The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: article ii
Fox Judge: Guilty Trump Was Acquitted, Not Exonerated

Fox Judge: Guilty Trump Was Acquitted, Not Exonerated

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell, 1984

The Senate trial of President Donald Trump ended not with a bang but a whimper. What different outcome could one expect from a trial without so much as a single witness, a single document, any cross-examination or a defendant respectful enough to show up?

Law students are taught early on that a trial is not a grudge match or an ordeal; it is a search for the truth. Trial lawyers know that cross-examination is the most effective truth-testing tool available to them. But the search for the truth requires witnesses, and when the command from Senate Republican leaders came down that there shall be no witnesses, the truth-telling mission of Trump’s trial was radically transformed into a steamroller of political power.

And in its wake is a Congress ceding power to the presidency, almost as if the states had ratified a constitutional amendment redefining the impeachment language to permit a president to engage in high crimes and misdemeanors so long as he believes that they are in the national interest and so long as his party has an iron-clad grip on the Senate.

When the House of Representatives voted in favor of two articles of impeachment against Trump, it characterized his lawlessness as contempt of Congress and an abuse of power. The contempt of Congress consisted of Trump’s orders to subordinates to disregard congressional subpoenas. Both Republican- and Democratic-controlled Houses of Representatives have deemed such presidential instructions in an impeachment inquiry as impeachable per se.

The abuse allegations address Trump’s solicitation of assistance for his reelection campaign from a foreign government by holding up the release of $391 million in military aid to the same foreign government. These funds were congressionally appropriated and ordered to be paid by legislation that Trump had signed into law.

Federal law prohibits such solicitation as criminal and prohibits government officials from seeking personal favors in return for performing their governmental duties. The latter is bribery.

Because the solicitation that Trump committed was a crime against the government, it is among those referred to when the Constitution was written as a “high” crime. High crimes are a constitutional basis for impeachment, along with bribery and treason.

The evidence that Trump did this is overwhelming and beyond a reasonable doubt, and no one with firsthand knowledge denied it. Numerous government officials recounted that the presidential leverage of $391 million for a personal political favor did occur and the government’s own watchdog concluded that it was indisputably unlawful.

The favor Trump sought was an announcement by the Ukrainian government of the commencement of an investigation of Trump’s potential presidential foe, former Vice President Joe Biden.

While the Senate was hearing House prosecution managers argue their case, and Trump’s lawyers challenging those arguments, The New York Times revealed that John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, had authored an as yet unpublished book demonstrating that the House case against Trump was true. True, because, unlike the senators who shut their eyes and ears at Trump’s trial, Bolton saw for himself the presidential tit-for-tat machinations that the House had alleged and, if proven, were criminal and impeachable.

The Times also revealed the existence of 24 emails sent by Trump aides manifesting indisputably his lawless behavior. But they are secret.

At the same time, two signal events occurred in the trial. The first was an argument by Trump’s lawyers that every president seeking reelection believes his victory will be in the national interest and thus all presidential efforts toward that victory are constitutional and lawful.

This morally bankrupt, intellectually dishonest argument — which effectively resuscitates from history’s graveyard Richard Nixon’s logic that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” because the president is above the law — must have resonated with Senate Republican leaders. They coerced their Senate Republican colleagues into embracing the view that — since the president did not want Bolton to testify or White House emails to be revealed — they must bar all witnesses and documents.

The second signal event was shameful. It was the 51 to 49 Senate vote to bar witnesses and documents from the trial.

Isn’t it odd that a president who clamors for exoneration, who claimed loud and long that he committed no crime and did no wrong, who insisted that his request to the Ukrainian president to seek dirt on Biden in return for American financial assistance was “perfect,” would command the members of his own party to block testimony adverse to him — rather than hear it, cross-examine it, challenge it and thereby obtain the exoneration on the merits that he seeks?

Do innocent people behave this way?

If Trump really believes he did not commit any crimes and any impeachable offenses, why would he orchestrate blocking evidence? And who — having taken an oath to do “impartial justice” — would close their eyes to the truth? How could such a marathon of speeches possibly be considered a trial?

Trump will luxuriate in his victory. But the personal victory for him is a legal assault on the Constitution. The president has taken an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Instead, he has trashed it. How? By manipulating Senate Republicans to bar firsthand evidence and keep it from senatorial and public scrutiny, Trump and his Senate collaborators have insulated him and future presidents from the moral and constitutional truism that no president is above the law.

Somewhere, Richard Nixon is smiling.

Trump Claims He Has Presidential Power ‘That Nobody Has Ever Seen Before’

Trump Claims He Has Presidential Power ‘That Nobody Has Ever Seen Before’

President Donald Trump has many verbal ticks that often act as tells about what he is really thinking or doing. For example, CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale has argued that when the president tells a story in which someone calls him “sir,” he’s usually lying. Another tell is that when Trump refers to a true fact that “no one ever knew” or that “people have no idea about,” it almost certainly means that the president himself just learned about this fact, even though it’s widely known.

Trump indulged in this tick during a gaggle with the press Friday morning when discussing the House of Representative’s ongoing efforts to get witnesses and officials involved in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to testify.

Yet again, the president tried to argue that all the questions raised by the Mueller report about Trump’s ties to Russia and his potential obstruction of the investigation were moot.

“[Former Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein and [Attorney General] Bill Barr said there’s no obstruction,” Trump told reporters. “And also interesting: Number one, there’s no crime. And how do you obstruct when there’s no crime? Also, take a look at one other thing. It’s a thing called ‘Article II.’ Nobody ever mentions Article II. It gives me all of these rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before. We don’t even talk about Article II. So: They ruled no collusion, no obstruction. Very simple.”

There were many things wrong in these brief comments.

First, you can obstruct justice even if there was no underlying crime to be discovered; the law is written to allow for that possibility. Second, there were many crimes that Trump may have been trying to cover up by obstructing justice, including the criminal lies of his subordinates and his own involvement in a criminal hush money scheme during the 2016 election.

And with regard to “Article II,” Trump is referring to the second article of the Constitution that lays out presidential power. In fact, this is discussed all the time in politics, and it has come up frequently throughout Mueller’s investigation and in the aftermath of former FBI Director James Comey’s firing. Trump’s claim that “nobody ever mentions” it and that it gives him authorities and rights to act that “nobody has ever seen before” suggests that he has only recently become aware of Article II, its provision, and the debates over its scope.

Bringing it up in this context, Trump seems to be referring to an argument made most prominently by legal scholar Alan Dershowitz that presidents cannot obstruct justice by using the powers granted to them in Article II. Dershowitz’ view seems to be relatively idiosyncratic in the legal profession — most scholars likely wouldn’t buy this argument — but it’s worth considering. One person who did consider this argument, though, is Mueller. He argued forcefully in his report that president’s can, in fact, obstruct justice using presidential authorities if they do so with corrupt intent. Moreover, some of the acts of potential obstruction of justice that Mueller describes don’t even involve Trump’s presidential powers, so this argument may not even be relevant to many of the key episodes under scrutiny.

Watch the clip of Trump’s comments below:

In ABC Interview, Trump Says Article II ‘Allows Me To Do Whatever I Want’

In ABC Interview, Trump Says Article II ‘Allows Me To Do Whatever I Want’

In a combative interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, President Donald Trump brought up special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on links between his campaign and Russia in a bizarre effort to explain why he’s angered by internal polling that shows him trailing Joe Biden in 2020 battleground states.

During the interview, Trump accused former White House counsel Don McGahn of lying under oath about the president’s efforts to fire Mueller, “because he wanted to make himself look like a good lawyer.” Trump then brought up Article II of the Constitution, which he claimed gave him the authority to fire the special counsel.

“Article II allows me to do whatever I want,” Trump insisted.

Pressed on his argument that Article II of the Constitution grants him broad powers to obstruct justice, Trump told Stephanopolous to “read” Article II. 

“I’m just saying a president under Article II — it’s very strong,” Trump said. “Read it. Do you have Article II? Read it.” (Actually, Article II, Section 3 says that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”)

Later in the interview, Trump accused Stephanopoulos of “being a little wise guy” for asking about the president’s refusal to sit for questioning with Mueller.

“There was no crime,” Trump said. “There was no collusion. The big thing’s collusion. Now, there’s no collusion. That means they set — it was a setup. In my opinion, and I think it’s gonna come out.”

Trump then stated, without evidence, that former President Barack Obama “must have known” about the so-called set-up.

“I’m not gonna make that statement quite yet,” Trump said. “But I would say that President Obama had to know about it.”

You can read a transcript of the interview here, and watch a portion of the interview below, via ABC News.