Democrats split over calls to impeach the president
Left-wing congresswomen lead demands that Donald Trump be removed from office after Mueller report
A SPLIT emerged in the Democratic Party yesterday over whether to begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump in the wake of the Mueller report.
Leading Democrats appeared at pains to play down the likelihood of success, instead favouring the 2020 election to remove the president from office. However a group of prominent Left-wing congresswomen went public with calls for Mr Trump’s removal from office, saying anything less would set a “dangerous precedent” and “imperil the nation”.
Republicans in turn framed their political opponents as being desperate to topple Mr Trump despite the report not recommending any new criminal charges.
Mr Trump yesterday dismissed the “crazy Mueller report”, lashing out at statements in the document that he called “fabricated and totally untrue”.
He defended his decision not to testify to Mr Mueller, adding that some comments about him in the report were “total bulls--- and only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad)”.
On Thursday he uncharacteristically declined the chance to answer reporters’ questions while leaving the White House for his Mar-a-lago golf resort.
The political implications of the 448page report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated Russian election meddling and Mr Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice, are still unclear.
Mr Mueller found that no criminal conspiracy had taken place between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in the 2016 presidential campaign, in volume one of his long-awaited report.
In volume two he decided not to make a decision on whether Mr Trump had committed a crime in obstructing the investigation, pointedly saying the president was not “exonerated” but leaving that call to others. Mr Trump’s Justice Department decided not to bring charges.
With virtually no chance of Mr Trump facing criminal proceedings over the report, the focus has turned to the political fallout – whether the findings will sway any voters, and how Congress will act.
For months Democrats have been insisting they must wait for Mr Mueller’s conclusions before any decisions on impeachment, the process of removing the president from office through Congress, were made.
With that moment now passed, many leading Democrats declined to call for impeachment, instead criticising the president’s actions in broad terms and his attorney general’s handling of the report. Various congressional investigations into Mr Trump’s presidency by the Democrats are already under way on Capitol Hill.
Steny Hoyer, the second most senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, said: “Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point. Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgment.”
Other leading Democrats took a similar stance. Two thirds of the US Senate would need to vote in favour of impeachment for it to be binding – and there are concerns of a political backlash if they appear unduly vindictive.
However a handful of Left-wing Democrats took the opposite view. Three prominent new congresswomen – Alexandria Ocasio-cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – called for impeachment proceedings. Maxine Waters, the Democrat congresswoman from California who regularly clashes with the president, was also unambiguous in her calls for impeachment. “At this point, Congress’s failure to impeach is complacency in the face of the erosion of our democracy and constitutional norms,” Ms Waters said.
For now, the House Judiciary Committee, controlled by the Democrats,
has issued a subpoena for the “complete and unredacted” Mueller report. ♦ Donald Trump spoke by phone to Khalifa Haftar, the Libyan commander, before the US blocked a British UN resolution for a ceasefire in Tripoli. Gen Haftar launched a surprise offensive on the Libyan capital earlier this month, derailing the election process.
US presidents can be rather domineering personalities. Still, even by these standards, it’s unusual for a president to go around carrying a metaphorical “shock collar” in his pocket in order to control his Attorney General. Yet that is how Donald Trump’s closest advisers interpreted his behaviour in May 2017, when he set off on his first foreign trip, to the Middle East, with an unpublished resignation letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions in his pocket.
It was only the fifth month of his presidency but already an independent special counsel had been convened to investigate the Trump campaign’s alleged collaboration with Russia. To Mr Trump’s displeasure, Mr Sessions had recused himself from the investigation, so the president had demanded his resignation – and then refused it. Keeping hold of Mr Sessions’s letter, his aides believed, enabled him to deliver a zap to Mr Sessions whenever he wanted to bring him to heel. After nearly two weeks spent flaunting the note to senior advisers, the president returned it to Mr Sessions with a scrawled “not accepted” on the top.
This is just one of the details contained in Robert Mueller’s jumbo 450-page report, published in Washington this week. And as with so many conspiracies, the most damning revelations don’t actually stem from the primary investigation, but from the way the key characters responded to it. “It’s not the crime. It’s the cover-up”, as the Watergate saying goes.
Mr Mueller has indicted 37 people – but Mr Trump is not one of them. Indicting a president, the lawyer decided, is beyond his authority. A US president has a mandate direct from the people, so only Congress can impeach. Since the Republicancontrolled House will never do so, especially given that the report falls short of recommending any prosecution, we now know the “impeach him!” brigade have spent three years barking up the wrong tree.
The proper way to judge a directly elected president is, of course, in an election. And if American voters care to engage with it, the Mueller report provides plenty of evidence that Mr Trump is utterly unfit to govern.
The president’s main saving grace is that his efforts to wriggle out of scrutiny are more comical than Machiavellian. The evidence paints a picture of a hysterical delinquent raging haphazardly at each development in the investigation, veering between panic and complacency. It documents him repeatedly ordering his aides to take actions they found horribly compromising and the creative ways they found of disobeying him. It was this disobedience that seems to have protected the president from suffering more serious consequences.
A few instances stand out. In June 2017, despite refusing to accept Mr Sessions’s resignation, Mr Trump still harboured resentment against his Attorney General for failing to “protect” him. So he ordered an aide to deliver a message: Mr Sessions would be fired unless he made a speech declaring that Mueller’s investigation was “very unfair”, that it would be narrowed only to examine future meddling, and that Mr Trump “ran the greatest campaign in American history” with “no Russians involved”.
The aide charged with this unappetising mission carefully noted down his brief… and then passed it off to an underling. This second aide recalled to Mr Mueller that the request made him “uncomfortable”, so he told his boss it had been “handled” and did nothing. Stonewalled by his own advisers, Mr Trump resorted to criticising Mr Sessions in press interviews and on Twitter, to the point where the Attorney General began carrying around a ready-to-go resignation letter in his breast pocket. If you must wear a shock collar, after all, best to carry the trigger yourself.
Around the same time, Mr Trump tried another avenue to rid himself of the turbulent Mr Mueller. He told White House counsel Don Mcgahn to remove him. But Mr Mcgahn decided he didn’t fancy carrying out the order. He could see quite clearly, he told the investigation, that its likely effect would be a modern-day “Saturday night massacre” – the tipping-point moment when Richard Nixon’s Attorney General and his deputy both quit rather than fire a special counsel. Mr Trump, seemingly forgetting about his command, didn’t follow up. But when reports of the incident emerged months later, he repeatedly suggested that Mr Mcgahn issue a public denial. Instead, the lawyer, just like Mr Sessions, decided he would quit if push came to shove.
Up until they leave, Mr Trump’s advisers prevaricate, persuade, put off and evade carrying out the president’s most absurd requests. The demands, often directly counterproductive to his cause and driven by pique, come and go as and when he remembers them. So his aides manage him, as one might manage a difficult teenager, with a careful curl of contempt on their lips, right up until the moment they have to decide whether to lie for him or get the hell out.
Still, however stark it is to see the facts laid out in official legal form, they ultimately line up with most of what we already knew about Mr Trump. What makes him unfit for office is not so much that he’s petty, malicious and bullying. What’s unusual about Mr Trump is how inept are his efforts to conceal facts and control people.
For one thing, Mr Mueller states plainly that the absence or loss of material by various players in the Russia probe means there simply isn’t enough evidence to conclude that the president entered into a conspiracy with Moscow. Despite 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants and interviewing 500 witnesses, the threshold wasn’t met, and those being indicted were mainly caught out for lying. If the president had simply sat tight throughout the whole investigation, rather than repeatedly meddling, tweeting and trying to fire people, he would come out of it all looking rather good.
As it is, Mr Trump is looking decidedly less vindicated than when his new Attorney General misleadingly declared, a month ago, that the investigation couldn’t identify any “obstructive conduct” by the president. This is probably why he’s back to his old tricks, condemning it all on Twitter as an “Illegally Started Hoax that should never have happened”. Mr Trump might not have committed any crime, but when it comes to their president, voters ought to demand a higher standard than that – in managerial competence if nothing else.
‘His aides manage him as one might a difficult teenager, until they have to decide whether to lie for him or get out’