Trump's latest impeachable actions - By Jennifer Rubin
By Jennifer Rubin November 3 at 12:25 PM
At the core of President Trump’s unfitness and his malfeasance in office is his interaction with the Justice Department and the courts. This goes from the merely verbal denigration of the courts — “a joke,” “a laughingstock,” “so-called judges” — to actual actions such as firing the FBI director, reportedly imploring the FBI director to lay off of former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, trying to meddle in the prosecution of Joe Arpaio (whom he subsequently pardoned for criminal contempt of court) and, now, directly encouraging the Justice Department to go after a political opponent for spurious, long-ago debunked claims.
In a series of tweets, he called on the Justice Department to go after the Democrats: “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems … People are angry. At some point the Justice Department, and the FBI, must do what is right and proper. The American public deserves it!” In remarks to reporters, he continued on in this vein. “I’m really not involved with the Justice Department. I’d like to let it run itself, but honestly, they should be looking at the Democrats. They should be looking at [John] Podesta and all of that dishonesty. They should be looking at a lot of things. And a lot of people are disappointed in the Justice Department, including me.”
There is no president in modern memory who has repeatedly and directly called on the Justice Department to investigate a political opponent in such a manner. A politician, one could imagine, upon new and actual evidence of wrongdoing, might say something like, “The appropriate authorities should look into this.” That’s not what Trump is doing here. He is both assuming guilt and applying pressure to go after an opponent based on scurrilous propaganda that he and his followers have generated. This is the conduct of a Third World dictator, and by any stretch of the imagination, an abuse of presidential power.
-snip-
“There is no bigger abuse of power than the president ordering his Justice Department to investigate his political appointees or back off his political allies, and Trump has done both,” says former Justice Department communications director Matthew Miller. “If he did it in secret, it would be treated as an enormous scandal, but because he does it in public, we have all gotten used to it. But it’s still the worst possible abuse of power, and the kind of thing everyone in Congress should demand end immediately — with the most serious consequences if he doesn’t.”
Republican leadership, however, has entirely abandoned its constitutional obligations and makes no effort to halt such conduct. The leaders are not acting in good faith to uphold their oaths of office — namely to defend the Constitution.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/11/03/trumps-latest-impeachable-actions/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.f4a1436b8e0e
= new reply since forum marked as read
