Democrats and their myrmidons in the leftist media are seriously discussing the impeachment President Trump, but they’re adding a new claim beyond that of “collusion” with the Russians to steal the election.
Now, they say, the collusion, and Trump’s payments to porn queen Stormy Daniels and Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal to keep quiet about their affairs, “defrauded” the voters.
“This theory,” Powerline blogger Paul Mirengoff wrote, “is worthy of ridicule” because the voters weren’t “defrauded.”
More Impeachment Chatter
“Top House Democrats have raised the prospect of impeachment or the real possibility of prison time for President Donald Trump if it’s proved that he directed illegal hush money payments to women, adding to the legal pressure on the president over the Russia investigation and other scandals,” the Associated Press reported.
Trump hater Representative Adam Schiff of California thinks “There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time” while “Rep. Jerry Nadler, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, described the details in prosecutors’ filings Friday in the case of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, as evidence that Trump was ‘at the center of a massive fraud.’”
On Friday, in their sentencing guidelines for Michael Cohen, who admitted lying to Congress about a business deal the president pursued in Russia during the 2016 campaign, prosecutors claimed Trump defrauded the voters. That fraud involved not just the collusion, but the payments to the women, which constituted illegal campaign contributions.
“While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard,” prosecutors claimed, “Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows.”
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Trump’s attorney “did so by orchestrating secret and illegal payments to silence two women who otherwise would have made public their alleged extramarital affairs” with the president. “In the process, Cohen deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election.”
The payments might not invite an actual impeachment, Nadler said. But, the New York Democrat told AP, “certainly they’d be impeachable offenses because even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.”
Collusion and obstruction of justice are just two of Trump’s possible high crimes and misdemeanors. “Now you have a third — that the president was at the center of a massive fraud against the American people.”
No Fraud
That claim is ridiculous, Powerline’s Mirengoff wrote: “No candidate in my lifetime ever painted a clearer, more vivid picture of himself for voters. For better or for worse, we knew what we were getting (and no, it wasn’t a Putin stooge).”
Whatever the possibility of impeaching Trump because he allegedly knew about Cohen’s false statements to Congress, or because he allegedly colluded with the Russians to “steal the election,” the claim that Trump could be impeached for “defrauding the voters” is preposterous:
How does Mueller’s team say Trump defrauded voters? In two ways, apparently. First, he paid money to hide the fact that he had sex with a porn star….
When did it become the role of prosecutors to question the legitimacy of an electoral victory? This must be a recent development. The legitimacy of Barack Obama’s election went unchallenged by the law even though he wrote a fake autobiography and, before his second win, secretly (he thought) promised Russia to be more flexible once those reactionary American voters re-elected him.
In 1992, Bill Clinton tasked a team of Arkansas operatives to cover-up his sexual indiscretions. John Kennedy conspired with the media to keep his quiet. Franklin Roosevelt covered up, as best he could, the fact that he couldn’t walk. Kennedy too concealed his medical problems.
As for the collusion, Mirengoff asked the right question: Whom did Trump defraud? “Not the general electorate. There has been no indication that Trump was still trying to [do] business with Russia when [he was] voted in November 2016. And by then, surely it was a matter of indifference which month the attempts ended.”
And, as Mirengoff wrote, Trump made his case clear. No one tricked Americans or forced them into voting for Trump. The fraud claims, he wrote, might mean “prosecutors haven’t found a crime, but are still pissed off that Trump won the election.”
Photo: whitehouse.gov
