House Dems: Lock up Trump?
After report on payments of hush money, chance of impeachment or jail time for president ‘very real’
WASHINGTON >> Top House Democrats on Sunday raised the prospect of impeachment or almostcertain 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 Trump over the Russia investigation and other scandals.
“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,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “The bigger pardon question may come down the road as the next president has to determine whether to pardon Donald Trump.”
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.”
“They would be impeachable offenses,” Nadler said.
In the filings, prosecutors in New York for the first time link Trump to a federal crime of illegal payments to buy the silence of two women during the 2016 campaign.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office also laid out previously undisclosed contacts between Trump associates and Russian intermediaries and suggested the Kremlin aimed early on to influence Trump and his Republican campaign by playing to both his political and personal business interests.
Again and again and again, over the course of Trump’s 18-month campaign for the presidency, public records and interviews suggest, Russian citizens made contact with his closest family and friends, as well as figures on the periphery of his orbit.
Some offered to help his campaign and his real estate business. Some offered dirt on his Democratic opponent. Repeatedly, Russian nationals suggested Trump should hold a peacemaking sit-down with Vladimir Putin — and offered to broker such a summit.
In all, Russians interacted with at least 14 Trump associates during the campaign and presidential transition.
After Trump took office, in February 2017, he denied there were any contacts at all. “No. Nobody that I know of,” the president told reporters when asked whether anyone who advised his campaign had contact with Russia. “I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”
It is now clear that wasn’t true.
Trump’s oldest children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, interacted with Russians who were offering to help the candidate.
Ivanka’s husband, top campaign adviser Jared Kushner, as well as Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his personal lawyer Michael Cohen and his longest-serving political adviser, Roger Stone, also had contact with Russian nationals.
Veterans of past White House bids said that so much interplay with representatives of a foreign adversary is highly unusual.
“This is different in kind than anything I have ever heard of before,” said Trevor Potter, who served as general counsel to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. McCain, he noted, traveled the globe as a member of the Senate, but his contacts with foreign government officials generally occurred in consultation
with the State Department and involved questions of policy — not personal business or his own electoral concerns.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and has compared the investigations to a “witch hunt.”
Nadler, D-N.Y., said it was too early to say whether Congress would pursue impeachment proceedings based on the illegal payments alone because lawmakers would need to weigh the gravity of the offense to justify “overturning” the 2016 election.
Regarding the illegal payments, “whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question, but 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,” Nadler said.
Mueller has not said when he will complete a report of any findings, and it isn’t clear that any such report would be made available to Congress. That would be up to the attorney general.
Nadler indicated that Democrats, who will control the House in January, will step up their own investigations. He said Congress, the Justice Department and the special counsel need to dig deeper into the allegations, which include questions about whether Trump lied about his business arrangements with Russians and about possible obstruction
of justice.
“The new Congress will not try to shield the president,” he said. “We will try to get to the bottom of this, in order to serve the American people and to stop this massive conspiracy — this massive fraud on the American people.”
Schiff, D-Calif., also stressed a need to wait “until we see the full picture.” He has previously indicated his panel would seek to look into the Trump family’s business ties with Russia.
In the legal filings, the Justice Department stopped short of accusing Trump of directly committing a crime. But it said Trump told Cohen to make illegal payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom claimed to have had affairs
with Trump more than a decade ago.
In separate filings, Mueller’s team detail how Cohen spoke to a Russian who “claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level.’ ” Cohen said he never followed up on that meeting.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida called the latest filings “relevant” in judging Trump’s fitness for office but said lawmakers need more information to render judgment. He also warned the White House about considering a pardon for Manafort, saying such a step could trigger congressional debate about limiting a president’s pardon powers.
Such a move would be
“a terrible mistake,” Rubio said. “Pardons should be used judiciously. They’re used for cases with extraordinary circumstances.”
Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine and a member of the Senate intelligence committee, cautioned against a rush to impeachment, which he said citizens could interpret as “political revenge and a coup against the president.”
“The best way to solve a problem like this, to me, is elections,” King said. “I’m a conservative when it comes to impeachment. I think it’s a last resort and only when the evidence is clear of a really substantial legal violation. We may get there, but we’re not there now.”