President Donald Trump walks out of the Oval Office prior to his departure for a campaign event in Battle Creek, Mich., on Dec. 18, 2019 at the White House in Washington, D.C. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Hurrah! On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump became the third president of the United States to be impeached. The House of Representatives voted 230-197 to charge Trump with abuse of power and 229-198 to charge him with obstruction of Congress.
It was a major moment in this car crash of a presidency — and a major achievement for House Democrats. Still, I couldn’t help but be disappointed that there were only two articles of impeachment passed against the president. Two? That’s it? Why were other Trumpian offenses not included? For context, it’s worth recalling that there were a whopping 11 articles of impeachment passed against Andrew Johnson in 1868. With Richard Nixon in 1974, the House Judiciary Committee considered five articles of impeachment, before passing three of them. With Bill Clinton in 1998, the House of Representatives voted on four articles and approved two of them.
Are we expected to believe that House Democrats really think Trump has only committed two impeachable offenses? Even the president himself seems to have been caught off guard by the Democrats’ very narrow approach to impeachment. “Frankly, I think he’s a little surprised it’s the Ukraine thing that’s done it,” a White House official told CNN.
The harsh reality, of course, is that Trump commits impeachable offenses on nearly a weekly basis. So here is an A to Z of such offenses — by issue and/or by crime — that were inexplicably overlooked or ignored by the House of Representatives.
- In the summer of 2017, Trump personally intervened to try and block a merger between AT&T and Time Warner — to try and punish CNN for its unfavorable coverage of him. -
The president of the United States is a fraudster. Don’t take my word for it. In November 2016, less than two weeks after he was elected, Trump settled three different fraud lawsuits related to his Trump University for $25 million. Earlier this month, as the New York Attorney General Letitia James formally announced .. https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2019/donald-j-trump-pays-court-ordered-2-million-illegally-using-trump-foundation , the president was “forced to pay $2 million for misusing charitable funds for his own political gain,” and his Trump Foundation was “shut down for its misconduct.” Trump isn’t fit to run a university or a charity, so how is he fit to run the country?
GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
As the New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/us/politics/fbi-headquarters-building-trump.html .. reported in October 2018, the General Services Administration, which manages real estate for the federal government, had planned to turn the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “over to a commercial developer” — until, that is, the president intervened to veto the sale. As a group of Democratic lawmakers pointed out .. https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2018/10/new-evidence-suggests-trumps-coordination-gsa-fbi-headquarters-plan/152128/ , Trump was “‘dead opposed’ to the government selling the property, which would have allowed commercial developers to compete directly with the Trump Hotel” only a block away. Is this not worthy of further investigation and, possibly, impeachment?
HUSH MONEY
We know that Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who is serving a three-year prison sentence .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/nyregion/michael-cohen-sentence-trump.html .. for campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud, made illegal hush money payments to two women — Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal — who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. We also know, thanks to federal prosecutors .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/nyregion/michael-cohen-sentence.html , that Cohen “acted in coordination and at the direction of” the president himself. How is this brazen violation of campaign finance laws not an impeachable offense?
Trump demanded .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/us/politics/jared-kushner-security-clearance.html .. that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be granted a security clearance, despite objections from intelligence officials who warned that Kushner could be compromised by his business ties to foreign governments. The president may have the right to give anyone a security clearance and yet, as House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler explained in March, “You can do things that are within your power that are abuses of power and that are crimes.”
- The very first article of impeachment against Nixon accused him of “making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States.” -
- Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu called Trump’s airstrikes on Syria “FRICKIN ILLEGAL.” -
TAX EVASION
In October 2018, a blockbuster 13,000-word investigation by the New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html .. found that Trump “received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.” What kind of dodges? “He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents. … Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more.”
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XI
Why is there no mention of the Chinese President Xi Jinping in either of the two articles of impeachment? Why only the Ukrainian president? If the Democrats’ argument is that involving foreign governments in U.S. elections is an impeachable offense, as well as a threat to national security, then why stop at Ukraine? What about China? Listen to the president himself, speaking to reporters .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-publicly-urges-china-ukraine-investigate-bidens-amid-impeachment-inquiry-n1061956 .. outside the White House in October: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.”
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