I believe it is now time to examine if Donald Trump is in danger of being indicted or removed from office.
I shall not address the emoluments argument, which I regard to be a complete joke, and will in any event not result in President Trump being removed from office but will address solely those arguments that insinuate Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has enough evidence to remove the President from office.
At this point in time the primary charges against the President are that he colluded with Russian government officials to alter the outcome of the Presidential election, that he obstructed justice by firing former FBI agent James Comey and that he committed a Federal campaign violation by authorizing a payment to an alleged former paramour named Stephanie Clifford. The vague charges that he had business dealings going back for decades in Russia I will not address.
With regard to the first charge of collusion, the only possible charge is a conspiracy to accept an illegal foreign donation in the form of information given to President Trump by the Russians which might damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Despite exhaustive efforts by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, no such evidence has been unearthed and, as I suspect, no such evidence exists at all. There is also no evidence that Trump campaign officials approved the hacking of the emails of the Democratic National Committee which emails included such salacious details as to Hillary aide John Podesta’s favorite pasta recipes.
I think we can safely dismiss the first charge of collusion. In all candor I admit that Donald Trump, Jr. engaged in a rather unfortunate and extremely ill-advised meeting on June 9, 2016 at the Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner regarding whether Natalia had any information which might be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Of course no such information emerged because Natalia had no such information and is in fact a fraud herself.
Did President Trump know about this meeting in advance? My guess is he did and can only be in trouble if he lies about the circumstances of this meeting under oath.
With regard to the obstruction of justice charge, I would point readers to this article by well-respected legal scholar Jonathan Turley who stated:
For the record, I have long argued that the current facts about Trump’s statements or actions would not support a compelling case for obstruction. While I supported the appointment of a special counsel after the firing of James Comey as well as the investigation into obstruction, a charge on the current facts would stretch the criminal code to an uncomfortable and almost unrecognizable degree.
Now we come to the payment to Stephanie Clifford. Was this a violation of Federal campaign finance law? This question is uncertain. Failed Democratic candidate Jonathan Edwards faced similar charges and emerged scot free. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-edwards-unlikely-to-face-a-retrial/. In any event, it is highly unlikely Mueller would indict a sitting President based upon such a flimsy charge.
So we are left with a case where the only option for Democrats is to vote for impeachment in the House of Representatives which most surely would fail because a 2/3 majority is required for conviction in the Senate. In that case, President Trump’s worst fear is a post-Presidency criminal trial for obstruction of justice or campaign finance violations both of which are highly unlikely to occur.
