President Trump fortified the liberal fantasy of him being impeached when, he claims, he misspoke during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and proving the point was an Irish betting website that said that the chances of impeachment have increased.
The problem for Trump’s enemies is that impeaching a president requires him to have committed a crime — something no one has suggested or even come close to proving that Trump has done.
Still, for those enemies, the dream lives on, amusingly boosted by some legal bookmakers who dabble in such forecasting.
Paddy Power
The website is Paddy Power, which says the odds have gone from 4-1 on Monday before Trump spoke to 2-1 now.
The leftist media was aghast when President Trump said he didn’t think Russia had attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, despite the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies.
Said Trump on Monday, “My people came to me. They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
On Tuesday, Trump said he misspoke, that he clumsily attempted to use a double negative, as the New York Times reported:
And by that, Mr. Trump said on Tuesday, more than 24 hours later, he meant the exact opposite. “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’” Mr. Trump said. “Sort of a double negative.”
“So,” he told the media, “you can put that in. And I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.”
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That mix-up, Paddy Power told the Washington Post, has sent Trump’s stock tumbling, and he now has a 33 percent chance of being removed from office, or at least impeached in the House and tried by the Senate. According to the Post:
“What this whole Moscow gruel has taught us is that the Donald is still the biggest ticket in town — and people love to bet on his downfall,” said Lee Price, a spokesman for Paddy Power. The gambling site has capitalized on the unpredictable nature of the Trump presidency, offering bets on scenarios such as “When will Sean Spicer leave/get sacked as White House press secretary?”
As well, Price told the Post, “Since Trump’s inauguration, we’ve had more bets on his impeachment than we’ve had on any Brexit market, any U.K. election market, or any of the other 100 or so specials we have on-site about the president.”
Impeachment Talk Nothing New
Democrats and their allies in the media have been talking impeachment since even before Trump won the election.
In April of 2016, eight months before Trump astonished the world by defeating Hillary Clinton, Politico published a story under this headline: “Could Trump Be Impeached Shortly After He Takes Office? It’s highly improbable, but law scholars and political junkies are speculating about it.”
The obvious question was how anyone could speculate about impeachment before the new president was elected or inaugurated, and, as Politico noted, even before he was nominated. Difficult as it may seem, Politico found some folks to discuss it:
From the right, Washington attorney Bruce Fein puts the odds at 50/50 that a President Trump commits impeachable offenses as president. Liberal Florida Rep. Alan Grayson says Trump’s insistence on building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, if concrete was poured despite Congress’s opposition, could lead down a path toward impeachment….
Constitutional experts of all political stripes say it’s surprising for impeachment talk to bubble up this early — but then Trump has been throwing around some surprising ideas for a leading candidate, calling the Geneva Conventions a “problem” and pitching policies that many see as violating international law. “What he’s stated in my judgment would be clearly impeachable offenses,” said Fein, a former Reagan-era Justice Department official who worked on the Bill Clinton impeachment effort. Likewise, Yale Law School lecturer and military justice expert Eugene Fidell offered a similar prediction for Trump from the Left. “He’s certainly said things, which if followed through on, would constitute high crimes and misdemeanors,” Fidell said.
Amusingly, in “full disclosure” mode, Politico confessed that “[n]obody we talked to said this was likely without a series of cascading events first unfolding,” raising the question, then, of why it published the story.
But back to the present: Representaitve Maxine “Mad Max” Waters, the virulent leftist from California, has been pounding the drums for impeachment too, as her greatest hits on YouTube show. Need To Impeach, a website funded by leftist billionaire Tom Steyer, has published a list of the president’s supposed crimes.
Others aren’t so sanguine about the possibility of impeachment.
No less a liberal than former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) firmly told Democrats in April to stop talking about impeachment because it will hurt them in November. She stated, “I have said over and over again that I don’t think we should be talking about impeachment. I’ve been very clear right from the start.”
As for the latest suggestion that Trump might have committed a crime by disagreeing with his own intelligence agencies, a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee threw cold water on the idea, according to The Hill.
Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said impeachment talk is “premature,” adding, “We should do all we can to make sure that he’s held accountable, that we conduct the investigations the Republicans have been unwilling to do. If impeachment is the case, it’s because we found impenetrable evidence that we take to the American people and will be accepted by both Republicans and Democrats.”
Image: BenThomasPhoto via iStock / Getty Images Plus
