Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

hookrider, Democrats’ 2018 impeachment dilemma, explained

"fuagf: IMO, Mueller should go for the Gold. Impeachment for the Fat One!!!!"

just be careful, you don't want high hopes to be pulverized, or expectations to be fruitless. Talk of impeachment in the electorate isn't the
ants pants. That's why Democrat leaders don't want impeachment to be a focus toward the midterms. And see the reality of the situation.

Impeaching Trump polls poorly, but Democratic candidates can’t ignore the elephant in the room

By Matthew Yglesias@[e-mail] Apr 30, 2018, 8:40am EDT

[...]

The crucial thing, both politically and substantively, is to be clear that impeachment is ultimately a question for Republicans, not for Democrats. Without GOP
support, there’s no way to remove Trump from office, and even if Trump were removed, Democrats still would not be thrilled with a Mike Pence presidency.

[...]

Impeachment is a pointless trap

[...]

But a 2019 impeachment drive wouldn’t be important at all — it’d be futile. To remove a president from office
requires 67 Senate votes, meaning it would need to be a fully bipartisan undertaking, and there’s
just no evidence that anything like a cross-party anti-Trump consensus is emerging.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/30/17291016/democrats-impeachment-midterms

This could even be Mueller's gold.

Mueller Has Authority to Name President Trump as an “Unindicted Coconspirator”



by Ryan Goodman

October 29, 2017

Imagine if Special Counsel Robert Mueller finds sufficient evidence to charge President Donald Trump, but his hands are tied because he or the Department of Justice concludes that they cannot indict a sitting President? Could Mueller instead identify President Trump by name as an “unindicted coconspirator” when bringing charges against other individuals? The stakes are enormously high. Such action would have some of the same reverberations across the country as a criminal indictment of the President.

[...]

What’s more (and it’s a lot more) is Mueller’s solemn responsibility described earlier. It can’t be that Mueller has the authority and publicly understood duty to investigate Trump for potential crimes, but not the power to say whether Trump was involved in any offences. It’s also worth looking back at the Watergate special prosecutor’s team, which wrote a memo to say:

-
“If we conclude that indictment of the President is constitutionally barred or is inappropriate, then we and the Grand Jury can and must fulfill our responsibilities to the public and to the law by recommending a Grand Jury presentment setting out in detail the most important evidence and the Grand Jury’s conclusions that the President has violated certain criminal statutes and would have been indicted were he not President. There appears to be no question of the propriety or legality of such a course….”
-

[For more on that topic, please read my piece with Alex Whiting, “An Untold Option for Mueller: Grand Jury ‘Presentment’ as an Alternative to Indicting Trump.”]

[...]

Having mined through the arguments on different sides of this issue, it seems clear that Mueller would have an open path to name President Trump in an indictment—for example as an unindicted coconspirator — if there’s sufficient evidence of the President’s involvement in criminal activity within the jurisdiction of the Special Counsel. The Watergate special prosecutor’s legal team appeared to think there was not just an availability but a profound responsibility to name President Nixon as an unindicted coconspirator if that’s where the evidence led them, and that may rightfully be Mueller’s lodestar.

[Final note: for a perspective that differs from mine, read Professor James Jacobs’ Just Security article ..
https://www.justsecurity.org/44705/naming-president-unindicted-co-conspirator/ ,
“Naming the President as an Unindicted Co-conspirator?”]
https://www.justsecurity.org/46415/mueller-authority-president-trump-unindicted-coconspirator/

Don't wanna be a dasher of hope and expectation, just it's velly velly complicated.