A year ago, the pointless impeachment trial was meant to
say, “Even though we can’t find a single crime, even a misdemeanor, that this President
has committed, we think he’s awful and should be removed from office.” That was
the essence of the prosecution, which of course went nowhere once they sent it
to the Republican-led Senate. So it was posturing, nothing more.
This year, the pointless impeachment trial has actually
included a crime—just not one the former President committed. And they’re
saying the action, which he didn’t commit, was done a mere two weeks before
inauguration. They held the trial just days before the President was leaving
office. And they failed to deliver the Article of Impeachment to the Senate
until well after inauguration.
I’m not a lawyer, but I can play one as well as the next blog
writer. So here’s my analysis.
The founders didn’t want elected officials to have to spend
their time in office defending themselves against lawsuits and various
accusations. It is the nature of politics that there are things they will do in
office that opposing factions will find just wrong, even though not technically
unlawful. For policy issues that may actually violate the law, lawsuits can be
brought against the government, rather than personally against the official.
But when it is the official who personally does wrongdoing,
rather than a typical court trial, the remedy is an impeachment trial. In our
Constitution, the limit of such a trial is to remove the person from office.
The founders wanted to prevent the uncivilized practice of executing or
imprisoning political enemies. If there was a criminal act, that could then be
handled in a criminal trial—for example, say a president murdered his secretary
of state in a fit of anger. The House would bring charges in an impeachment
trial, and if the House found the president guilty, they would pass the
articles of impeachment (the charges and the prosecution’s case) to the Senate,
where the actual trial would be held. If the Senate found him guilty, he would
be removed from office. That’s the limit of an impeachment. But the president—or
a justice or other officeholder subject to impeachment—would thereafter be a
private citizen, subject to criminal proceedings, and murder, as you know, has
no statute of limitations.
A year ago, when we were talking about this, I explained,
While an impeachment is not exactly a court trial, it is
analogous to think of the impeachment articles, and all that was done in the
House, as the prosecution’s case. When they pass along the articles of
impeachment, that is akin to the prosecutors saying, “The prosecution rests its
case.”
When the Senate takes up the case, they have a couple of
options beyond holding a further trial. One is to look at the evidence and say,
“No, the evidence does not show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant
[the president] is guilty of these charges,” and they could rule not guilty.
Or they could look at the evidence and say, “He may have done
these things he’s charged with but still not be guilty of something requiring
his removal from office,” and they could rule not guilty.
Beyond that, of course, if they were to find him guilty,
they could remove him from office, which, of course, they didn't do.
But this year, the trial is against a private citizen
already out of office. The Congress doesn’t have the authority to legally
pursue a private citizen, even a former officeholder. The Democrats don’t care,
however. But that explains why Justice Roberts will not be overseeing the impeachment trial as constitutionally required; this is not a legal impeachment trial.
If the Senate trial were to find the former President
guilty, they can’t even remove him from office. Obviously. The assertion is
that they can at least attach the additional impeachment punishment of
preventing him from ever running again. Now, seriously, in four years Donald
Trump will be 78, practically as old as Joe Biden is now. While his health and
energy are far better than Biden’s right now, handling a presidency between
ages 78 and 82 might not be what he wants to do—or what the American people
want him to do at that time. Democrats seem to assume others are as power
hungry as they are, and as incapable of retiring from their power mongering.
But if you look at someone who hasn’t lived his life accruing political power,
you might find other life purposes altogether. Who knows?
However, if Donald Trump wants to run in 2024, he can run, regardless
of what the House proclaims in a nonofficial “impeachment” trial. If he does, the
House can take him to court, to see whether they had any legal authority to punish
him by removing permission to run. But their saying “You can never run for
anything again,” when they had no authority to do so is nothing more than slamming
the door after someone leaves, and then saying, “And take that!” If they could,
they would simply hold an “impeachment” trial of any political foe they never
wanted to face and put up that roadblock. In a legal court of law, such a
punishment couldn’t stand.
They also want to claim he shouldn’t be allowed to have a
presidential library. A good question would be, why do they care? It’s a
private thing, built with money from private donors. Not taxpayer dollars. And
no one is forced to go to it. Just as Congress has no power to prevent other
private citizens from building libraries, or other buildings of whatever purpose,
they do not have the power to declare that a former president cannot build a
library related to his life and his time in office.
This impeachment isn’t going anywhere for one large additional
reason: the Democrats do not hold a 2/3 majority in the Senate, where they need
to convince all Democrats plus around 17 Republicans that the President
committed the crime they are accusing him of.
As with last time, it’s hard to know whether the Senate will
even bother to try the case. With a split Senate, and possibly a few Republican
defectors, they will likely look at the charges, and spend some time posturing. But they cannot convict. So it
is a waste of taxpayer time and money.
There are some other legal issues related to this
impeachment we ought to mention. Like we said, the House brought the single article of
impeachment. That is the prosecution’s case. Done. They took only a few hours to discuss and
even fewer pages to write up their case. They voted on that in a frenzied hurry.
And then they changed the article of impeachment, added to it,
after the vote. This week they offered up what they’re calling a “memorandum”
on the impeachment. And it isn’t what the House voted on.
Law vlogger and defense attorney Robert Gruler compared the original article of impeachment to this new memorandum. He
reviewed what he said a couple of weeks ago, where he had shown the pertinent
charges: that President Trump incited violence at the capitol with his speech,
and they cited certain words from that speech. Here’s a screenshot of what was
included:
Robert Gruler shows the main points of the Article of Impeachment
screenshot from here
You might note that, speaking untruths about election fraud is something the former President could defend himself on by showing that there was a whole lot of election fraud. They’re claiming that saying that basic fact, which they call untrue, incited violence at the capitol. The other things they’re saying incited violence are two quotes from his January 6th speech. Plus, not shown on that page is also the Raffensberger phonecall, which Gruler says was simply a settlement discussion in a litigation suit, perfectly legal, even if the President’s words were not precisely elegant or helpful. It was certainly not something they could impeach him on, nor did they consider doing so prior to the events of January 6th. In other words, that was just thrown in but wasn’t an impeachable charge.
Gruler draws the scope looking like this, inside the blue
circle. Plenty of things exist outside the circle, but they are all outside the
scope of the case.
The scope of the case includes only what is in the blue circle.
screenshot from here
What does he mean by scope? An example he gave was, if you
were arrested for stealing a candy bar, and you face your day in court on that
charge, referring to what you did on a certain day, a certain place, doing a
particular thing—and then suddenly on the day you get to defend yourself in
court, they say, “Oh, by the way, we’re also charging you with the theft of
that TV.” What? That has nothing to do with what you were charged with. That’s
not what your attorney prepared to defend you on. Not only that, it’s not what they
presented evidence to prove. We have due process to prevent that sort of thing.
Here he shows what additional “outside the scope of the case” stuff they are suddenly putting in that memorandum.
 |
| Gruler shows how the memorandum stuffs all kinds of things into the scope of the case that are not in the Article of Impeachment. screenshot from here |
He lays it out this way:
My high-level take on all of this is, the old narrative, the
old theme of this case was, “Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric on January 6th was
the direct cause of (incitement of) the Capitol Hill Insurrection.” That
narrative is now changing. It’s now, “Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric before,
during, and after January 6th was the direct cause of (incitement) of the
Capitol Hill Insurrection and is a continuing threat to America.”
It’s even worse than that; he didn’t just cause what happened
on Capitol Hill, but he’s also now a continuing threat to America. So you see
how the scope sort of changes a little bit. And I read through most of the 80
pages. I read through Donald Trump’s response. And that’s just sort of how I
synthesize it into the Democrats’ argument, that they’re expanding the scope,
and they’re now saying that a lot of Trump’s behavior, before, after, during,
his response after the Capitol Hill riots, was all inappropriate, and it’s all
impeachable now as a result. So the scope—it gets much bigger, as we’re going
to see.
He goes on to say why they couldn't leave it at "Trump's speech incited a riot." You see it spilled by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier this week. She claimed that she was getting text messages about a threat on January 6th as early as a week before. Add to that some things we’ve known for a while. There was a letter put out by Pelosi herself, I believe, refusing any additional help from the feds. Chief of the Capitol Hill Police Steven Sund brought concerns to the attention of the Sgt. of Arms of both chambers of Congress, but they flatly refused to use any additional help. Gruler says,
So, if they knew this was going to be a problem, and they
undersecured the facilities, is the government negligent? Are they contributory?
Is their negligence contributing to this entire debacle? Or was this all just
Donald Trump? Because that’s what the original allegation has been.
At least it was that for a while. Then Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez said, no, Ted Cruz tried to murder her. So it’s not just Donald
Trump; it’s Donald Trump and Ted Cruz who tried to murder her, literally; she
said that on Twitter. We covered that.
So, you’re seeing how the narrative is just unraveling just a
little bit.
You can’t have it both ways: Trump incited violence on
January 6th, or there was pre-planning that didn’t involve Trump,
but he’s somehow responsible for that too.
Evidence keeps coming out about the pre-planning. Much of it
appears to be done by non-Trump supporters. It’s looking more like a setup.
They hoped there would be a problem they could blame Trump for. Maybe Democrats
even colluded to make that happen; if I were the investigator, that’s what I’d
be looking into. But of course Democrats won't be investigating themselves.
But now we’re supposed to believe Donald Trump is guilty of
insurrection for questioning a voting process with more evidence of fraud than
we have ever seen in a US election. And we’re supposed to believe saying so—which
I have done and continue to do on this platform—is inciting insurrection. And
it was all put over the top by a speech, in which the President called for
peacefully cheering on those who challenged the electors, and never called for
violence—and never has before or since either. And the words they claim incited
violence weren’t even spoken before the violence began miles from where he was
speaking.
Incitement has a legal definition as well, which they’re
ignoring. It has to be actually calling for violence to happen imminently. It
can’t be hinted at, or words construed to mean that. And you certainly can’t incite violence
by calling for peace, as the President did, before, during, and after.
So this is all a sham. It seems designed to label everyone
who believes there was election fraud as an insurrectionist. And beyond that,
anyone who voted for Trump is, by association, an insurrectionist.
It’s hard to believe this is America. A question for a
future post is, is the current dictatorship more like a banana republic or a communist
regime?
In other words, don’t worry about President Trump’s
impeachment trial. He’ll be fine. But the country, if left in the hands of
these lawless power mongers, will not.
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