Plenty of reasons to impeach Trump, beyond Ukraine
Donald Trump has been impeached. Whatever happens from here on out, he will always have that little asterisk by his name in the history books.
He joins that rarified community of presidents about whom a majority of the House of Representatives believed his conduct was so outrageous as to warrant impeachment and removal.
The Democrats really had no choice if they were going to try to save some remnant of the concept of the balance of power and fair and free elections.
When people say, oh this should just all be decided at the ballot box next November, they miss the point – how can we trust the ballot box when Trump was using the office of the presidency to undermine the
2020 election?
Trump strong-armed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the newly elected president of a much weaker country, which has been invaded by Russia and is dependent on U.S. aid, to investigate his political rival Joe Biden.
He did it the day after special counsel Robert Mueller testified to Congress about Russian interference in the 2016 election, including 10 instances of Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice for stonewalling that probe.
Each time law enforcement or Congress fails to act to rein in his behavior, Trump feels vindicated and emboldened to do worse.
His chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, admitted at a news conference that the $400 million in military aid for Ukraine was being held up until it announced an investigation.
Politics in foreign policy? “We do that all the time. Get over it.” Mulvaney said.
This past week, the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, bragged that he forced out a career foreign service officer with
33 years of service, Maria Yovanovich, “because she’s corrupt.”
“I believed that I needed Yovanovich
out of the way,” he told The New Yorker magazine. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton allegedly told a group of advisors Giuliani’s investigation in Ukraine was a “drug deal” and he wanted nothing to do with it.
I want to hear from these guys, under oath! Bring your evidence. Only Trump himself is blocking them from testifying.
I want to know what Mulvaney means by “we do that all the time.” Give us a few more examples, Mick, please.
I want to know more about how Giuliani, who is not a government official, got Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to remove a very high-level American diplomat from her position so she would not interfere with “the investigations.”
I want to know a lot more about Giuliani’s Ukrainian associates who have been indicted for funneling illegal campaign money to a Trump super PAC.
I am not alone. Seventy-one percent of the public, including 62 percent of Republicans, said in a poll this week that they want to hear from these witnesses, too.
This impeachment involves only the Ukraine incident, but it comes out the profound mistrust and in some cases, disgust, of many Americans about how the president has been conducting our foreign policy.
When Trump won the election, Russians donated to his inauguration committee and showed up for the festivities. Then Russian officials showed up in the Oval Office and Trump blurted out classified information provided to him by Israel regarding Russia’s involvement in Syria. We learned about that from Russian media because ours was not allowed to cover the event.
His first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, lasted only a few days in office before he was fired and he has twice pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI and working as a foreign agent for Russia and Turkey without registering.
I remember Flynn striding the Republican convention stage screaming, “Lock her up!” Will someone please sentence him already and “lock him up” for his admitted and proven crimes?
Trump has had five face-toface meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the American people do not know one word that was said between them.
He came out of his big meeting with Putin in Helsinki and defended Russia against charges by his own government that it interfered in the 2016 election. And he confiscated his translator’s notes of that meeting and ordered her not to talk about it.
At a photo-op before another meeting, he joked with Putin, who is believed to have ordered the killing of 26 Russian journalists, that Putin doesn’t have a free press problem in his country.
We learned from Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, currently serving three years for crimes he committed for Trump, that the president was pursuing the building of a tower in Moscow well into June 2016 while he was campaigning for president. Trump later admitted he lied to us that he had given up on the project six months earlier.
And he has constantly denigrates and threatens the NATO alliance, no doubt to the delight of Putin, who is poised to take back the Baltic countries as soon as he thinks he has our permission.
As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said to Trump, “All roads lead to Russia with you.”
But not exclusively. Trump took his first trip abroad to Saudi Arabia, a country that buys lots and lots of weapons from U.S. companies and rents a lot of expensive rooms in his Washington, D.C., hotel.
America has helped Saudi Arabia wage a horrible war in Yemen, bombing and starving thousands of children. The U.S. Energy Department recently signed off on six nuclear reactors to be built in Saudi Arabia by a consortium of American companies. Gee, who do you think will be getting a piece of that pie?
Trump failed to take any meaningful action after Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Mohammad bin Salman is alleged to have ordered the brutal killing of a Washington Post columnist, and he barely blinked two weeks ago when a Saudi killed three American sailors and wounded eight others in Pensacola, Fla.
Trump handed over the Syrian Kurds’ homeland to Turkey to carry out whatever ethnic cleansing Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan feels is necessary after 11,000 Kurds died fighting ISIS as our surrogates. Trump has a hotel tower in Istanbul.
He held a couple of photo-ops and failed summits with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un but again, we have no idea what the two leaders said to one another and we see absolutely no progress toward denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.
He waged a trade war with China for which he got a new trade deal that puts us approximately right back where we started. That’s after he bailed out farmers to the tune of $28 billion in taxpayer money for the loss of their Chinese markets, which they will likely never get back.
He shut down the government for 35 days in 2018-19 at a cost to the U.S. economy of $11 billion because Congress wouldn’t give him $5.7 billion for his wall, which he promised Mexico would pay for.
And he openly invited Ukraine and China to investigate Biden while standing on the White House lawn.
It is sad that the House had to dumb down the articles of impeachment for the public to just Ukrainegate, but a lot of us are judging him on his whole inept, dishonest, self-serving and sometimes horrifying foreign policy. Among other things.