High crimes and misdemeanors

The report of the Special Counsel, Robert S. Mueller, issued last week after a two-year investigation, offers the best view ever of the essence of the Trump administration. It is a criminal operation.

The findings are damning:

• Trump invited a foreign power, Russia, at best a rival of the United States, to meddle in the U.S. election.
• The president tried to obstruct justice multiple times but most of the time it didn’t work because his own officials recognized that they were being pressured to break the law and, out of conscience or self-preservation, ignored Trump’s orders. But an attempted crime is still a crime, and Mueller found ten instances that could be considered obstruction of justice.
• Trump, Mueller discovered, engaged in a vast amount of deplorable and unethical conduct that technically might not always meet the standard criteria of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt but nevertheless constitute impeachable offenses.

The Trump presidency that emerges from the Mueller report is criminal in two senses of the word. Criminal in the common use of the word, a serious violation of law, as in Trump’s pleas to Russia that led to the theft private of emails related to the Clinton campaign. Criminal also in the special sense of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the term that the Founders established in the Constitution as the basis for impeaching a president.

Much of this is not totally new or surprising. The deluge of books about Trump and his presidency has offered enough pieces of information, analyses, and insight to confidently reach the conclusion that Trump is unfit to be president.

But the Mueller report goes above and beyond all previous accounts. Mueller had subpoena power. Unlike journalists, he could compel the testimony of people close to Trump who witnessed firsthand the president’s repeated attempts to obstruct justice. His report is authoritative and factual, the work not of one man but of dozens of top-notch prosecutors and skilled federal law enforcement officers led by the best among them. Robert Mueller performed two miracles: producing a high-quality, thorough investigation despite constant attack by the Trump administration and keeping his troops from leaking to the press even to defend themselves from repeated false and malicious attacks by the president.

Mueller could only go so far in investigating Trump’s common crimes. The Department of Justice has a standing rule against impeaching a sitting president. Mueller was hamstrung not only by the pervasive hostility of the administration but also by this regulation that goes against the grain of what prosecutors do, indict. But Mueller did uncover a vast amount of evidence that Trump committed numerous high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution, the nation, and the people.

Trump and his circle of yes men and women have touted the fact that Mueller found insufficient evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia. Yet, in a campaign speech in Florida amid the heat of the contest, Trump implored Russia to help his cause by obtaining and releasing presumably damaging private emails belonging to Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Call it collusion or not, it is a grave offense against democracy and the sovereignty of the nation

Thus, Trump benefited politically from a vast Russian operation to influence the 2016 presidential election in his favor. Moreover, Trump was not a passive actor opportunistically taking advantage of the situation but encouraged what amounts to foreign aggression against U.S. national sovereignty. He was an active participant in the scheme. His words during a momentous Florida speech make that clear: “Russia, if you are listening,” (release the emails).

Russia was listening, with a keen ear. The very next day, as U.S. intelligence discovered, Russian hackers succeeded in obtaining the emails requested by Trump. The hackers were none other than officers in that nation’s military intelligence service, the GRU. Such a high-stake operation could not have been carried out without orders from the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, now virtually a pal of Trump. To establish “plausible deniability,” the GRU turned over the emails to Wikileaks so it could leak them.

Donald Trump was delighted and went on to make the emails one of the two major themes of his campaign (second only to immigrant bashing). The “emails issue” was a tempest in a teapot, a non-issue but a good distraction from Trump’s numerous misdeeds and nefarious plans.

The FBI investigated Hillary’s emails and ultimately concluded, on the eve of the election, that they contained no evidence of a crime. Too late: By then, many people had made up their minds that Hillary Clinton was untrustworthy.

Mueller could not indict but Congress could impeach. Can there be any doubt that the Founding Fathers, wary about foreign interference, would have considered a presidential candidate who invited a foreign power to intervene in the nation’s most critical political process—the election of a president—guilty of a high crime. The word that best defines that high crime is treason.

The report of the Special Prosecutor concluded that Russia meddled in the 2016 election big time, way beyond the hacking of emails. Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation worked hard to tilt the U.S contest toward their favorite, Donald Trump, and to sink the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Why?

The Russians had reason to believe that a President Trump would go easier on Russia than a President Clinton. As Secretary of State, Clinton had been hard on Putin for various transgressions. She favored continuing sanctions. Trump the businessman had friendly relations with the Russians. His people removed a plank in the Republican platform on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

Trump knew that Russian meddling was one of the factors that produced his victory, and Putin knew Trump would reward him. Putin wasn’t disappointed. Trump went as far as taking Putin’s denial about Russian interference over the vast evidence collected and the judgment reached unanimously by well over a dozen U.S. intelligence agencies. Talk about pulling out the rug from your own troops.

The Democrats now have a dilemma and an opening. Trump richly deserves impeachment but there is zero chance the Republicans in the Senate, good soldiers all marching behind Trump, would convict Trump. A failed Congressional attempt to remove Trump would provide Trump, good at posing as the aggrieved victim, a chance to climb back from his current rock-bottom approval rating.

Like a matador with a wounded and angry bull, the Democrats should skip the spectacular kill and continue to deliver justice through a thousand cuts until this nasty bull collapses of its own weight.