Cincinnati echo - Impeach Trump now!

Republicans created a brouhaha about the tragic raid in Benghazi, Libya when nothing came of any evidence towards Secretary Clinton, who had nothing to do with the outcome.  Yet, when confronted with treasonous behavior among the incompetent Donald Trump, the GOP are oblivious to a preponderance of evidence pointing to his incompetence.

In the Cincinnati Enquirer- another call for Donald Trump to be impeached.

Mark P. Painter, is a contributor to the Cincinnati Enquirer. This is an amazingly frank commentary.

There is no doubt now about the need to impeach Trump

Mark P. Painter, a lifelong Cincinnatian, served as a judge for 30 years and is a member of The Enquirer Board of Contributors.

He wrote, "In February, I said here that Donald Trump must be impeached. Some people said I was premature, in that he had only begun violating the Constitution."

If there were any doubt then, there is surely none now.

The president continues to violate the Emoluments Clause every day, by taking profits from his companies paid in by foreigners. The Trump Hotel in Washington has become the place for diplomats to stay, enriching the Trump clan, and Trump himself. He has refused to divest his business dealings. The Palm Beach Club has raised initiation fees to $200,000. And sold how many new memberships?

He has appointed the most incompetent and dangerous cabinet members in history: a climate-change denier as head of the EPA; a foe of public education as education secretary.
At the G20 summit, where the American president was always, until now, considered the leader, Trump was marginalized. (He was a lonely wall flower at the big people's table!)

In fact, the other 19 nations ealized he was totally out of his league. The Putin meeting was good until it wasn’t. We were going to work together on cybersecurity. The president at first either pretended to believe it – or even worse – did believe it. The only thing worse that comes to mind would be enlisting Kim Jong-un to help us contain nuclear weapons. But then the anagram, Reince Priebus, trotted out immediately to say that, of course, Trump did not believe anything Putin said.

On-the-job training isn’t working.

No one can possibly read the Tweetstream daily and not, as I’ve said before, be convinced that our leader is 1.) illiterate, 2.) incompetent, and 3.) insane.

Now we have the Russia Connection becoming more apparent. 

There has never been any doubt that the Russians interfered in our election. But now we know that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer, soliciting valuable information. Legal experts are now debating whether what Trump Jr. and Kushner have admitted to constitutes treason or just an election-law felony.Richard Painter (no relation), the former George W. Bush ethics lawyer, has opted for the latter. 

From The Hill: “Painter said the Bush administration would not have allowed the meeting, which was attended by Trump Jr., then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, now a White House senior adviser, to happen. ‘If this story is true, we’d have one of them if not both of them in custody by now, and we’d be asking them a lot of questions,’ he said. ‘This is unacceptable. 

This borders on treason, if it is not itself treason.’” Well, we now know it is true.

Charles Pierce, in his not-to-be-missed daily column on Esquire.com: “The government of the United States is a shambles. An incompetent administration headed by an unqualified buffoon is now descending into criminal comedy and maladroit backstabbing. It is an administration that not only self-destructs but glories in the process. There seems to be no end to it, and no desire to end it by the people who actually have the power to do so.”

One problem of the Trump attempted presidency is there is just so much absurdity. One day’s revelation is not yet digested when on the next day, or in the next hour, a further one comes to light. Trump has been surrounded by fraud and criminality his entire life –it’s just the norm for him.

But when Trump Jr. was offered help from the Russian government for his father’s campaign and replied, “I love it,” the beginning of the end came into view. It is criminal for sure, treason perhaps. Not just for the son. What did his father know, and when did he know it? And insanity is no defense to impeachment.

It’s just a matter of time before someone at that meeting decides to tell the whole truth to save their own posterior. That’s when there will be another “Saturday Night Massacre,” because Trump Sr. will feel that he has to fire Mueller. But will the attorney general – the execrable Sessions – have the guts to resign, as Elliott Richardson and Bill Ruckelshaus both did, rather than fire the special prosecutor?

When we last had a criminal president, there were people of honor in the justice department.