11,000 Lies = Unfit to occupy the White House
By Roberto Rodriguez
Even beyond the
Mueller investigation and the subsequent Mueller report, the question of the
day seems to be: Has the President engaged in impeachable conduct and thus,
should he be impeached?
Actually, that
question seems so yesterday, though because of its dire consequences, it should
still be answered and then we can get to today’s question later.
For the doubting
Thomases or the doubting Nancys of the world, to answer yesterday’s question,
let us examine the oath he made, with hand on Bible, as he was sworn into office:
“I, Donald John Trump,
do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the
United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend
the Constitution of the United States.”
In effect, it is the
very same oath that every president is required to swear-to, enshrined in
Article II, Section I of the Constitution.
Based on the above,
the better question should be: Has the president honorably upheld his oath of
office?
The answer is an
emphatic no, primarily because the president has not faithfully executed the
Office of President of the United States. Also, something adding to that
unwavering “no” answer, something that is supposed to be important to his base;
he has consciously and repeatedly violated the 9th Commandment:
Thou shall not bear false witness… to the tune of
more than 10,000 times (April
27, 2019, Washington Post). As such, based on
any measure, he has forfeited his right to occupy the White House, precisely
because also, he has not, to the best of his
ability, preserved, protected nor defended the Constitution of the United
States.
Despite this, the
Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is resolute in her belief that the
president has not engaged in nor committed impeachable offenses.
Prior to the release
of the Mueller Report, Pelosi was convinced that impeachment was “Not
worth it” (3/12/2019, NYT) and
its April release has apparently not changed her mind either. Even the
president’s recent meltdown and vow to no longer work with Democrats has not
moved Pelosi.
One has to wonder if
she has actually read the same report as Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, who
asserts that the president has engaged in impeachable conduct. Amash is the
lone Republican who has called for the president’s impeachment.
Truthfully though, the
Russian interference issue aside, the president should be impeached for what he
has done since assuming office, not just for what he is accused of during the
2016 campaign. There are perhaps 100 impeachable offenses he has committed,
though here, I will cite only three:
1) his disgracing of his office with his congenital and
pathological lying;
2) his sidestepping of Congress in his insatiable drive for
building a wall, and;
3) his zero-tolerance immigration policy that resulted in the
separation of thousands of children from their parents. This last one,
incidentally, is not just impeachable, but arguably, constitutes a crime
against humanity.
To be sure, virtually
everything that is in the Mueller report had already been reported in either
the New York Times or the Washington Post, albeit with more details, etc.
Were there any
surprises in the 448 pages? Very few. Probably the most important thing to
remember is that virtually all the big players in the investigation have been
Republicans; it has not been a Democratic plot. What that also means is that
historically, their idea of justice has traditionally been tilted in favor of
protecting those in power. The report examines two things primarily;
connections or contact (conspiracy) between Russians and the candidate's 2016
campaign, and obstruction of justice.
The contacts between
his campaign and the Russians reaches the level of both, unprecedented and
mind-boggling. And much of it, if not most of those contacts have been very
much in the public eye, due to that reporting by those two prestigious
mainstream newspapers. Former Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, who has a
stellar reputation amongst the mainstream U.S. body politic, is a Republican.
When one reads that section though, it appears that he bent over backwards time
and time again to not connect the dots, dots that are not only smoking but
seemingly on fire. The episodes regarding Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Michael
Flynn jump outfor their criminality. That also includes the June 2016
Trump Tower meeting between the campaign and Russian operatives – which
included Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law –
in which dirt on Hillary Clinton was to have been delivered by those
operatives.
It strains credulity
that there were more than a hundred contacts between the Russians and the
campaign, but that the candidate and now president, knew nothing, despite going
through extra lengths to both hide those contacts and to lie about them. This
is especially true of the Trump Tower meeting. This Mueller conclusion about no
conspiracy, despite these 100-plus contacts, is now being taken as gospel,
though a different prosecutor could have easily drawn a different conclusion.
While collusion was not a legal issue, the report is clear regarding the
unprecedented contact between the campaign and Russian operatives.
On the subject of
obstruction of justice, that one is much easier as the over 900
ex-prosecutors have attested
that save for the Office of Legal Counsel directive of not indicting sitting
presidents, there is more than enough evidence to file obstruction charges
against the president and his minions. And Mueller actually said as much. This
is the opposite conclusion of what Attorney General William Barr and the
president have disingenuously and continually asserted.
But if someone was
looking for the key as to whether crimes were committed by the president and
his campaign and his minions, there are two names that stand out: James
Comey and William Barr. Really, that is virtually all one needs to know about
this case. The first one, who was investigating the Russian interference, gets
fired and the second one, a yes-man, gets hired, ensuring the results that the
president desired. On the topic of obstruction, two other names also
stand out: The president’s former fixer, Michael Cohen and personal
attorney Donald McGahn. They both have powerful eyewitness testimony, though in
the end, it is still about Comey and Barr.
If one does a careful
reading of the report, one will find that Barr actually rushed Mueller to
finish his investigation, before it was actually completed. One finds this
nugget in Appendix D.
“This appendix
identifies matters transferred or referred by the special counsel's office as
well as cases prosecuted by the office that are now completed. Transfers. The
Special Counsel's office has concluded its investigation into links and
coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the
Trump campaign. Certain matters assigned to the office by the acting Attorney
General have not fully concluded as of the date of this report. After
consultation with the office of the Deputy Attorney General, the office is
transferred responsibility for those matters to other components of the
Department of Justice and the FBI.”
To reiterate, Mueller
was not finished with neither his work nor his report.
But back to the
10,000-plus lies.
Since his first day in
office, in less than 1,000 days, he will have told some 11,000 documented lies
or misleading statements. His apologists or those with the position of no
impeachment – on both sides of the aisle – give him a pass purportedly because
he was not under oath when he has told those obvious lies. Apparently, those
pols have forgotten that on the day he was sworn into office, he actually took
that sacred oath to faithfully execute the
Office of President of the United States.That oath, by the way,
is still in effect 24/7.
It takes extreme
sophistry to actually believe that the founders of this nation would have
interpreted the telling of 10,000 lies (that requires multiple lying on a daily
basis) and still be seen as faithfully executing
his office.
But forget the
founders. The question is simple, and this is independent of anything in the
Mueller report; if members of Congress are looking for impeachable offenses or
impeachable conduct, they only need to look at his Pinocchio nose for the
answer. Not to be forgotten is that Mueller’s investigation was highly
constricted. It was strictly related to Russian interference and issues that
might arise as a result of the investigation. An investigation into whether the
president is fit to hold his office would look into his financial dealings,
both before and during his presidency.
Now regarding today’s
question, since the release of the Mueller Report, it is no longer
actually a question, but rather, more grounds for impeachment:
4) With the president claiming that he was exonerated him (“No
collusion. No Obstruction.”), everything the president has done in response to
the scrutiny of the report, is arguably, a concerted campaign to obstruct
justice, which includes directing his underlings not to testify before Congress
and to defy its subpoenas. Also, the president’s vow not to work
with Democrats unless they drop their investigations, is also another ground
for impeachment.
5) The opening up of an investigation, headed by William Barr, of
the genesis of the Mueller investigation, accusing his adversaries of treason,
without question, constitutes a serious abuse of power and another reason for
impeachment.
Despite Pelosi’s
hesitancy to impeach, perhaps she was right when she alluded to that his family
needs to do an “intervention,” which alludes to the need not to impeach, but to
invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution. That has
probably been true since the day he took office.
