After resisting for almost a year, House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi may finally be ready to look seriously at impeachment of President
Trump. Pelosi has long been a voice of reason among Democrats on the subject of
impeachment, saying as
recently as July that the House should move slowly on taking the constitutional
action against the president. With the White House stonewalling the recent
report on whistleblower
accusations against Trump, however, Pelosi may be starting to lean the
other way.
Axios
reports that Pelosi sent a letter to lawmakers over the weekend that warned
that if the Administration continues to block Acting Director of National
Intelligence Joseph Maguire from turning over the whistleblower complaint,
Democrats may escalate their legal efforts against Trump.
"If the Administration persists in blocking this
whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of
constitutional duties by the President, they will be entering a grave new
chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of
investigation," Pelosi said in the letter.
While Pelosi did not specifically mention impeachment, it is
likely that the “whole new stage of investigation” refers to the constitutional
remedy that available to Congress.
Separately, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff
(D-Calif.), who has also resisted endorsing impeachment, also said that
Democrats may be getting close to impeachment. On CNN's
"State of the Union," Schiff told Jake Tapper, "The
president is pushing us down this road and if in particular — after having
sought foreign assistance and welcomed foreign assistant in the last
presidential campaign as a candidate, he is now doing the same thing again but
now using the power of the presidency — then he may force us to go down this
road. I've spoken with a number of colleagues over the last week and this seems
different in kind and we may very well have crossed the Rubicon here."
While all the facts are not in the whistleblower incident,
the original meaning of the Constitution’s phrase, “high crimes and
misdemeanors,” does not require proof of a criminal act. As the Constitutional
Rights Foundation points out, under the English law where the Framers took
the phrase, examples of high crimes and misdemeanors included officials who
were “accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds,
appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money
allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates,
threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man
to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor
it, helping ‘suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament,’ granting
warrants without cause, and bribery.”
“Some of these charges were crimes,” the group’s explanation
continues, “Others were not. The one common denominator in all these
accusations was that the official had somehow abused the power of his office
and was unfit to serve.”
As the Washington
Post explains, federal law requires the Intelligence Community Inspector
General to forward valid complaints to the Director of National Intelligence,
who then has seven days to forward it to congressional oversight committees. In
this case, Acting DNI Maguire did not forward the complaint to Congress or
respond to congressional subpoenas, claiming, it was not valid because it
involved “conduct by someone outside the
Intelligence Community and did not relate to any ‘intelligence activity within
the responsibility and authority of the DNI.’”
As the Wall
Street Journal reports, Administration officials are saying “the call
didn’t mention a provision of U.S. aid to Ukraine” and sources “don’t believe
Mr. Trump offered the Ukrainian president any quid pro quo for his cooperation
on any investigation.”
The bottom line is that Congress does not have all the facts
about the whistleblower complaint and the Administration is trying to see that
they don’t get all the facts. After the Administration’s previous shading of
facts to make itself look good, Congress, the media and the public can be
forgiven for not taking the Administration’s denials at face value.
I’ve long held that Trump’s
previous abuses of power justified impeachment and there seems to be
widespread agreement that, if the president tied aid to Ukraine to forcing an
investigation that would benefit him politically, it would be an impeachable
offense. Even refusing to be held accountable to Congress would be
impeachable under original intent, which is based on abuse of office. The problem
for Democrats is that impeachment would founder in the Senate where Republicans
would be almost certain to acquit the president.
The easiest way out for Donald Trump is to release the
whistleblower complaint and transcripts of the calls associated with it. It’s
possible, however, that the president wants to generate an impeachment
investigation, believing that it will help him in next year’s election. Schiff
said in May that Democrats believed that Trump wanted to be impeached.
Whether impeachment would benefit President Trump
politically is debatable, but it would definitely not be good for the country. If
the president is truly as innocent as he claims, the Trump Administration
should have no problem releasing the complaint and associated evidence to prove
his case.
If they refuse to do this, the inspector general could
release the whistleblower complaint directly to Congress but it’s possible that
he could be prosecuted for doing so. Further, the whistleblower himself could
come forward, either publicly or anonymously. If he or she is seriously concerned
about what he knows, then the need to inform Congress should outweigh the
risks.
If the Trump Administration continues to stonewall, information
will continue to leak out slowly, perhaps well into the 2020 election season.
There is an old aphorism in politics that the coverup is often worse than the
crime. That was the case with the Russia investigation and it may well be the
case here.
Originally published on The
Resurgent
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