Six more days until the country’s next effort to get Donald Trump impeached commences. First of all, forget about so-called white shoe firms, this is strictly Ambulance Chasing 101. But that’s okay, because this isn’t a trial, it’s a TV show.
As you know, Trump’s first legal team quit en masse so that leaves us here:
“David Schoen, a Georgia-based lawyer who represented the longtime Trump adviser Roger J. Stone Jr., and Bruce Castor, a former district attorney in Pennsylvania, were announced …
Mr. Castor is famous for declining to prosecute the disgraced entertainer Bill Cosby while he was the district attorney in Montgomery County, Pa., in 2005. He also served briefly as Pennsylvania’s acting attorney general.
OK, so far this scans… but then we hit pay dirt:
“Mr. Schoen has represented a wide range of clients, from mobsters to political figures to Mr. Stone. In an interview with The Atlanta Jewish Times in September, Mr. Schoen said of his casework, ‘I represented all sorts of reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia and two Italian bosses, as well a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world.’”
Thanks to Mock Paper Scissors for the foregoing.
Former President Trump has parted ways with his lead impeachment lawyers just over a week before his Senate trial is set to begin, two people familiar with the situation said Saturday. Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, both South Carolina lawyers, are no longer with Trump’s defense team….Greg Harris and Johnny Gasser, two former federal prosecutors from South Carolina, are also off the team, one of the people said.
According to a different person with knowledge of the legal hires, Bowers and Barbier left the team because Trump wanted them to use a defense that relied on allegations of election fraud, and the lawyers were not willing to do so….Trump has struggled to find attorneys willing to defend him after becoming the first president in history to be impeached twice….After numerous attorneys who defended him previously declined to take on the case, Trump was introduced to Bowers by one of his closest allies in the Senate, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Jokes aside, this shows that Trump understands what Bowers didn’t: this isn’t a trial, it’s a TV show. Trump knows that his control over the Republican Party is still strong enough that he faces no chance of conviction, which means that legal arguments are unnecessary. Instead, he wants this to be a nationally televised opportunity for him to persuade the public that the 2020 election was teeming with Democratic fraud that cheated him out of reelection. He will, of course, be aided in this via coverage from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and all the rest of the right-wing media empire. I predict high ratings.
Now here’s a spin on this that you should think about: it would actually be in the GOP’s best interest to convict Trump and preclude him from holding any future office, because that would allow them to put him in the rear view mirror. As it is now, he’s got a stranglehold on the GOP and they can’t move forward. But, without him in the picture, they could conceivably heal their splintered state.
Or, maybe they want to remain the party of the crazies? But Mitch McConnell’s impassioned take down of Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday, followed by his support for Liz Cheney, would indicate that the old guard Republican party wants to sever its ties with the most severe faction of its constituency.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. Even if, by some minor miracle (or even a major one) the a$$ lickers in the senate decide to convict, the Trompador will run bawling to the supreme court challenging the ‘constitutionality’ (not his guilt – that’s as obvious as the horn on a rhino). In the meantime, Donnie Baby will form a new party and take over the MAGAts and the crazies already elected and run for the job himself.
The scary thing is he’ll get a load of votes and we’ll have to go through it all overagain in 4 years time.
But, as it’s almost certain that the Trompador will, once again, sneer at the law and continue to act as though he was still in office.
The problem with any arguments about “constitutionality” (beyond the fact that Trump doesn’t have a clue about the term) is that there’s actually nothing that is actually unConstitutional about the proceedings. The Constitution simply says that impeachment is the way to try Federal officials for certain crimes committed while IN OFFICE. Beyond that, nothing. There’s no actual complete list of what does and what doesn’t constitute impeachable offenses (a few specifics are mentioned but they’re basically examples of offenses but not an exhaustive list of such). As for the “in office” bit, precedent exists for officials being impeached after leaving office and as there’s nothing IN the Constitution that actually prohibits impeachment from occurring after leaving office (the precedent was a case involving an official who resigned to stave off impeachment; technically, the only reason Nixon didn’t face impeachment was because he resigned and the Congress was satisfied with that so it didn’t pursue the proceedings–Congress COULD have but the members decided against.
And, all those “original intent” folks who insist that there’s no right to privacy since that phrase isn’t in the Constitution would have to admit their argument is–and always has been–pure hokum, intended to further an agenda. Admitting it not just to themselves but also the millions of right-wingers who’ve swallowed the hokum, hook, line and sinker.
He doesn’t have the money for a new party.
With the impeachment being strictly a political exercise, I hope that doesn’t preclude any possible criminal proceedings. Don’t get me wrong, impeachment conviction would be great, especially barring him from future public office. I would just like it to be followed up with criminal accountability.
It won’t, especially since most of those are at the state level.