked a couple of observations.

First, as I have had occasion to observe before, passionate opponents of Mr. Trump who confidently expect (or even fervently hope) that the Mueller investigation of Russia-Trump campaign collusion in the recent election will produce some smoking gun that will lead naturally to articles of impeachment should moderate their expectations.  So far, at least, the picture is not one of sophisticated, nefarious, high-level Trump operatives working hand-in-glove with agents of the Russian government, but of something altogether murkier and more ambiguous.

To be sure, there exists nearly irrefutable evidence that the Kremlin was working hard through every means at its disposal to harm the Clinton campaign and help Mr. Trump. Mr. Putin’s repeated denials that Russia was meddling and Mr. Trump’s on-again–off-again acceptance of those denials may convince his endlessly credulous base, but outside those blinkered precincts it merely prolongs the bizarre spectacle of an American president siding with the dictator of a hostile foreign power against the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies.

(As an aside, when I began drafting this post, Mr. Trump had just said that he accepted as sincere Putin’s denial of meddling.  Mere hours later, Trump straddled the question, saying that he accepts both the findings of U.S. intelligence and Putin’s sincerity.  This waffling is either: (a) Yet another example of Mr. Trump’s persistent tendency to say whatever he thinks will please the audience immediately in front of him, with no thought for either truth or how today’s effort to ingratiate will affect his own or the country’s interests tomorrow; (b) Yet another example of Mr. Trump’s seeming inability to engage in rudimentary critical thinking — the idea that the Russian government could engage in a wide-ranging effort to influence the American presidential election without the knowledge or approval of Vladimir Putin is laughable, and thus it is impossible for U.S. intelligence to be right and for Putin to be sincere; or (c) Just another manifestation of Mr. Trump’s knee-jerk rejection of any fact, however firmly established, that might suggest his election victory was due to anything other than his own personal merits. My best guess is that all three factors were at work.)

But it is not a crime or an impeachable offense merely to be the unwitting beneficiary of foreign efforts to damage one’s political adversaries.  What must be shown to prove a crime is that affiliates of the Trump campaign consciously aided or sought to aid the Russians’ subversion and violated some statute in the process.  What must be shown for any of this to amount to an impeachable offense is that Mr. Trump himself approved, was aware of and failed to stop, or later tried to cover up culpable conduct by his subordinates.

It is too early to assess the ultimate question about whether culpable collusion occurred.  But the emerging (though far from complete) evidence suggests at least three points about the Trump campaign’s Russian contacts:

  • Repeated claims by Mr. Trump and his subordinates that there were no contacts between persons associated with the Trump campaign and Russian officials or agents were simply untrue.  As the Chicago Tribune summarizes, at least nine people in the Trump orbit had Russian contacts during the campaign or transition.
  • At least some of those contacts involved persons high up in the campaign hierarchy or personally close to Mr. Trump, people like Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Jeff Sessions.  Others, like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, had impressive-sounding titles like “foreign policy adviser,” but  were in reality on the fringes of what was always a barely coherent campaign organization. Nonetheless, it is now clear that campaign higher-ups, like Senator Sessions, Stephen Miller, Hope Hicks, J.D. Gordon, campaign manager Cory Lewandowski, and national campaign co-chair Sam Clovis, knew about the Page and/or Papadopolous contacts.
  • Whether contacts between Trump surrogates and Russian actors ever produced concrete results, such as the direct transfer to the Trump campaign of negative information about Secretary Clinton or her team, remains unclear … and frankly seems doubtful.  What is clear is that multiple members of the Trump entourage were willing and eager to receive that kind of material — even when it was plain that the source would have to have been Russian intelligence services, and that the means employed to obtain the material would likely have involved violations of American law. The first proof of their eagerness was the now-famous Donald Trump Jr. – Kushner – Manafort meeting with the Russian lawyer.  Now Mr. Papodopoulos admits to having received a purported Russian offer of “dirt” on Secretary Clinton in the form of emails, and to have passed the offer along to Trump campaign officials.
  • If, in the end, Trumpists and Russian emissaries never quite did a deal that produced active cooperation or transmission of opposition research “deliverables,” efforts to cover up all the active flirtation could nonetheless amount to criminal obstruction of justice and even impeachable conduct.  That’s the thing to watch for in coming months.

Second, the overriding impression, reinforced by each new revelation, is that both the inner circle of the Trump campaign and the outer rings of staff, consultants, and advisers consisted primarily of pathetically ill-informed amateurs like the Trump children and in-laws, eccentrics like Carter Page, desperate wanna-be‘s like George Papodopoulos, or outright scoundrels like Paul Manafort.  Even those with long government resumes and conventional credentials, like Trump’s short-tenured National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Senator Jeff Sessions, gravitated to Trump because, in Flynn’s case, he had been expelled from the circles of power for persistent bad judgment, and in Sessions’ case, he was a fringe player in the Senate, with views on many subjects too extreme even for for a caucus edging steadily to the right, and no path to any meaningful leadership role.

Moreover, the one character trait common to virtually all of this ill-assorted crew is greedy opportunism. The Trump family, from the paterfamilias on down, has profited by skating on or over the edge of legality for decades and has been monetizing its connection to the presidency ever since the election.  Manafort’s long career as apologist for thugs and dictators should have disqualified him from a role in any American presidential campaign, and predictably has both embroiled Trump in controversy and produced an indictment founded in part on money laundering and tax evasion. Page reportedly combined his Russian overtures for Trump with efforts to secure private deals for himself.  Michael Flynn is under investigation for an array of dodgy, but potentially lucrative, deals, as well as illegal failures to report work on behalf of authoritarian regimes like that of ascendant Turkish dictator Recip Erdogan.

The mix of incompetence, bad judgment, blithe disregard of normal legal and ethical boundaries, and personal greed in the Trump campaign is both a gift and an impediment to any effort to impeach Mr. Trump.

On the one hand, it is increasingly obvious that people high and low in the Trump campaign were trying quite hard to collude with a hostile foreign power to win a presidential election.  On the other hand, it may prove that the Russians simply didn’t trust these escapees from the Island of Misfit Toys enough to enter into any active collaboration, preferring to feed toxic misinformation to the American electorate indirectly through Wikileaks and directly through social media.  Now that Mr. Trump has shed virtually all of the primary actors in the Russian contacts — with the notable exceptions of his family members — he can disavow former staffers’ conduct as the inconsequential bumbling of fringe nobodies.

BUT — having foolishly chosen to ignore settled norms against nepotism in the White House, Mr. Trump is probably stuck with whatever the kids have done or may yet do. Even an ordinary father would shrink from throwing his children overboard and into the clutches of waiting prosecutors, but in Mr. Trump’s case, ordinary considerations of paternal affection are infinitely complicated by the fact that the Trump campaign was, and the Trump Organization remains, a family business … and the kids, notably including son-in-law Jared Kushner, are privy to their secrets.  Perhaps Ivanka or Don Jr. might be willing to take a fall for dear old dad.  Were I Mr. Trump, I would not bet that, at the last extremity, young Mr. Kushner would do the same.

Thus, Mr. Trump will never be able to make a clean break from the Russian meddling investigation. Some of its central figures will remain close to him.  He will continue defending them.  And as in Watergate, it may prove that the cover-up, rather than the original wrong, will be his undoing.

Finally, it would be easy to dismiss the near-universal obsession of those around the Trumps with self-enrichment through politics as a side issue.  For two reasons, it’s not.

First, as Mr. Manafort recently discovered, the United States has a web of laws that regulate, and often criminalize, aspects of the “deals” he and his ilk are so eager to make.  Those laws are a tool box for Robert Mueller’s prosecutors, and the questionable financial motives and maneuvers of those involved in contacts with Russian representatives will provide legitimate grounds for inquiring deeply into financial matters the Trumps would surely prefer remain hidden.

Second, to the extent Mr. Mueller’s investigation or other sources reveal that Mr. Trump and family have used the presidency for personal profit, such disclosures implicate at least two grounds for impeachment.  The most obvious of these is violation of the emoluments clauses.  But I would go a bit further.  I do not believe that a technical violation of, for example, the foreign emoluments clause of Article I, Section 9, is required to make out an impeachable offense if it could be shown that, as James Madison put it, the president “pervert[s] his administration into a scheme of peculation.”

I will expand on this latter point in later posts.  Stay tuned.

Frank Bowman

 

 

 

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Trump Waffles on Putin’s Denial

12 Sunday Nov 2017

Posted by crosbysamuel in Articles, Uncategorized

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asia-pacific summit, democratic national convention, intelligence community, pompeo, Putin, russia, russian collusion, russian interference

President Trump met with Vladmir Putin informally at the Asia-Pacific Summit on Saturday. He emerged from the meeting reiterating that Putin denied allegations that he had intermeddled with the 2016 presidential election, and claiming that he believed the Russian President. After a strong reaction from the intelligence community, Trump backpedaled his statement, claiming he sides with “our agencies.”

Though Trump now claims to side with the intelligence community, he has done so only through an ambiguous statement of loyalty. It is an especially fledging remark in light of his long defense of Putin, and his attempts to quash the Russian interference story. The President has even gone so far as to direct CIA Director Mike Pompeo to meet with William Binney, a former member of the intelligence community who believes the Democratic National Convention email scandal was an inside job. So, one must wonder what Trump means when he claims to “be with our agencies,” and whether he believes he can be with Putin simultaneously.

download (1).jpgREUTERS

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Frank O. Bowman, III


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