Republicans must reckon with how they abandoned the Constitutional responsibility to remove Donald Trump because he is a criminal

John M. Crisp: A third impeachment❓ What if there’s no choice❓
Holding the commander in chief accountable for constitutional violations isn’t optional for lawmakers. Echo opinion published in Mercury News, a California newspaper.

Nothing in this column is meant to suggest that if Democrats achieve a majority in the House in next week’s midterms, they should immediately impeach Donald Trump for a third time.

Republicans are already rejecting hasty calls for impeachment by some impulsive Democrats as unalloyed political payback, and in some cases, they’d be right. And an ugly third impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate might do more harm than good. In fact, America needs the spectacle and drama of another impeachment like it needs another forever war.

But here’s the problem: The Constitution provides not only the possibility of impeachment, it seems to impose an obligation, as well: It doesn’t say that a president “may be removed,” it says that a president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

In other words, the House and Senate have not only a right, but also a responsibility, to remove a president or other officers who have arguably committed “Treason, Bribery, and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Here’s what the House could face in January: Trump has called our current involvement with Iran a “military operation,” a “mini-war,” a “little excursion” and a “little trip,” but, let’s face it: It’s a war. Only Congress has the power to declare war. The president is empowered to use military force in limited ways by the War Powers Resolution of 1973, but Trump has blown past those limitations with little more than a peep out of Congress. The war is in a precarious pause, but it’s likely that Trump, in a stunningly cynical calculation, will resume bombing after the midterms.

So how should a Democratic House majority deal with a president who is in violation of both the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution? Is there any higher crime than taking our nation to war in violation of the Constitution and the law❓ The House would have not only a right to act, but also an obligation.

Why does this matter❓ To prevent future presidents from committing the same offense, of course.

This principle is especially relevant in the case of Trump. In 2019, as the Trump administration held on to nearly 💲400 million in security aid for Ukraine that had already been approved by Congress, Trump conditioned its release on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s willingness to investigate one of Trump’s political opponents, Joe Biden. You remember: “I would like you to do us a favor, though…”

The House duly impeached Trump. The Republican Senate let him off the hook. And now Trump’s relationship with Ukraine is thoroughly transactional. He has no qualms about threatening Ukraine by withholding military support unless he gets what he wants, which is essentially a Ukrainian surrender.

It’s the same with Trump’s second impeachment: On January 13, 2021, the House impeached Trump for “incitement of insurrection” after the January 6 attack on the capitol. Again, the Senate gave Trump a pass, even though seven Senate Republicans voted to convict him.

Six years later Trump is showing signs of his willingness to use federal power to interfere with next week’s midterms. Last week he directed his Department of Justice (and it is “his”) to file a lawsuit to block the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if his preferred Republican candidate doesn’t win.

Further, Trump loyalists and election deniers have been installed in positions that situate them to challenge and obstruct the results of the midterms. When asked about implementing the Insurrection Act in connection with the midterms, Trump said, “I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.”

It’s impossible to imagine that Trump will gracefully accept a midterm election that establishes a Democratic majority in the House and/or Senate. He’s already made one attempt to overturn a legitimate election without suffering consequences. If he tries to do it again, how can the Democrats avoid the responsibility — the obligation — of holding him to account with a third impeachment❓

Trump’s escape from his two impeachments have only emboldened him. He learned nothing from them. Have we❓

John M. Crisp is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. ©2026 Tribune Content Agency.

Cult leader Donald Trump and Republican enablers

Opinion echo published in the The Detroit News by Harry Litman: Trump's impeachment defense is threadbare and irrelevant. But coward Republicans are supporting him.

Donald Trump’s hastily assembled impeachment legal team has submitted written arguments in his defense that are threadbare, amateurish and replete with irrelevancies.

Nonetheless, as it stands Trump figures to walk out of the Senate a winner.  (Maine Writer- I disagree with this particular statement by Litman.  Trump is not a winner, but he a cult leader that Republicans are somehow supporting like it's their political addiction.)

On Tuesday, the House impeachment managers filed a persuasive and on-point 80-page brief. It spends 35 pages on a methodical account of facts and evidence that draws a direct — and hard to refute — connection between Trump’s conduct starting in late December and the violent storming of the Capitol that stunned the nation on January 6.

At the same time, the House managers eloquently invoke the broader themes of constitutional principle and historical purpose that justify the House’s impeachment resolution, and show that the process Congress is now engaged in is deeply consequential to the republic.

Trump’s lawyers, on the other hand, seem to have gotten lost on their way to offering a hasty initial defense for a minor offense in a state trial court, “answering” the House allegations in rote fashion: Their client denies all wrongdoing. The brief‘s response to the contents of the article of impeachment against Trump is mostly “the 45th president denies.”

The shortcomings of the response may reflect delicate negotiations with a truculent client, one who sacked a different legal team over the weekend. The departed attorneys, according to unnamed sources, refused to commit professional suicide by affirming the Trumpian lie that the 2020, presidential election was stolen.

In fact, the new Trump team, not surprisingly, isn’t pursuing the Big Lie either. It would not only ensnare them in falsehoods (when attorneys lie professionally they can lose their licenses), it would add to the contention that Trump supported, even encouraged, the insurrection and that it was justified. In other words, it would hurt his case, not help it.

Instead, the former president’s defense rests on a blizzard of nonsense. The brief asserts, for example, that because Trump is out of office, the House’s article of impeachment is “moot and a non-justiciable question” — a court can’t decide it. In fact, most questions in the impeachment realm are “non-justiciable” because the Constitution commits them not to the courts but to the political system, the Senate, for a final decision. What the Senate as a body says about when an impeachment trial can take place, in other words, goes.

The brief further argues that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on Jan. 6, which the House cites to justify “incitement to insurrection,” was “protected speech,” and that the impeachment violates Trump’s right to “free speech and thought.” That’s another swing and a miss.

The First Amendment has no applicability to an impeachment charge. Many, if not most, impeachable offenses by their nature are “speech.” For example, President Richard Nixon’s command to the FBI to stand down in investigating the Watergate affair. The House can surely pursue impeachment if a president’s speech abrogates the president’s duty to uphold and defend the Constitution.

It only gets worse from there.

Trump’s lawyers say the House deprived their client of “due process” by “rushing to issue the Article of Impeachment,” and that a single article of impeachment can’t be valid because it covers multiple actions. Both concepts, again, are borrowed from criminal law; they have no relevance to impeachment. And even if we read the “due process” complaint metaphorically, it’s obvious that Trump is being afforded ample notice and opportunity to defend himself.

The defense also tries to claim that the House impeachment resolution is a “bill of attainder,” a law passed specifically to target an individual for criminal prosecution. Bills of attainder are prohibited by the Constitution, but the brief is grasping at straws. Under its tortured reasoning, any impeachment would qualify as a bill of attainder.

That leaves one final defense. It, too, is errant, but it is likely to carry the day. In the Tuesday filing, it’s the bare assertion — with no argument from text, structure or history — that the Constitution itself does not permit the Senate to try an official whose term has expired.

But as I’ve said, along with a majority of constitutional scholars, it’s the Constitution that leaves it to the Senate to decide this issue. In at least two historical instances, senators have already allowed impeachment trials to go forward even after the defendant was “removed.” It did it again just days ago by rejecting Sen. Rand Paul’s point of order that sought to dismiss Trump’s second impeachment trial before it could begin.

That’s the right result under constitutional text, practice and history. The House managers’ brief adds to the point with a nice reference. Article 1, they wrote, gives the Senate “sole power to try all impeachments.” Trump was duly impeached by the House, ergo the Senate can try him.

Still, the vote count on Paul’s point of order showed that the “it’s too late” constitutional argument will probably attract sufficient support to prevent Trump’s conviction. A majority of Republican senators appear ready to ignore text and precedent — as well as the violence they witnessed and lived through — because blindness will give them a way to wriggle out of passing judgment on Trump’s behavior.

It is a shame, literally, that any Republican senator would shirk his or her duty to pass judgment on the merits of the case against Trump. As was true in the 45th president’s first impeachment, Senate Democrats are left to play to the court of history. There they will prevail.

Harry Litman is a former U.S. attorney and the host of the podcast "Talking Feds."

Maine Writer- In other words, cowardly and hypocritical Republicans are enabling cult Trumpziim. Trump is guilty but Republicans are blinded by cultism.

Trump gave aid and comfort to enemies of the U.S. Constitution

14th Amendment Section 3. No person shall be a senator, or representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House remove such disability.

By Philip Zelikow- Published in Lawfare and the History News Network online newspaper.

Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has practiced law and served in various government positions, including as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

Time has come for Congress to contemplate how to hold Donald Trump accountable for his efforts to overthrow the election and incite an insurrection. After all, the last time American citizens made such a concerted, violent effort to overthrow U.S. leaders was in April 1865, when a group of conspirators murdered President Abraham Lincoln and attacked other members of his Cabinet.

As others have noticed, Congress can pursue either impeachment or the invocation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Impeachment has gotten the bulk of public attention, but it’s fitting to take a closer look at Section 3. The 14th Amendment path is true to the facts and preferable procedurally, as compared to impeachment.

The 14th Amendment disqualifies any enemy of the Constitution of the United States from holding state or federal office if that person, as a public official, had previously taken an oath to support the Constitution. Congress has the duty to enforce the 14th Amendment and only Congress, “by vote of two-thirds of each House[,]” has the power to enforce the provision and to remove the disqualification.

How might Congress go about enforcing Section 3? It can simply decide in any manner it wishes, including a resolution adopted by majority votes, that Donald Trump has “given aid or comfort to the enemies” of the Constitution of the United States. The U.S. Senate, for example, refused to seat Zebulon Vance in 1871 when North Carolina elected him to the Senate because, as a former congressman, he had violated his former oath by serving the Confederacy.

In the extensive discussions of this option, for instance, by Gerard Magliocca and Daniel Hemel here on Lawfare, there are two points that may be missed in those thickets and that require emphasis.

First, the 14th Amendment does not require the Senate to conclude that Trump engaged in an insurrection. The amendment requires only that Congress conclude that Trump gave aid or comfort to enemies of the Constitution. This he did, both on Jan. 6 and in the broader context of the events after the presidential election of 2020.

The House of Representatives has already adopted this conclusion. The article of impeachment adopted by the House found that Trump violated his oath to defend the Constitution “by willfully inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” It also found that this conduct was “consistent with his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election.” Thus, the House concluded, “In all of this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government.”

Hemel’s explanation of the relevant standard confused matters a bit because he discussed how “aid and comfort” was defined under the criminal law of treason, which applies to enemies “of the United States.” The 14th Amendment is not identical to the criminal law of treason: It refers to enemies of the Constitution.

What America just experienced was an assault by enemies at home who, while claiming to be patriots, sought to override and thus overthrow the Constitution’s procedures for electing a president. Though he had sworn to defend the Constitution as a public official, Trump gave aid and comfort to these enemies of the Constitution. He thereby, under the 14th Amendment, disqualified himself from holding future office unless the Congress chooses to remove the disqualification by a two-thirds vote.

The House already voted that Trump aided these enemies. The Senate could therefore just concur with the House’s conclusion, by majority vote, in a resolution. To make the legal implication of this shared conclusion clear, the resolution could add that, by these actions, Donald Trump gave aid or comfort to enemies of the Constitution of the United States. This would explicitly invoke the 14th Amendment standard. Period.

Magliocca is reluctant to find power for a congressional finding because he believes some judicial involvement is needed to establish 14th Amendment disability. But the 14th Amendment expressly gives Congress the direct constitutional authority to enforce its provisions, including by legislation.

Some might worry that a congressional finding violates the constitutional prohibition on bills of attainder, a legislative act that pronounces an individual’s guilt of a certain crime. But the congressional finding is not a prohibited bill of attainder. It is not a criminal conviction. The criminal law of treason is a separate matter with its own burdens of proof and penalties.

Magliocca refers to the use of the bill-of-attainder argument by a then-Supreme Court justice, Salmon Chase. The issue came up in the treason trial case of Jefferson Davis. It was voiced by one of the two circuit judges considering the matter, Supreme Court Chief Justice Chase, who was there in his circuit-riding role. The U.S. government thought this argument was meritless, as did the other judge hearing the case and as did lead sponsors of the 14th Amendment itself. The circuit court was therefore split. The issue was not settled by the U.S. Supreme Court only because President Andrew Johnson pardoned Davis before the case could be heard.

The strangeness of the bill-of-attainder argument is underscored if one understands the historical background. Cynthia Nicoletti, a University of Virginia colleague who teaches both law and history, is the leading scholar on the Davis case. She told me she was “sort of tickled that Davis’s argument, which was cooked up by Chase and handed to his lawyers for Chase’s political gain, is being taken seriously. I always regarded it as pure nonsense. What’s really interesting to me is how it takes on a life of its own once it’s taken out of context and printed in the federal reports.”

Chase wanted to get rid of the Davis case. He had an ex parte meeting with Davis’s lawyers and suggested to them that they argue for dismissal of the indictment on the ground that the 14th Amendment had already assessed his criminal punishment and that his treason trial was therefore double jeopardy. When the government’s lawyers objected to the silliness of this claim, Chase acted as if he had not heard of the bill-of-attainder argument before. Davis’s main lawyer had his own theories about the motivations for Chase’s unusual intervention, which the court alluded to in a veiled way. Those who are interested should read Chapter 14 of Nicoletti’s book (especially pp. 293-300).

The main point, then, is that Congress can apply the 14th Amendment disqualification to Trump, by majority vote. This congressional action might eventually be challenged in court if Trump did run again and got on a ballot. 

In fact, the same would happen if someone who was not native born got on the ballot to run for president.

Those who want a fuller sort of accountability for Trump can make the political and legal argument that, if the votes may be there, impeachment might well be preferable. But an impeachment trial and acquittal might also be unfortunate if it fails, if it redoubles public confusion (why are they impeaching him if he is out of office?), or if it derails urgent congressional business. That is why I think it is important to maintain and develop the 14th Amendment option.

Such a 14th Amendment disqualification provides accountability, in both form and substance. It would formally condemn Trump for aiding enemies of the Constitution, as he did in trying to overthrow a lawful election and then inciting the insurrection. The finding would disqualify him from public office.

Recent illegal airstrikes into Iraq are high crimes

"...violated not only the United Nations Charter but also the principle announced by the U.S. and other world powers at the Nuremberg trials.."

The News-Gazette (Champaign–Urbana)- echo opinion letter:

The illegal U.S. assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani should be sufficient grounds for additional articles of impeachment.

Recent illegal airstrikes into Iraq would be, too. In committing these high crimes, Donald Trump violated not only the U.N. Charter but also the principle announced by the U.S. and other world powers at the Nuremberg trials that “waging aggressive war” or “violations of sovereignty” are capital offenses. The U.S. officially incorporated both into its own law.

The claimed exception of “imminent threat” is a transparent lie. 

For any threat to be imminent, it must be in progress, not “developing plans,” as the administration claims. Then it would be necessary to take out fighters, not planners. Officials now say there are no imminent threats, compounding the contradiction.

Was Soleimani himself going to plant explosives? Add to this the recent report that Soleimani may have been in Iraq negotiating peace with Saudi Arabia.

The Iraqi parliament has demanded all foreign troops leave, but Trump refuses, further violating sovereignty. This after the U.S. invaded and overthrew the previous Iraqi state based on ridiculous lies.

And before that, the U.S. and Britain had overthrown the elected Iranian government, installing the Shah’s brutal torture regime, which led to the Islamic Revolution. What success.

Democrats may fear impeachment on such grounds, however, due to the risk for future Democratic presidents — all the more reason Republicans should support Trump’s impeachment.

From Ricky Baldwin, Urbana Illinois

Donald Trump's one truthful quote about "5th Avenue"

Donald Trump keeping his word- when lies are his only truth.  Trump is incapable of giving sworn testimony during impeachment proceedings, under oath, because he can only verify lies, while he denies truth. But, out of the huge pack of lies he has told to his cult followers, there is one truth. Unfortunately, he has proven that he can shoot somebody and not lose voters. Pathetic!

Opinion letter published in Texas, the Dallas Morning News.

The patriotic people who testified in the Intelligence Committee impeachment inquiry did so under oath. They saw a problem and reported it. They answered questions and had facts to back it up. They were willing to be held accountable for what they said. 

On the other hand, those who are trying to defend Donald Trump are not under oath so they can and have blown smoke and lied, as they do not expect to be held accountable. He shot that letter and phone call to Ukraine right down Main Street, just like he said he could (“I could shoot somebody in Times Square and it would be OK”) and just as he said they would, his less-than-patriotic cult said oh that’s OK. Shame!

Mary Veasey, McKinney Texas

Please listen to the evidence!

Put country first
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-dallas-morning-news/20191125/281754156170343

Response to: “Political disengagement is a rising threat — When we stop caring about what’s going on in Washington DC, the extremists run amok,” by Abby McCloskey, Opinion published in the Dallas Morning News.

Opinion Letter echo:  What sets our country apart from many other countries in the world is the genius of the U.S Constitution. Not always perfect, it strives to make our country a more perfect union. 

Moreover, I find ironic those who professed admiration for our Constitution in the tea party movement are the same people who want to rip it to pieces by ignoring the many malfeasances in office by Donald Trump.

Asking a foreign country to do opposition research of a political opponent is in my view, against the law, i.e. the Hatch Act. If not against the law, then this action is an abuse of power that makes the presidency, our Constitution and country weaker. Do we want to leave our children and future Americans a country that can’t function democratically? I don’t.

Those who support Trump, please listen to the evidence provided by the impeachment inquiry with an open mind. Consider what is at stake for the country, not the election prospects for Trump. What he has done in regards to shoring up his election prospects is grave. And it should worry us all.

From Russ Pate, Dallas, White Rock, Texas

Republicans bone spurs included putting Jim Jordan on the House Intel Committee

An echo opinion letter published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Cartoon published in the Florida newspaper Sun Sentinel

Nothing but excuses from Arkansas Representative Rick Crawford

Comedian Robin Williams (1951-2014) offering The Thinker toilet paper. This image reminds me of what Congressman Jim Jordan looks like everytime he spews diarrhea from the mouth.

Maine Writer- Obviously, Republicans preferred garbage mouth from Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who is under investigation for not reporting sexual misconduct, rather than Arkansas Rep. Rick Crawford, because they wanted a dirreha sound bite to put on the evening news.  Rather than bring Republican credible witnesses to the Intelligence Impeachment Hearing, they put motor mouth Jim Jordan on the committee to spew incohenence.  

Arkansas opinion - I almost choked on my toast while reading the news Saturday morning on my new electric newspaper.

After wiping the jam off the screen, I read that U.S. House Rep. Rick Crawford had gallantly surrendered his position on the hot-seat House Intelligence Committee to a fellow representative from Ohio, a more aggressive apologist and attack-dog for the president.

The article was overall pretty funny, but it was the last section that almost did me in: Representative Crawford started by accusing his committee chairman of being a 'liar' (good start to re-establishing a working relationship there, Rick), and excused his not attending the committee hearings regularly by calling it a "dog and pony show," and providing all the excuses under the sun for why he couldn't do the job we sent him to Congress to do.

The final sentence of the article was delivered like a Good Republican with a bad case of Alzheimer's and certified short-term memory loss: "If Democrats are 'weaponizing' impeachment, it sets a precedent for future presidents and future Congresses, Crawford added."

Can we perhaps recall Benghazi, the endless investigation of Hillary Clinton--that magically disappeared after her defeat--and the Star Chamber investigation of Bill Clinton? Can we please re-evaluate the history of "weaponizing" committee investigations?

But perhaps my representative just decided to be like Huckleberry Finn and duck out the back and lay low for a while. While you're out fishing on the river bank and another man is doing your job, you should have time to come up with some more excuses for the real estate salesman who accepts no constitutional limit on anything he wants. All the other excuses haven't held water for long.

Oh, our president does so love the crowds' roar, but if he could but love our nation and moral principles a little more ...

Danny Hancock, Lonoke, Arkansas

Maine Writer Post Script - Jim Jordan is a rambling idiot! Instead of calling credible witnesses to the Donald Trump impeachment hearings, the Republicans used a bone spur defense by putting Jim Jordan on the interviewing committee, just to create a false narrative about quid pro quo. 

Republicans illegally protecting a guilty Donald Trump with stupid civil disobedience

Republicans are quick to label civil disobedience but made the wrong decision to respond to herd mentality~ published in The New Yorker by Jelani Cobb

Republicans are always ready to stereotype civil disobedience with ugly labels like "extremists" or "leftists" and worse.  Nevertheless, when Republicans have been forced to accept the truth as a tool to demonstrate how they have been supporting the failed leadership of Donald Trump, a band of hurd mentality white male partisans decided to create their own extremist response. They stormed into a security protected hearing to protest the testimony of American citizens who were giving evidence about how Donald Trump has practiced "high crimes and misdemeanors" by requesting a quid pro quo from Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky until he agreed to lie about finding political dirt about former Vice-President of the United State Joe Biden.

A Clarifying, Upending Week in the Impeachment Inquiry
Republicans can protest all they want, but the facts increasingly indicate that the President committed impeachable violations.
By traditional civil-disobedience standards, the apparel of the protesters in the Capitol basement last Wednesday fell on the bespoke side. During the civil-rights movement, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee favored overalls, in solidarity with the humble citizens whose rights were being denied. In 2017, women protesting the Inauguration of the nation’s most prominent misogynist were identifiable by the pink “pussy hats” they wore. By contrast, the thirty-some House Republicans—all of them white and all but a few male—who stormed a secure hearing room appeared less “We Shall Overcome” than “We Are Overcompensated.”

The plan was to disrupt the deposition of Laura Cooper, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and an expert on Russia and Ukraine, who was to address a bipartisan group comprising members of the committees handling the inquiry into the impeachment of Donald Trump. The protesters decried what they considered the Soviet-style secrecy of the process. Some carried their cell phones into the room—a breach of security—tweeted about their antics, and ordered pizza. In effect, they were trying to stop a hearing that was in compliance with rules set in 2015 by the House—which at the time had a Republican majority—and which a number of them, as members of the committees involved, were already free to attend. In essence, the stunt was a high-profile display of fealty to Trump, who measures loyalty by a willingness to commit acts of self-abasement on his behalf.

After the recent explosive developments in the impeachment inquiry, such a display was almost to be predicted. (~hypocrites~ the Senate, Lindsey Graham simultaneously prepared a resolution, co-sponsored by the Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, to condemn the inquiry as “illegitimate”; forty-six Republicans signed it.) Here, too, Republicans were following the President’s lead.

On the eve of the 2016 election, Trump railed against a “rigged” political system that was conspiring to produce a victory for Hillary Clinton. Observers pointed to the recklessness of his words and to the ways in which delegitimatizing the system might eventually culminate in unrest. He has gone considerably farther down that road. Last week, he called Republicans who do not support him “human scum,” and referred to the impeaching process as a “lynching.” According to the N.A.A.C.P., between 1882 and 1968 nearly five thousand people were lynched in the United States, three-quarters of them African-Americans. None of them had a former U.S. Attorney and mayor of New York City acting as their personal lawyer, or an entire political party defending them.

The current situation has arisen not as a result of Democratic overreach but because the facts increasingly indicate that the President has committed impeachable violations. The G.O.P. protest came after closed-door testimony from William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, who, in a fifteen-page opening statement, described an explicit quid pro quo, in which Trump withheld military aid in the hope of pressuring President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch investigations into a debunked conspiracy theory about the 2016 election and into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Taylor’s statement is stunning in its allegations of self-interest guiding foreign policy toward a country fighting Russian aggression. Foreign policy is always a matter of balancing competing national interests, but the interests weighed here are not national, or at least not American—they are Russian and Trumpian.

The circumstances are so bizarre as to make the former national-security adviser John Bolton seem like a voice of restraint. Taylor reports that Bolton abruptly ended a meeting with Ukrainian officials at which Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, brought up the investigations, and later referred to the scheme as a “drug deal.” Taylor’s statement is notable not only for the details it provides but because it recounts his reactions to events as they unfolded. He was “embarrassed,” “uncomfortable,” “troubled,” “alarmed,” and “very concerned.” Those same words describe how much of the country has felt for the past three years.

The week’s developments both clarified and upended ideas about the potential impeachment of Trump. There really can no longer be substantial doubt of a quid pro quo. Taylor’s statement and those of other diplomats, along with the whistle-blower’s complaint and the record of Trump’s telephone conversation with Zelensky—not to mention the here-today-gone-later-today admission by Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, during a press briefing—have surely resolved the question.

A cornerstone of the comparisons between Watergate and the present national predicament has been the way that congressional hearings drove public opinion toward impeaching Richard Nixon. Support for impeaching Trump surged a few weeks ago, after the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced the inquiry. Taylor’s testimony appears to have raised the volume of the conversation about whether Trump’s actions warrant his removal from office. More testimony—in closed and open hearings—and additional facts, the argument presumes, will further move the public to support impeachment.

Such presumptions should not rest so easily. Trumpism is hostile to facts. The consequence may be more reactions like the one we saw last week. The House may deliver articles of impeachment before the end of the year. The findings that result may point to even more damning conclusions than have already been established. Trump, though, has been the lifelong beneficiary of a system in which his race, his wealth, and his lineage have allowed him to operate above the law. Both his personal attorney and Attorney General William Barr are attempting to institutionalize this kind of immunity as a perquisite of the Presidency. (On Thursday, the Times reported that the Justice Department has turned its review of the Russia investigation into a criminal inquiry.)

All of which suggests that Trump is partly correct about the situation resembling a lynching. The history of that act is replete with examples of men who operated outside the law, and believed that their offenses should carry no penalty. In that, the comparison brings to mind not the victims of lynchings but those who committed them. 

By Jelani Cobb

Donald Trump: history correlation with the doomed English King Charles I

Ed Simon is the associate editor of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a contributing editor at the History News Network.

Donald Trump has never read the US Constitution, because he wrongly calls the emoluments clause 'PHONY'

Trump and the Divine Right of Kings

We are forgetting that the true democratic winner of the 2016 election was "None of the Above"; i.e., those who did not vote or did not even bother to register? If God wanted us to vote, maybe she'd give real candidates. Then there's the Electoral College that the Dems were too dumb too disband after having recently lost a previous election despite getting more votes~ Victor Madeson.

The History News Network - Some ten days after the execution of King Charles I, a pamphlet with the Latinate title Eikon Basilike (which means “Royal Image”) appeared in the book stalls of London, attributed to the dead monarch and purporting to be a diary of his imprisonment. 

Within the book was an allegorical depiction of Charles: the king on penitential knee (nonetheless wearing the elaborate, regal clothes appropriate to his stature) while a ray of divine light penetrated his skull, generating for the monarch a vision of a shining crown. Eikon Basilike’s engraver William Marshall included an explanatory poem with the image: of the “boist’rous Windes and rageing waves/So triumph I. And shine more bright/In sad Affliction’s darksom night.” For Charles, a man who despite his tremendous authority was still checked by the ancient rights invested in the legislative branch, it was apparently very hard to be king.

Nobody feels sorrier for themselves than a monarch who discovers that their divine right is an illusion; nobody is more liable to lash out and project the blame for their predicament. For royalist defenders of the king, Charles had been unfairly assaulted by his Parliamentarian enemies; as a ruler gifted with the divine right of kings,all legislative and ecclesiastical prerogative was his, and as such his fall from grace could never be attributed to his own ineptitude or authoritarianism. When he (or his ghostwriter) announced “I would rather choose to wear a crown of thorns with my Saviour, than to exchange that of gold,” I’ve no doubt to read that sentiment as genuine; though when he follows up the subject of golden crowns by emphasizing that they and all that they represent are “due to me,” his political theory is clear. It turned out he was disastrously wrong about that.

In matters of syntax, grammar, punctuation, diction, and spelling, readers of Eikon Basilike will not necessarily see much rhetorical similarity between a sentence like the “aspersion which some men cast upon that action, as if I had designed by force to assault the House and Commons, and invade their privileges is so false, that as God best knows, I had no such intent” and a tweet which read “A Total Scam, by the Do Nothing Democrats. For the good of the Country, the Wirch Hunt (sic) should end now!” When it comes to intent and meaning, however, there’s a lot of overlap. Despite Charles’ erudition, there is a similar sense of aggrievement at being asked to do something that each man doesn’t want to do. Both ran into some trouble with their legislative branch, and both men similarly questioned the vested rights of those respective bodies to act as counterbalance to executive authority. And they’re both angry at being questioned about it.

Historical comparison is a fickle and ambiguous gambit; I don’t want to belabor the similarities beyond comprehension. There are cultural, social, and political differences that are so profound that it would be an act of intellectual malpractice for me to claim that 2019 bears too much similarity with 1649. In more superficial attributes concerning temperament, forbearance, and faith,there’s little that’s similar about the two. A reading of Eikon Basilike demonstrates that as unconvincing and self-serving as Charles’ theological arguments may be, they were genuine; a reading of Trump’s Twitter feed shows him to be a man of seemingly limitless non-faith (even while his evangelical supporters pretend otherwise). 

But, in another sense, the two men do share a certain philosophy of power, whereby that which is invested in the head of state is seemingly limitless and always justified by the simple fact that they’re the ones who are wielding it. For Charles, this was religiously justified – the monarch was touched by God and so was allowed authority over other men. Trump’s reasoning, however, bears more similarity to the fascist rhetorical trope of conflating the leader with some amorphous, ambiguous, faceless sense of “The People” (even while a majority of Americans now support impeachment and removal from office). 

Nonetheless, the conclusion is the same – nothing that the leader does can be illegal simply because the leader is the one doing it.

While Charles’ writing (or whoever wrote Eikon Basilike) is certainly more sophisticated than that of Trump, the over-weening sense of wounded pride from an autocrat spurned is present in the language of both. Defending himself against the observation that he had violated the rights of Parliament, Charles emphasizes that this claim “is so false.” (Evocations of screeching “Fake News!” from 350 years ago, perhaps.) Historian Michael Braddick writes in God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars that the pamphlet attributed to Charles was “by far the greatest propaganda success following the regicide, calling forth anxious… rival histories.” Confusion sowed by Trump and his defenders serves a similar purpose:to craft an alternative history in real time. Lest I be accused of being the historian who tends to see their own field of study in whatever the headlines for that day are, I should emphasize that it was actually Trump’s defenders who first implicitly made the comparison to Charles, and as such a parsing of what those similarities are is helpful at this dangerous moment.

Sitting next to the vampiric Rudy Giuliani on FOX News’ The Ingraham Angle, Trump surrogate and attorney Joseph diGenova claimed with supreme self-seriousness that “This is regicide by another name, fake impeachment.” 

Indeed, it’s helpful to note that impeachment isn’t regicide, it’s not political execution, it’s not imprisonment, it’s not even necessarily being removed from your job. It’s an investigation and congressional censure; realistically the most Trump has to fear is being fired (unless some of his past shady dealings still being investigated by the Southern District of Manhattan have him more worried about imprisonment). What’s illustrative about the histrionics implicit in the word “regicide,” however, are what they tell us about how Trump and his supporters see the president. 

If impeachment is “regicide,” then the conclusion must be that Trump is a king. DiGenova’s use of the word implies that he sees no problem with interpreting Trump as a king, only a problem with those who would dare to question that authority. That this is a deeply worrying way of understanding the executive goes without saying.

“Regicide” is not a word you often hear self-implied in American political discourse. The U.S. founders in many ways worked in the stead of their English antecedents, and consequently were attuned to the theory and rhetoric of that previous century. In this manner they were inheritors of a virulently anti-monarchical politics. In a nation where, despite our many hypocrisies on the actual deployment of such power, we historically blanche at anything that seems too symbolically regal when applied to the office of the presidency, there is something sinister in diGenova’s language. What’s clear is that Trump and his surrogates understand the position as implying complete agency and complete authority over the other branches of government, that their understanding of power in that manner has more to do with Charles’ divine right than it does with the United States’ Constitution.

Trump’s defenders are brazenly putting forth a counter-narrative of American law, one that is explicitly anti-American. Council to the President, attorney Pat Cipollone wrote in an October 8th letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and three other congressional committee heads that the impeachment hearings are “contrary to the Constitution of the United States and all past bipartisan precedent.” A strange claim in a nation that has impeached two presidents before, and was on the way to impeaching another, and where Article 1, Section 2, Clause 5 of the actual Constitution itself explicitly states that “The House of Representatives… shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”

There’s a certain smug style in liberal politics which would (and has) claimed that Cipollone’s gambit demonstrates an unfamiliarity with the Constitution, that Trump and his supporters are simply too stupid to understand what’s in the document. I’d venture that that’s a misinterpretation, and a dangerous onebecause what Cipollone is actually doing in that letter is abandoning the dictates of the Constitution by redefining the Constitution out of existence. When Cipollone says that something is “unconstitutional,” that should not be taken literally, he is simply using it as a synonym which means “Something that my boss doesn’t agree with.” When diGenova says “regicide,” he means “Any process which questions Trump’s authority.” Such claims aren’t being made in this way by these men because these men are stupid, they’re being made in this way because these men are conniving, disingenuous, manipulative and incredibly threatening to the politics of a free republic.

An argument could be made that what we’re witnessing is one of those periodic, dialectical flare ups that have occurred in the Anglophone world since Charles’ day (albeit at a hopefully much smaller scale). These are conflicts over who should have more power: a representative legislature or a unitary executive. Demographer Kevin Phillips argued (not without some disciplinary controversy) in 1998’s The Cousins’ War: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare and the Triumph of Anglo-America that certain events from the English and American revolutions through the American Civil War need to be read as part of the same conflict over questions of power and authority. He writes that the “English Civil War is the necessary starting point, not just for a piece of Britain’s history but for America’s. This is where the events and alignments leading up to the American Revolution began.”

According to Philips, each of those three conflicts followed a certain Manichean script: in the English Revolution of the seventeenth-century there were Parliamentarians who defended their rights against an absolute monarch; there was a similar dynamic in the American Revolution. The American Civil War represented the latest iteration of a democratizing political force as the Union fought to expand republican values against the aristocratic Confederacy. In The Cousin’s War (Civil War), this dialectic explains Anglophone political history; the periodic pitting of an authoritarian, aristocratic class against nobler, democratizing movements.

Read as such, Trump’s arguments shouldn’t be understood as just disingenuous or misinformed (though they certainly can be those things), but as primarily a restatement of that old lie about the divine right of kings, and as a repudiation of the legislative authority that goes back to the Magna Carta. In Trump, we have an inhabitant of the Oval Office more similar to King George III than George Washington, a man in the shadow of Jefferson Davis rather than Abraham Lincoln. DiGenova and Cipollone’s claims share with Eikon Basilike the sense of aggrievement and privilege, they also share in some sense the same political theory regarding the rights of kings. It’s encouraging to remember that in the past wars enumerated by Philips, the authoritarian side ultimately lost. Yet, after each of those victories there was significant backsliding towards an undemocratic status quo.

Something to keep in mind as we hope, prepare, and plan for Trump’s impeachment: an assault on this president is less radical and perhaps not as important as an assault on the very idea of the presidency. Executive power is fundamentally authoritarian regardless of who wields it; as Astra Taylor writes in Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Miss it When it’s Gone, “The forces of oligarchy have been enabled, in part, by our tendency to accept a highly proscribed notion of democracy, one that limits popular power to the field of electoral politics, ignoring the other institutions and structures… that shape people’s lives.” Taylor argues that “This is a mistake.”

Following the downfall of Trump, we should neither desire nor countenance any restoration, any return of a simple status quo. From the eclipse of this authoritarian moment we can perhaps dream of more egalitarian, more emancipatory, more democratic arrangements. Such was the desire of the poet John Milton, who eight months after Eikon Basilike wrote his rejoinder Eikonoklastes. Milton enthuses that “We expect therefore something more, that must distinguish free Government from slavish.” His revolution ultimately failed, but ours doesn’t necessarily have to. Any “Resistance” that only imagines the downfall of Trump doesn’t deserve the name, for we must dream bigger than the deposition of kings. Impeachment is a necessity, but what is required is a reorganization of our politics, our economics, and our culture to ensure that future tyrants will not lead in his stead. We require a politics which is finally commensurate with a nation of free women and men.

In the file "I told you so" with tragic consequences

Echo published in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin

Donald Trump’s Ukraine Scandal Has Its Roots in RussiaBoth situations stem from the President’s apparent willingness to accept political favors from foreign leaders, and his eagerness to do Putin’s bidding.

(Maine Writer- In the file of "I told you so!) 

Donald Trump and his allies nearly succeeded in consigning the Mueller report to oblivion. William Barr, Trump’s compliant Attorney General, got a jump on the process when he preëmpted the public release of the report by providing a misleading summary, which minimized the special counsel’s findings on Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. 

Trump compounded Barr’s distortions by falsely and endlessly repeating that the report found “no collusion, no obstruction.” Congressional Democrats did little for the cause of clarity by using the report as an occasion to debate the semantics of what constitutes an impeachment investigation. And Robert Mueller himself invited a certain measure of confusion by telling his story in dense, legalistic prose. Barely six months after he delivered the report, it had already faded into the mists of Trumpiana: post-Sean Spicer, pre-whistle-blower.

The whistle-blower revealed Trump’s July 25th phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, in which, according to the official memorandum, Trump said that he wanted a “favor,” then asked Zelensky to look into negative information concerning Joe Biden, at the time the Democratic front-runner for 2020. The request was so plainly an abuse of Presidential power—Zelensky was awaiting delivery of military aid already approved by Congress—that Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, launched an investigation focused on impeachment, to be led by Adam Schiff, the chair of the Intelligence Committee. Mueller and Russia are out; Schiff and Ukraine are in.

But the Russia and Ukraine scandals are, in fact, one story. 

Indeed, the Trump's false denials in both of them capture the common themes: soliciting help from foreign interests for partisan gain, followed by obstruction of efforts to uncover what happened. Both, too, share roots in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mueller’s two indictments of Russian interests—the first involving the use of social media and the second the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails—are perhaps the most detailed chronicle ever published of foreign interference in a U.S. political campaign. Trump’s team was appreciative. When a public-relations adviser to a Russian oligarch’s family e-mailed Donald Trump, Jr., offering dirt on Hillary Clinton that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” the candidate’s son gave a straightforward reply: “If it’s what you say I love it.”

Just two years earlier, Putin had invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. The government in Kiev went back and forth between leaders who wanted to accommodate Putin’s regime and others who wanted to enlist the help of the West to push back against it. 

Moreover, the political consultant of choice for the pro-Russian faction was Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chair in the summer of 2016. As Mueller documented, Manafort passed proprietary campaign polling data to pro-Russian Ukrainians. The campaign-era Trump portrayed in the report suffered from one major limitation: he wasn’t President. He clearly welcomed Putin’s assistance, and promised a better relationship with Russia; but he was still just a businessman from New York.

The whistle-blower’s complaint is the epilogue to Mueller’s report: the coming of age of an illegal aspiring colluder.

(In the file of "I told you so") It’s important to note, as well, that, in the Ukrainian chapter, Trump has done Putin’s bidding, to the extent that he can, going so far as to embrace a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 campaign. The rest of the U.S. government has never been as enamored of Putin as Trump is. That includes Republicans in Congress, who joined the Democrats in voting for military aid to Ukraine. Trump wants no part of conflict with Putin, but the aid package tied his hands. There was a revealing moment in his joint news conference with Zelensky at the United Nations last month. Almost as an aside, Trump said, “I really believe that President Putin would like to do something. I really hope that you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem.” Ukraine doesn’t have a “problem” with Putin—it has an invasion by Putin.

In the July 25th phone call, Trump did what he couldn’t do as a candidate: he tried to leverage the power of the Presidency to extract partisan political advantage. Texts of U.S. officials, released last week, further suggest an attempted quid pro quo. On September 1st, William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Kiev, asked, “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Gordon Sondland, a former Republican fund-raiser who is Trump’s Ambassador to the European Union, replied, “Call me.”
Ten times Donald Trump obstructed justice documented in the Mueller Report.- CBS News reports.

Mueller did chronicle Trump’s efforts, as President, to interfere with his investigation. Trump made repeated attempts to rein in or fire Mueller, and was saved from that misconduct only by the refusal of people around him (including Don McGahn, his White House counsel; Rob Porter, his staff secretary; and even Corey Lewandowski, his otherwise zealous onetime campaign manager) to carry out his directives. The lesson of the past few weeks is that those restraining figures have left the building, literally and figuratively. Trump is currently surrounded by people like Barr and Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, who are willing to debase their offices to indulge Trump’s abuse of power. The unhinged arias of Rudolph Giuliani, his personal lawyer, are a constant from the Russian chapter to the Ukrainian. In customary fashion, Trump has sought to normalize his corruption, by bragging that he could recruit even more countries, including China, to conduct political investigations for him. That’s still an abuse of power, even though he’s now doing it in public, rather than bothering to try to hide it.

Mueller famously closed his investigation without rendering a judgment on whether the President committed crimes. “We did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct,” he wrote. The time, though, for ultimate conclusions is approaching. 

One way of looking at Trump’s evolution from candidate to President, from Mueller’s time to Schiff’s, is that his abuses are accelerating, with each unpunished act serving as a license for more. The Constitution gives Congress the tools to halt this cycle in Trump’s out-of-control Presidency. The question now is whether the people’s representatives will use them. This article appears in the print edition of the October 14, 2019, issue, with the headline “From Russia to Ukraine.”

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The NewYorker since 1993, and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.

"No one is above the law," Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi's full remarks as she called for an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump
USA TODAY

Nancy Pelosi Finally Goes All In on Impeachment

"Donald Trump's conduct revealed his 'betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections',” Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi Announces Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump- Faced with new allegations against President Trump and administration stonewalling, Democrats have ended months of caution. (The New York Times reports.)

WASHINGTON. DC – Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday that the House of Representatives will launch an official impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

Here are her remarks as delivered:

Good afternoon. Last Tuesday, we observed the anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution on September 17.

Sadly, on that day, the Intelligence Community Inspector General formally notified the Congress that the Administration was forbidding him from turning over a whistle blower complaint. On Constitution Day. This is a violation of law.

Shortly thereafter, press reports began to break of a phone call by the President of the United States calling upon a foreign power to intervene in his election. This is a breach of his constitutional responsibilities.

The facts are these: the Intelligence Community Inspector General, who was appointed by President Trump, determined that the complaint is both of ‘urgent concern and credible,’ and its disclosure, he went on to say, that it ‘relates to one of the most significant and important of the Director of National Intelligence’s responsibilities to the American people.’

On Thursday, the Inspector General testified before the House Intelligence Committee, stating that the Acting Director of National Intelligence blocked him from disclosing the whistle blower complaint. This is a violation of the law.

The law is unequivocal. The DNI, it says, the Director of National Intelligence ‘shall’ provide Congress the full whistle blower complaint.

For more than 25 years, I have served on the Intelligence Committee – as a Member, as the Ranking Member, as part of the Gang of 4 even before I was in the Leadership.

I was there when we created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That did not exist before 2004.

I was there ever earlier in 90’s when we wrote the whistle blower laws and continue to write them, to improve them to ensure the security of our intelligence and the safety of our whistle blowers.

I know what their purpose was, and we proceeded with balance and caution as we wrote the laws. I can say with authority, that the Trump Administration’s actions undermine both: our national security and our intelligence and our protections of whistle blowers – more than both.

This Thursday, the Acting DNI will appear before the House Intelligence Committee.

At that time, he must turn over the whistle blower’s full complaint to the Committee. He will have to choose whether to break the law or honor his responsibility to the Constitution.

On the final day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when our Constitution was adopted, Americans gathered on the steps of Independence Hall to await the news of the government our Founders had crafted.

They asked Benjamin Franklin, ‘What do we have: a republic or a monarchy?’ Franklin replied: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’

Our responsibility is to keep it.
Our republic endures because of the wisdom of our Constitution, enshrined in three co-equal branches of government, serving as checks and balances on each other.

The actions taken to date by the President have seriously violated the Constitution – especially when the President says, ‘Article II says, I can do whatever I want.’

For the past several months, we have been investigating in our Committees and litigating in the courts, so the House can gather ‘all the relevant facts and consider whether to exercise its full Article I powers, including a constitutional power of the utmost gravity — approval of articles of impeachment.’

And this week, the President has admitted to asking the President of Ukraine to take actions which would benefit him politically. The action of – the actions of the Trump Presidency revealed the dishonorable fact of the President’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security, and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.

Therefore, today, I am announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry. I am directing our six Committees to proceed with their investigations under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry.

The President must be held accountable. No one is above the law.

Getting back to our Founders – in the darkest days of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine wrote: ‘The times have found us.’ The times found them to fight for and establish our democracy. The times have found us today, not to place ourselves in the same category of greatness as our Founders, but to place us in the urgency of protecting and defending our Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. In the words of Ben Franklin, to keep our Republic.

I thank our Chairmen – Chairman Nadler, Chairman Schiff. Chairman Nadler of Judiciary. Chairman Schiff of Intelligence. Chairman Engel of Foreign Affairs. Chairman Cummings of Oversight and Chairman Cummings I have been in touch with constantly. He is a master of so much but including, Inspectors General and whistleblowers. Congressman Richie Neal of the Ways and Means Committee. Congresswomen Maxine Waters of the Financial Services Committee.

And I commend all of our Members, our colleagues for their thoughtful, thoughtful approach to all of this – for their careful statements.

God bless them and God Bless America. Thank you all.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/transcript-nancy-pelosi-s-speech-trump-impeachment-n1058351

Robert Mueller gave the Shakespeare conclusion - "dear Brutus..."

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” *
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

In my opinion, if Americans can't see the truth in the message below, delivered by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, then we deserve what we have in the failed and flawed leadership of the evil Donald Trump.

Mueller:  …[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. … Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime [add: because to do so would violate due process principles], it does not exonerate him.’ (italics added)..(published opinion by Lani Davis, in The Hill...)

And Mueller's refusal on Wednesday to state legal conclusions on the overwhelming evidence of obstruction of justice in his report, he was actually adhering to due process principles. He passed the baton to where it belongs: the impeachment and removal power uniquely possessed under our Constitution by the U.S. Congress.

Special counsel Robert Mueller, in his first public statement about his Russia probe on May 29, did not exonerate Donald Trump. He, instead, explained why his office never indicted him for the crime of obstruction of justice.

"As set forth in the report, after the investigation, if we had confidence that the president did not clearly commit a crime, we would have said so," he told reporters at the Justice Department Wednesday.

*Prophetic Shakespeare.....