Donald Trump -- a plutocrat, white supremacist, misogynist, narcissist, and demagogue -- took over the Republican Party. His plan: to "make America great again" by undoing the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, and the gay rights movement. (Conservative columnist and lifelong Republican Max Boot observed: the Republicans used to be "a conservative party with a white-nationalist fringe. Now it's a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe.") The majority of Republican elected officials either agree with him, see his racism and misogyny as an acceptable means to an end, or are too afraid to stand up to him. Meanwhile, Republican-controlled State legislatures abused gerrymandering and passed "Jim Crow" laws to keep themselves in power even if a majority votes against them. (Trump did not create gerrymandering or "Jim Crow" laws -- he just exploited them.)

Likewise, the Democrats -- who won the majority vote in 2012, 2014 and 2016 and lost anyway due to gerrymandering -- proved unwilling or unable to take action for three years. For instance, throughout his two terms, President Obama -- a moderate -- ran on bringing the country together and regularly attempted to compromise with Republican Senators. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell famously replied: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." The Republicans filibustered everything Obama proposed in order to paralyze the government and make Obama look bad. Astoundingly, when Donald Trump -- an extremist -- won an apparent Electoral College victory, the only Democrat to suggest filibustering everything Trump proposed was former Labor Secretary Thomas Perez.

Paul Waldman made a compelling case in the Washington Post that "Donald Trump thinks he can get away with anything.
"In a matter of days, he's invited his daughter Ivanka, who will be leading the Trump Organization, to sit in on a meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan. He held a meeting with Indian businessmen developing a Trump-branded apartment complex. He had his Washington hotel encourage foreign diplomats to stay there while they're in the nation's capital. He pressed British party leader Nigel Farage to fight against a proposed wind farm Trump believes mars the view from a golf course he owns in Scotland." The only reason these were not impeachable offenses is that Trump hadn't been sworn in yet.
"Republicans in Congress sure aren't going to be investigating his conflicts of interest," Waldman continues. "Democrats have no institutional power to do so... So who's going to stop him?"

• The Constitution forbids the President from receiving emoluments, i.e. using his government position to do people favors in exchange for gifts. Trump's entire presidency has been a series of colossal emoluments violations. Trump has violated the Constitution's emoluments clause every day since he was sworn in.
• For instance: foreign diplomats and American businessmen are staying at Trump-owned hotels to gain his favor, and the money they spend eventually finds its way into Trump's pockets. It's an emoluments violation (akin to bribery) every time that happens. For example: in 2019, executives from telephone company T-Mobile visited Washington to lobby regulators to approve their merger with Sprint, another telephone company. In the process, they spent $195,000 staying at a Trump-owned hotel.
• Likewise, Trump has engaged in graft -- paying himself millions of dollars of taxpayers' money by ordering government employees to stay at his hotels and by booking government (and campaign) events at his resorts. For instance: Politico reported that Trump ordered Air Force jets to refuel near a resort he owns in Scotland -- one where Trump has a special deal with the local airport. The Air Force then pays Trump to have their personnel stay at his resort. (It would be cheaper -- and routine -- for the jets to refuel at a military base in the UK and for the crew to sleep there.) Emoluments are illegal for precisely this reason: politicians are not allowed to abuse their political authority to generate business for themselves. If President Barack Obama had ordered military personnel to stay at a resort he owned instead of on a normal military base, he would have been impeached later that week.
• Trump's emolument violations don't stop with his hotels. According to ABC News and the Huffington Post, the Chinese phone company ZTE -- which is partially owned by the communist Chinese government -- got in trouble with the United States for two reasons. First: the U.S. military banned the use of ZTE phones due to security concerns. Second: When ZTE violated sanctions against Iran and North Korea, the United States forbid the company from buying American-made parts. These moves crippled the company.
  In May 2018, the Chinese government agreed to loan $1 billion to a Trump-branded resort in Indonesia. Three days later, Trump -- who criticized China for years -- announced that American taxpayers would bail out ZTE.
  If President Barack Obama had undercut sanctions to benefit his business, he would have been impeached immediately.
• In 2019, Vice President Mike Pence made a state trip to Ireland and met with Irish officials. Instead of staying in a hotel in Ireland's capital, he paid Trump $3.6 million of taxpayers' money to stay at one of Trump's golf clubs on the other side of Ireland. Pence then drove 181 miles to attend the meetings. If Vice President Joe Biden had spent $3.6 million staying at a hotel owned by President Obama that wasn't anywhere near the people he was meeting with, both he and Obama would have been impeached immediately.
• A few months later, Trump announced that he would hold the Group of Seven economic summit at a resort he owns in Florida. Congressman Jerry Nadler explained: "Hosting the G7 Summit at Doral implicates both the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses, because it would entail both foreign and U.S. government spending to benefit the President, the latter potentially including both federal and state expenditures. More importantly, the Doral decision reflects perhaps the first publicly known instance in which foreign governments would be required to pay President Trump's private businesses in order to conduct business with the United States." After a massive public outcry, Trump agreed to hold the summit somewhere else. "You people with this phony emoluments clause," he grumbled.
• The New York Times has compiled a list of all the ways Trump, his family, and his cronies are using the Presidency to enrich themselves.
• The Washington Post lists other examples. For instance: in 2018, Trump met with the Japanese Prime Minister. Instead of holding the meeting at the White House, Trump held the meeting at Mar-a-Lago, a resort he owns in Florida. Trump used his government position to generate business for Mar-a-Lago, and the resort billed taxpayers $36,200. $6000 of that was just for floral arrangements.
  In the four years of his presidency, Trump conducted government business at his own properties at least 280 times and sent taxpayers a bill of $8.1 million. Trump's properties then paid their owner: Trump.

  "...The more [Trump] went, the more he got. Since 2017, Trump's company has charged taxpayers for hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides. And water." Trump charged taxpayers $3 for every glass of water.
  "While Trump was publicly donating his $400,000 annual presidential salary, he was privately using his power to bring his businesses far more than that."
  "In addition, Trump's campaign and fundraising committee paid $5.6 million to his companies since his inauguration in January 2017. Those payments -- turning campaign donations into private revenue -- continued even this year, as Trump fell behind in polls and his campaign ran short of money... Trump's campaign paid Trump's business $40,000 [to] rent... space in Trump Tower."

• Receipts show that Trump made $7.8 million during his presidency from foreign governments sending representatives to stay at his hotels.

• As a presidential candidate, Trump called on Russian hackers to break American laws. "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing." Russian dictator Vladimir Putin ordered Russian hackers to break into Trump's opponents' computers later that same day. Putin also ordered a disinformation campaign against Trump's rivals and ordered Russian hackers to break into American voting databases.
• In August 2016, America's intelligence agencies informed Trump that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was attacking America's election infrastructure. Ever since, Trump has tried to cover up that attack by denying it took place and obstructing the investigations into it. Trump aided the enemy as an accessory after the fact. That meets the Constitutional definition of treason. If Obama had used his Presidential power to cover up Putin's cyberattacks and ridicule anyone who said they were happening, Obama would have been impeached within the week. If the slightest hint existed that Putin had helped Barack Obama win the 2008 or 2012 elections, Obama would have been impeached before he was even sworn in.
• The Constitution's Preamble describes the Federal government's purpose: to "provide for the common defence... and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." On January 20, 2017, Trump swore to "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." Trump has done nothing to protect our elections from future hacking. Trump refuses to defend the country, and he refuses to secure the blessings of liberty against foreign cyberattacks. Trump must be impeached for dereliction of duty, removed from office, and barred from ever again holding office. Not only has Trump failed to uphold the Constitution, he never had any intention of doing so, and told the Russian Ambassador and the Russian Foreign Minister in 2017 that he didn't care that Putin -- their boss -- had directed cyberattacks against the United States in order to manipulate the 2016 election. As Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe told Newsweek, "If one defines war to include cyberwar, —e.g., by deliberately hacking into a nation's computer-based election infrastructure, —then what we witnessed in Helsinki was President Trump openly aiding and abetting the Russian military''s ongoing war against America rather than protecting against that Putin-led cyber-invasion. That, in turn, could reasonably be defined as treason within the meaning of 18 USC § 2381 and Article III of the U.S. Constitution." If Obama had openly refused to defend the country against cyberattacks, he would have been impeached later that day.
  
• Following Putin's attack on the 2016 election, Congress passed sanctions on Russia by a large bipartisan majority. Though Trump signed the law, he refused to enforce it for months. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Had Congress imposed sanctions against an enemy dictatorship and Obama refused to uphold those sanctions, he would have been impeached within the month.

• In May, 2017, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, and told an interviewer he did it to stop the FBI from investigating Russia. According to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and journalists David Corn and Keith Olbermann, that's obstruction of justice -- a criminal offense. Even if Trump did not collaborate with Putin to break American laws in order to steal the election, obstructing the investigation was itself a crime. Olbermann points out that Trump engaged in witness intimidation (against the just-fired Comey). If Comey had investigated the Obama campaign and President Obama had fired him, Obama would have been impeached immediately.
• Trump named Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Sessions then recused himself from overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the 2016 Russian cyberattack. Sessions was following the law: since he had himself spoken with the Russian Ambassador when he was advising Trump's presidential campaign, he had a conflict of interest that prevented him from overseeing an investigation that might include his own actions. Even though Sessions didn't do a good job at recusing himself, Trump believes Sessions should have protected him from Mueller's investigation and took Sessions' recusal as a personal betrayal.
  In August 2018, Trump publically chastised Sessions for not dropping criminal investigations of two of Trump's Congressional allies. Former U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Toobin says this statement may itself be an impeachable offense. "If I went to my supervisor and said... we should not indict or investigate a member of the President's party because they're a member of the President's party, I probably would have been suspended, if not fired," he explained.
  The Constitution requires the President to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." In this country we prosecute criminals based on the evidence, not on whether or not they agree with the President's politics. If Obama had ordered the Justice Department to stop investigating crimes just because the criminals were friendly to the Democratic Party, Obama would have been impeached immediately.
• Trump also publically criticized Sessions for not stopping the Mueller investigation, which indicted 34 people and three companies for conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering.
• Trump claims to be "the most transparent president... in the history of this country." In reality, he was the first presidential candidate since 1976 to refuse to release his tax returns. Trump continues to defy subpoenas for those returns and for the uncensored version of the Mueller Report. Trump also refuses to allow former White House Counsel Don McGahn or Attorney General William Barr to testify before the House of Representatives.
• Trump said he could pardon himself if he committed any crimes while in office. Although it's not illegal and and of itself to make statements like that, had Obama said those that, Congress would have launched an impeachment investigation immediately.

• In November 2018, Trump fired Sessions and named an "interim Attorney General," Matthew Whitaker, to lead the Justice Department. By doing so, Trump obstructed justice again: Trump felt threatened by the Department of Justice's investigation and wanted it shut down. (Trump insisted Mueller's investigation -- that yielded the indictments of 26 Russians and 3 Russian companies -- was a "witch hunt.") Furthermore, naming an "interim Attorney General" is unconstitutional and violates the Attorney General Succession Act. Although the President can fire cabinet officials, Trump cannot name new cabinet officials without the Senate's consent. According to the law, the acting Attorney General must be the highest-ranking Justice Department official who has been confirmed by the Senate until Trump nominates -- and the Senate confirms -- a successor.
  As Law Professor Laurence Tribe points out, "If the attorney general -- whose signature appears on the charging documents [has not been confirmed by the Senate], then the office has no legal authority... if a defendant can show that Whitaker's authorization is behind a case, and that there's a serious question about whether Whitaker was legally appointed... Criminal defendants in federal prosecutions could resist whatever the Justice Department demands of them (for instance, by subpoena) by arguing that Whitaker is a legal nobody." Since the Senate never confirmed Whitaker, he had no legal authority to do anything, including prosecute criminals.
  If President Obama's friends were under criminal investigation, and Obama fired his Attorney General for not doing enough to protect those friends, Obama would have been impeached that week. If Obama had named a new Attorney General without the Senate's consent, he would have been impeached the next day.
  

• Trump is a serial liar. Like all of his speeches, his February 2017 speech to Congress was full of lies. According to the Washington Post, Trump twice took credit for events that happened during his predecessor's term, took credit for routine law enforcement that's been happening for years, and claimed unemployment is ten times worse than it really is. Lying to Congress is a felony. If Obama had deliberately told Congress information he knew to be false, he would have been impeached immediately.
• Likewise, Trump lied in his 2018 State of the Union address to Congress. According to The Hill, Trump claimed he'd passed the largest tax cuts ever (they weren't), claimed wages are rising (they aren't), and claimed the United States exports more energy than we import (we don't.) He also claimed that Apple, Inc. plans to invest ten times more money in the American economy than they really do. Furthermore, his statements about how American immigration laws work were completely wrong.
• Trump also lied in the 2019 State of the Union Address. According to the Washington Post, Trump again claimed the United States exports more energy than we import (we don't), claimed that there's a crisis at the southern border (there isn't), claimed that immigrants bring crime (immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than natives), claimed he is trying to protect patients with pre-existing conditions (he's doing the opposite), and claimed he's made peace with North Korea (he hasn't).
• Trump lied in the 2020 State of the Union Address too. According to the Fiscal Times, Trump claimed he'd signed the biggest tax cuts in history (they weren't); claimed he's trying to protect health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions (he's trying to take it away); claimed that drug prices are falling (they aren't); and claimed that he's protecting Social Security and Medicare (he's trying to cut them.) According to the NewsHour, Trump also lied about immigration, lied about job creation, lied about the size of the labor force, and took credit for oil production that happened before he became President.

  Republicans in the audience responded to Trump's lies by giving him a standing ovation and chanting "four more years!" At the time, Trump was going through an impeachment trial. The Republican Senators chanting "four more years" were supposedly deliberating whether or not Trump should be removed from office for trying to steal the 2020 election.
  

• According to BuzzFeed, "Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow." Ordering a subordinate to lie to Congress is a felony: subornation of perjury and obstruction of justice. According to Business Insider, Trump claims he never talked to Cohen about testifying before Congress, but Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani confirmed that Trump and Cohen had discussed it.

• Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes that Trump systematically disparaged the independent judiciary -- a violation of his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Had President Obama threatened to dismantle the Ninth Circuit the way Trump did, Obama would have been impeached immediately.

• In October 2017, Trump threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of NBC and CNN for running ordinary (though unflattering) news stories. Although the President does not have the power to do this, Mother Jones points out that Trump's threats against the news media violate the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press -- whether he has the power to carry them out or not. (Had President Obama threatened to revoke the broadcast license of any news network, he would have been impeached immediately.)
• The Trump Administration arrested journalists who covered protests and charging them with felonies. A member of the Trump Administration also threatened a reporter covering the White House. A few months later, a reporter was arrested for asking then-Secretary Tom Price a question outside a courthouse. Another reporter was thrown out of a public meeting for asking Federal Communications Commission official Michael O'Rielly a question. A month later, two cable news hosts told the Washington Post that "top White House staff members warned [us] that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us [in retaliation for unflattering coverage] unless we begged the president to have the story spiked."
  In 2018, then-EPA director Scott Pruitt barred reporters from the Associated Press and CNN from attending a clean water meeting, and a female reporter was shoved out of the building.
• In September 2017, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the St. Louis police arrested and jailed one of their reporters covering a local civil rights protest. During the protest, the police also arrested and assaulted an undercover officer.
• According to the Washington Post and the New Yorker, Trump called the news media "the enemy of the American People." Trump echoed the words of Russian dictator Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union.
• A few months later, Trump asked the Senate to investigate newspapers who published unflattering (though honest) stories about him. The Atlantic commented: "He is suggesting that the Senate bring its investigative powers to bear on news reports that are... entirely accurate."
  
• In May 2020, a rubber bullet hit MSNBC anchor Ali Velchi in the knee while he was covering a peaceful civil rights protest. A few months later, Trump said the incident "was the most beautiful thing... wasn't it really a beautiful sight?" If Obama had glorified violence against a free press, the House would have launched an impeachment investigation later that week.

• Trump accused former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates of a crime a few hours before she testified before Congress. According to PoliticusUSA, Trump may have violated Federal laws against intimidating, threatening, or tampering with a witness. Politicus concludes that "A judge would have to answer that question" -- but had Obama threatened a witness, he would have been impeached the next day. Witness intimidation is a Federal crime.
• Trump made another attempt at witness intimidation when he threatened former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch when she was testifying before Congress.
• As noted above, Trump also attempted witness intimidation against former FBI Director James Comey.

• Trump created the so-called "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity," chaired by Mike Pence and run by Kris Kobach. This Commission was a scam. As The Nation reported, "The commission was set up for one purpose: to spread false information about voter fraud, like Trump's gigantic lie that millions of people voted illegally, in order to build support for policies that make it more difficult to vote."
  In 2016, the States using Kobach's "Crosscheck" system claimed that people with similar names were all the same voter and removed thousands of innocent American citizens from voting rolls. (Greg Palast reported: "According to database expert Mark Swedlund, an astonishing one in six Hispanics and one in nine African-Americans are on Kobach's 'potential double registered' list of seven million suspects in the twenty-eight States. [Swedlund] says, 'If your name is Jose Hernandez, you're likely suspected of voting in 28 States!'") Trump, Pence and Kobach wanted to take "Crosscheck" national, purging voter rolls of anyone who might vote against them. It wasn't a case of being misguided. Trump, Pence and Kobach couldn't possibly believe that all 28 people named Jose Hernandez in different States are the same person.
  The 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments guarantee the right to vote to all innocent citizens over eighteen, regardless of race, color, or gender. Trump's conspiracy to violate the Constitutional rights of millions of Americans is also an impeachable offense. (Had Obama done what Kobach did -- demanded that all 50 States produce the names, birthdays, voting histories and social security numbers of all registered voters and send them to him over an unsecured email -- he would have been impeached the next day.)
  Though Trump disbanded his so-called Commission in January 2018, he said that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be investigating voting fraud, and that Kris "Crosscheck" Kobach would be advising them.

• Trump libeled former President Obama by falsely accusing him of a crime. Trump made the bogus claim that his predecessor had wiretapped him in 2016 -- ironically, the same crime that Trump himself had urged Russia to commit against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Law Professor Noah Feldman argued that Trump's libel was an abuse of power and was itself an impeachable offense. "...An allegation of potentially criminal misconduct made without evidence is itself a form of serious misconduct by the government official who makes it," Feldman wrote. "Given how great the executive's power is, accusations by the president can't be treated asymmetrically. If the alleged action would be impeachable if true, so must be the allegation if false. Anything else would give the president the power to distort democracy by calling his opponents criminals without ever having to prove it."
  Three years later, Trump wrote that Obama had committed "the biggest political crime in American history, by far!" When reporters asked him what crime Obama had supposedly committed, Trump replied: "Obamagate. It's been going on for a long time. It's been going on from before I even got elected and it's a disgrace that it happened and if you look at what's gone on and if you look at now all of this information that's being released and from what I understand, that's only the beginning. Some terrible things happened and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again. And you'll be seeing what's going on over the next, over the coming weeks and I wish you'd write honestly about it but unfortunately you choose not to do so."
  "What is the crime exactly that you are accusing him of?" the reporter asked.
  "You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody," Trump said.
  Trump couldn't explain the crime because there was no crime. He made the whole thing up on the spot. Like a schoolyard bully, Trump tried to make himself look good by making Obama look bad. (Watch the video.) Trump's incompetence would be comical if it were coming from anywhere other than the Oval Office.
• Trump later libeled former FBI director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, falsely claiming they had "committed many crimes." Trump later claimed Comey and McCabe were guilty of treason. (Treason is a capital crime, so Trump threatened Comey and McCabe's lives.) Trump made similar false accusations against former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates.
• Months later, Trump libeled retired Special Counsel Robert Mueller, falsely accusing him of a crime. Trump thinks any law enforcement official who investigated Putin's 2016 cyberattack is a criminal and a traitor.
• Trump later said former Secretary Hillary Clinton had committed "many... crimes," directed Justice Department officials to investigate her, and told the Justice Department to imprison former Clinton aide Huma Abedin. (The Justice Department is supposed to investigate criminals, not people who ran against Trump in the last election.)
• Trump libeled Congressman Adam Schiff, flasely claiming he had acted "illegally." A year later Trump said Schiff should be arrested for treason -- for reminding Congress of something Trump himself said two months earlier.
• The Washington Post notes that Trump libeled numerous others by falsely accusing them of crimes, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, millionaire George Soros, FBI agent Peter Strzok, and (later) Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
• Trump libeled former Vice President Joe Biden by falsely accusing him of abuse of power. In 2015, then-Vice President Biden had urged the Ukrainian government to fire their Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin, because Shokin was not doing enough to fight corruption. Trump falsely claimed Biden had urged the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin because Shokin was investigating Burisma, a gas company that Biden's son worked for at the time. In reality, Shokin was not investigating Burisma and had no plans to do so. If Biden had wanted to protect his son's employer, he would have left Shokin in place. (A Congressional investigation later revealed that Shokin never investigated any crimes in his time as Ukraine's Prosecutor General, covered up other crimes, and lived an extravagant lifestyle that he could never have afforded with his government salary.)
• Trump falsely accused television host Joe Scarborough of murdering an intern in 2001. In reality, the intern died of heart failure.
• Trump called for the prosecution and imprisonment of his former National Security Advisor, John Bolton. Why? Bolton wrote a book critical of Trump.
• If Obama had made similar baseless accusations against his political opponents -- for instance, if Obama had claimed Mitt Romney was a criminal -- Obama would have been impeached the next day.

• Trump became President even after breaking campaign finance laws by soliciting donations from foreigners.
• Over a year later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump's attorney Michael Cohen had paid porn star Stephanie "Stormy Daniels" Clifford $130,000 to keep quiet about an affair she'd had with Trump ten years earlier. (The adultery took place a few months after Trump's current wife had given birth to their son.) Cohen claimed he'd paid Daniels out of his own money and Trump hadn't known about it. However, another of Trump's attorneys -- Rudy Giuliani -- later said that Trump had known about it and had reimbursed Cohen. Moreover, Giuliani said the payment was timed to prevent the news coming out before the 2016 election. Without meaning to, Giuliani confirmed a second campaign finance violation, and may have confirmed another crime -- falsification of business records.
  Cohen later pleaded guilty to tax evasion and bank fraud. When doing so, he told the court that Trump had directed him to pay hush money to a second woman (model Karen McDougal) to prevent the news of their adultery from coming out before the election. According to the New York Times, Cohen's admission confirmed that he and Trump broke campaign finance laws again. The next day, Trump admitted that he'd paid the money, but claimed his payments weren't illegal.
  According to The Atlantic, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker later "admitted to the Department of Justice that he, Trump, and Trump's fixer Michael Cohen engaged in a catch-and-kill scheme for stories about alleged affairs and one-night stands involving Trump, with the goal of keeping such information from voters...
  "The Federal Election Commission [later] sanctioned... the National Enquirer's parent company for its illegal interference in the 2016 election. [The National Enquirer] agreed to pay $187,500 in fines after the FEC's nonpartisan staff found that the catch-and-kill arrangement, in coordination with Trump and Cohen, violated federal campaign-finance law."
  Had Obama cheated on his wife with a porn star and a model and then paid them to keep quiet about it -- conspiring to break election laws in the process -- Congress would have impeached him within a week. Had former President Clinton cheated on his wife... yeah.
  It took seven years, but in 2023 the State of New York indicted Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to violate New York election laws. Each count is a felony under New York law. Trump and his sons responded by threatening the district attorney and his family and attacking the judge hearing the case and his family. Threatening a prosecutor is also illegal in New York. If any other person had attacked a judge, they'd be held in contempt of court. It took eight years, but in May 2024, a jury found Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records. Trump was finally convicted of committing fraud in order to stop voters from finding out about his adultery before the 2016 election.
• Trump and his children founded the Trump Foundation in 1988 ostensibly as a charity. However, according to the Washington Post, the Trump Foundation did little charitable work. Instead, Trump used its funds to settle lawsuits against him and pay off other debts. In 2015-2016, Trump's campaign used Trump Foundation "charity" money to fund his presidential bid. Doing so broke tax laws and constituted further violations of campaign finance statutes. (The State of New York later shut down the Trump Foundation and fined Trump $2 million.)
• In 2022, the State of New York sued Trump and his three oldest children, demanding the return of $250 million the Trumps stole through bank fraud, insurance fraud, and tax evasion. The Trump Organization was found guilty that December.
• In 2023, a judge determined that Trump had knowingly committed financial fraud for years. Trump falsely claimed his house was three times larger than it is, falsely claimed his $18 million resort in Florida is actually worth $612 million, and falsely claimed he has $2 billion more in assets than he really does. The judge wrote: "The documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuation that the defendants used in businesses... Defendants respond that: the documents do not say what they say, that there is no such thing as objective value, and that essentially the court should not believe its own eyes."
  The judge revoked Trump's business licenses and ordered the Trump Organization dissolved.
  Trump subsequently said the judge was "deranged", called him a criminal, and said he "should be disbarred." If any other person had done that, they'd be held in contempt of court. As a direct consequence of Trump's attacks, the judge and his staff have been receiving hundreds of death threats every day. Ironically, Trump later admitted to financial fraud while testifying under oath in his own defense.
  In 2024, a New York judge ordered Trump to repay $355 million in stolen funds, another $100 million in interest, and forbade him from doing business in New York for three years. Trump's two oldest sons were each ordered to repay $4 million in stolen funds. Trump has to pay $100,000 per day in fines until he repays the stolen money.
• Mother Jones reported another instance of the Trump campaign breaking campaign finance laws when they coordinated their election advertising with the National Rifle Association. "'I don't think I've ever seen a situation where illegal coordination seems more obvious,' said Ann Ravel, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission, who reviewed the records. 'It is so blatant that it doesn't even seem sloppy. Everyone involved probably just thinks there aren't going to be any consequences.'"

• In order to discourage people from Latin America from immigrating to the United States, in April 2018 Trump and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a "zero tolerance" policy and ordered the Border Patrol to arrest anyone trying to sneak across the American-Mexican border. According to the New York Times, however, "many of the detained migrants - including those in families that are split apart - enter at official border crossings and request asylum, which is not an illegal entry." How is this happening? The Texas Monthly reported that the border guards have been ordered to turn away everyone asking for asylum legally. The result: anyone attempting to immigrate is charged with illegal entry and imprisoned, where they wait months before trial.
• If the migrants have children, the children are taken from their parents and sent to other "facilities" hundreds of miles away. News and Guts republished a government video showing what one of those "facilities" is like -- it's a converted Wal-Mart with "rooms" made from steel chain-link fences. The children sleep on the floor and the overhead lights stay on all night. It's not exactly a prison, but what else do you call a place where children are kept in cages? Moreover, the Texas Monthly reports that, while the Homeland Security Department has imprisoned the parents, the children are in the Health and Human Services Department's custody. The two departments don't communicate and there is no procedure for reuniting families. Meanwhile, many children are so young they don't know their last names or birth dates, let alone their parents' birth dates. Many don't speak English, and there is no mechanism for informing the children if their parents were deported without them. Furthermore, there aren't enough judges at the border to hear asylum requests, and the immigrant parents generally sit in prison for two to six months before their cases get heard. In cases where the children taken from their parents have relatives living in the United States the children are placed with relatives, but if the relatives' visas expire and get deported, the children are put back in the system. (The New York Times later reported that the Homeland Security Department placed some immigrant children with caregivers, but didn't bother running background checks on those caregivers. Officials "did not examine whether an adult who claimed to be a relative actually was." At least twenty children were handed over to human traffickers, and some were forced into child labor.)
  "We're looking at a variety of ways to enforce our laws to discourage parents from bringing their children here illegally," then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Congress that January. "If you don't want your child separated, then don't bring them across the border illegally," Sessions said when announcing the policy that April. Their policy, however, was itself illegal. It's against the law to lock up migrant children under the 1997 Flores Settlement. Also, a 2015 court order struck down a Obama Administration policy designed solely to scare people away from immigrating to the United States - which (according to the Trump Administration) is exactly what they're trying to do.
• The Independent reported that, in situations where the entire family is already in detention, the Border Patrol has taken children away from their parents under the pretense of giving them baths. According to CNN, one woman's child was taken away while she was breastfeeding. The Los Angeles Times reported that the guards told the imprisoned mothers that they would never see their children again.
  Over 2,500 children were taken from their parents. As the Times, the Associated Press, News and Guts, and the Washington Post report, this separation is traumatizing the children and is causing permanent psychological damage. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association call it child abuse. NBC News reported that at one facility, the children were given psychotropic drugs to keep them quiet. Mother Jones points out that having the government take their children away causes severe harm to the mothers, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
  Business Insider reported that there are over 10,000 migrant children in custody -- which includes migrant children arrested while trying to cross the border alone, legally or illegally. (The American Civil Liberties Union reported that, over the last decade, the Border Patrol has subjected migrant children to widespread abuse.)
  Senator Elizabeth Warren reported on her visit to one of these prisons. Although the border patrol employee she spoke with claimed no one was held there for more than 72 hours, the prisoners themselves said they'd been there from two days to two weeks. "Mothers and children may be considered 'together' if they're held in the same gigantic facility, even if they're locked in separate cages with no access to one another," Warren wrote. "In the world of CBP and ICE, that's how the 10-year-old girls locked in a giant cage are 'not separated' from their mothers who are in cages elsewhere in the facility. In the process of 'reunifying' families, the government may possibly count a family as reunited by sending the child to a distant relative they've never met – not their parents." At a different prison, "Each mother told us her own story about crossing the border, being taken to a processing center, and the point that they were separated from their child or children. In every case, the government had lied to them about where their children were being taken. In every case, save one, no mother had spoken to her child in the days since the separation. And in every case, no mother knew where her child was." There are phones, but using the phones costs money, and the detainees' money has been confiscated. The Huffington Post reported that at least nineteen parents were deported while their children remain in custody.
  Once in the system, the children eventually get to see an immigration judge where they can make their case that they should be granted asylum. However, according to the PBS NewsHour and the Texas Tribune, these children -- aged anywhere from one to seventeen -- have been taken from their parents and put in cages. After several days, they're escorted to a courtroom in a country where they don't speak the language well and don't know the laws. There, the children are expected to plead their case in front of a judge with no preparation, no lawyer, no parents, and sometimes no help. Afterwards, they get cross-examined by an adult lawyer who is an expert in immigration law and has been hired to use any and all legal means to prevent the child from getting asylum. Expecting toddlers who haven't even learned to read yet to navigate this alone is ludicrous at best and abusive at worst.
• After a massive public outcry, Trump signed an executive order ending family separation in late June. However, Trump's order was also illegal. Even if they're locked up in the same prison, jailing innocent children -- with or without their parents -- violates the 2015 court order. Furthermore, Trump's order said nothing about reuniting children and parents who were already separated. The Atlantic reported that family separation is still happening, with 1,000 children separated from their parents in the year since.
• A judge ordered Trump to reunite all the families by the end of July. However, according to the New York Times, the Trump Administration lost the records (when they bothered making any in the first place) indicating which children belonged to which parents. Health and Human Services officials worked frantically to figure out how to return the kids to their parents -- because no one in the Trump Administration who came up with the "zero tolerance" policy thought it through enough to realize they'd have to give the children back some day. Meanwhile, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are telling the parents they will only get their kids back if they agree to give up their asylum requests and return to the country they fled. This presents "a stark choice," The Atlantic reported: "be reunited with your child upon deportation, or be deported without your child and let them stay in the United States to fight their immigration case on their own." According to the court order, this is also illegal: the families must be reunited regardless of whether or not the parents agree to give up their asylum requests.
• The Chicago Sun Times reported the tragic story of a one-year-old refugee who could barely talk and went before the immigration judge in diapers. It turned out that he and his father had fled violence in Honduras only for ICE to separate them at the border. They haven't seen each other since. Immigration officials told the imprisoned father that he would only be reunited with his son if he agreed to return to Honduras. In desperation, the father took the deal -- and then ICE refused to keep their end of the bargain and deported him to Honduras alone.
• According to CNN, the Trump Administration missed the court-ordered deadline for returning over 700 children to their parents, mainly because they deported the parents and kept the children in custody. How did this happen? Senator Brian Schatz wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "The separation of children from their parents at the Southwest border is not simply a policy that has resulted in immeasurable harm, but a policy designed to inflict it. The government blew its Thursday deadline to reunite these families because it never intended to do so... the administration seems to have taken a comprehensive inventory of confiscated items — sneakers, toothpaste, rosaries — everything except which child belongs to which parent. These are the actions of a government that intended to separate families but did not intend to reunite them. It meant to inflict so much suffering that other families wouldn't make the dangerous trek. [But:] The number of families stopped at the border actually increased by 64% in the months after the administration began to separate families. So even if you could stomach traumatizing toddlers, this policy did not accomplish Sessions' objective of sending a warning across the desert."
• According to the New York Times, the 1800 children who have been reunited with their parents "are exhibiting signs of anxiety, introversion, regression and other mental health issues. ... Most children who are experiencing problems so far display acute anxiety around routines that separate them briefly from their parents, such as when the adult bathes or goes into another room... In some cases, children were torn from their parents' arms amid tears and pleas. Other children appear to have been duped — told they were being taken to play with other children but never returned to the parent. ... Decades of research have concluded that children traumatically separated from their parents have a high likelihood of developing emotional problems, cognitive delays and long-term trauma." The Atlantic cited the example of one Honduran mother whose six-year-old son barely knew her when they were reunited. ProPublica cited further examples, including one child from a European country, Romania.
  As of September 2018, the Trump Administration still has 416 young children in custody in violation of the court order.
  
• In 2018, the Alvarado family fled El Salvador after a relative testified against a gangster -- and the gang retaliated by murdering his family members. When her life was threatened, Dora Alvarado and her daughters requested asylum in the United States, and in October 2018 they were allowed to stay in Houston while their case makes its way through the immigration courts. In March 2019, however, the Trump Administration decided to deport Dora's 11-year-old daughter back to El Salvador alone. The family lived in terror for the next month until a judge overruled the deportation order.
• According to CNN and New York Magazine, in April 2019 Trump voiced his desire to restart the illegal family separation policy and block any and all migrants seeking asylum. Trump fired then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen -- who had been the policy's chief enforcer -- when she tried to talk him down. Trump later held a meeting with border agents and ordered them not to let any migrants in. After Trump left, the border agents' supervisors told the agents that Trump's instructions had been illegal and told the agents not to follow them.
• According to Slate Magazine, after firing Nielsen, Trump fired three more high-ranking Homeland Security officials and the Secret Service director. "Nielsen... carried Trump's immigration crackdown as far as she could without risking contempt of court. Under her leadership, the agency engaged in horrific human rights abuses and violence against innocent migrants, including children. Nonetheless, it could, indeed, get worse. [Trump's purge] is an ominous indication that Trump will now brook no independent judgment at DHS. He wants an agency that does exactly what he asks. And what he asks is frequently cruel, brutal, and lawless."
• CNN later reported that Trump told the Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection that, if he were prosecuted for illegally denying entry to migrants, Trump would pardon him. The Commissioner, Kevin McAleenan, was subsequently promoted to acting Secretary of Homeland Security.
• In May 2019, the Homeland Security Department's Inspector General found 900 would-be immigrants packed in to a facility with a maximum capacity of 125. According to the Huffington Post, "In one cell, 76 detainees were forced into a room that had a maximum capacity of 12. One 12-person cell held 76 people. Another cell with a maximum capacity of eight held 41 people during the inspectors' visit, and a third cell intended for 35 people contained 155 detainees... the limited space is preventing detainees who have infectious diseases, including chicken pox, scabies and influenza, from being quarantined from the general population... The crowding has forced some detainees to stand on top of the toilets in the cells to make room." The Inspector General ordered the Department to fix the problem, and gave them a deadline: do it in the next year and a half.
• Technology website Gizmodo reports that the Customs and Border Protection agency argued in court that it has no legal responsibility to provide toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, beds, or other toiletries to the immigrant children it has imprisoned. "...The lights are left on all night long, the facilities are overcrowded to the point of absurdity, and the buildings are kept extremely cold. In fact... the facilities are made even colder when migrants complain, according to witness testimony." (Watch the video.)
• The Associated Press reported on the conditions at a facility for immigrant children. If "inhumane" describes the way the adults are being treated, "horrifying" describes the way the Trump Administration is treating children.

  "A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they've been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there's inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.
  "...On Wednesday there were three infants in the station, all with their teen mothers, along with a 1-year-old, two 2-year-olds and a 3-year-old. There are dozens more under 12. Fifteen have the flu, and 10 more are quarantined.
  "Three girls told attorneys they were trying to take care of the 2-year-old boy, who had wet his pants and had no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him.
  "'A Border Patrol agent came in our room with a 2-year-old boy and asked us, "Who wants to take care of this little boy?" Another girl said she would take care of him, but she lost interest after a few hours and so I started taking care of him yesterday,' one of the girls said in an interview with attorneys.
  "A teenage mother with a premature baby was found last week in a Texas Border Patrol processing center after being held for nine days by the government.
  "Children told lawyers that they were fed oatmeal, a cookie and a sweetened drink in the morning, instant noodles for lunch and a burrito and cookie for dinner. There are no fruits or vegetables. They said they'd gone weeks without bathing or a clean change of clothes.
  "...The Border Patrol is holding 15,000 people, and the agency considers 4,000 to be at capacity."
  

• Two human rights activists visited a detention center and shared their experience with CNN.

  "US Border Patrol is holding many children, including some who are much too young to take care of themselves, in jail-like border facilities for weeks at a time without contact with family members, regular access to showers, clean clothes, toothbrushes, or proper beds. Many are sick. Many, including children as young as 2 or 3, have been separated from adult caretakers without any provisions for their care besides the unrelated older children also being held in detention.
  "As we interviewed... two brothers, [one] fell asleep on two office chairs drawn together, probably the most comfortable bed he had used in weeks. They had been separated from an 18-year-old uncle and sent to the Clint Border Patrol Station. When we met them, they had been there three weeks and counting. 'Sometimes when we ask, we are told we will be here for months,' said one 14-year-old who had also been at Clint for three weeks.
  "Some of the children we spoke with were sleeping on concrete floors and eating the same unpalatable and unhealthy food for close to a month: instant oatmeal, instant soup and a previously-frozen burrito. Children should spend no more than a few hours in short-term border jails to be processed and US-law limits their detention under typical circumstances to 72 hours.
  "Based on our interviews, officials at the border seem to be making no effort to release children to caregivers-- many have parents in the US -- rather than holding them for weeks in overcrowded cells at the border, incommunicado from their desperate loved ones.
  "A second-grader we interviewed entered the room silently but burst into tears when we asked who she traveled with to the US. 'My aunt,' she said, with a keening cry. A bracelet on her wrist had the words 'US parent' and a phone number written in permanent marker. We called the number on the spot and found out that no one had informed her desperate parents where she was being held. Some of the most emotional moments of our visit came witnessing children speak for the first time with their parents on an attorney's phone.
  "Congress should take action -- not by approving more money for detention -- but by requiring immigration agencies to cease separating children from family members unless that's in the interest of the child, release and reunify children as soon as possible and cease using them as bait to arrest family members."

• Buzzfeed described further horrors.

  "Teen mothers said they struggled to keep their babies clean and warm...
  "A 16-year-old girl said 20 teens were crowded into a cage with babies and children, and only one mat to sleep on...
  "A 17-year-old girl said there were no clean clothes for her baby. 'Three days ago my baby soiled his clothes. I had no place to wash the clothes so I could not put them back on my baby... Since then, my baby of only three months has only been wearing a small little jacket made of t-shirt material... I have been told they do not have any clothes here at this place. I just want my baby to be warm enough. I am having to make sure I carry my baby super close to me to keep his little body warm.'
  "A 15-year-old girl said children had nothing to do except cry. 'I started taking care of [a 5-year-old girl] in the Ice Box after they separated her from her father. I did not know either of them before that. She was very upset. The workers did nothing to try to comfort her. I tried to comfort her and she has been with me ever since. [She] sleeps on a mat with me on the concrete floor. We spend all day every day in that room. There are no activities, only crying.'
  "A pregnant 17-year-old girl said she and her baby were forced to sleep on the floor. 'I was given a blanket and a mattress, but then, at 3 a.m., the guards took the blanket and mattress. My baby was left sleeping on the floor. In fact, almost every night, the guards wake us at 3 a.m. and take away our sleeping mattresses and blankets. They leave babies, even little babies of two or three months, sleeping on the cold floor.'

• According to Democracy Now, there are over 52,000 immigrants currently in custody. "At least 24 immigrants have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, and at least four more died shortly after being released. Now Homeland Security's own inspector general has revealed how detained immigrants are subjected to rotten food, severe overcrowding, inadequate medical care, and broken and overflowing toilets... The agency is already holding a record number of children in some 168 facilities and programs in 23 states." In May 2019, Time Magazine reported that five children between the ages of two and sixteen died in the Border Patrol's custody in previous last six months.
• Pediatrician Dolly Sevier told The Atlantic that "Inside the Border Patrol warehouse on Ursula Avenue, [she] saw a baby who'd been fed from the same unwashed bottle for days; children showing signs of malnutrition and dehydration; and several kids who, in her medical opinion, were exhibiting clear evidence of psychological trauma."
  "...When Sevier asked the 38 children she examined that day about sanitation, they all said they weren't allowed to wash their hands or brush their teeth. This was 'tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease,' she later wrote in a medical declaration...
  "Sevier found that about two-thirds of the kids she examined had symptoms of respiratory infection... Sevier said she found evidence of sleep deprivation, dehydration, and malnutrition too."
• According to the Los Angeles Times, three immigrant adults died in custody due to the crowded cells. "And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents' arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas," writer Jonathan Katz continues. "There are now at least 48,000 people detained in ICE facilities, which a former official told BuzzFeed News 'could swell indefinitely.'
  "...Authorities prevail when the places where people are being tortured and left to die stay hidden, misleadingly named and far from prying eyes," Katz wrote. "There's a name for that kind of system. They're called concentration camps.
  "...This isn't just a crisis facing immigrants," Katz warns. "When a leader puts people in camps to stay in power, history shows that he doesn't usually stop with the first group he detains."
• In February 2019, the New York Times reported that over 4,500 children reported surviving child abuse in border patrol custody in the last four years. Although Trump is clearly not responsible for abuse that happened before he took office, there was "an increase in complaints while the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant families at the border was in place... 178 were accusations that adult staff members had sexually assaulted immigrant children," whereas over 1,000 "were allegations of minors assaulting other minors."
• When a group of Honduran refugees arrived at the United States' southern border, Trump ordered them dispersed with tear gas. The refugees included women, children and babies. According to blogger Elie Mistal, Trump's orders were intended to deny asylum-seekers due process (as is required by American law) and were therefore illegal.
• Trump's orders violate the Fourth Amendment (forbidding unreasonable searches and seizures), the Fifth Amendment (guaranteeing due process for everyone in American jurisdiction), and the Eighth Amendment (banning cruel and unusual punishments.) It's also illegal under the 1997 Flores Settlement and a 2015 court order.
  By implementing a policy that traumatizes children, Trump committed contempt of court, conspiracy to commit child endangerment, and conspiracy to commit child abuse. Had Obama taken immigrant children away from their asylum-seeking parents in defiance of a court order, he would have been impeached within the month.
  
• In September 2020, a whistleblower in Georgia reported that detained immigrant women were being forced to have surgery where they were sterilized against their will - a crime reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps.
• The Texas Tribune reported that ICE guards sexually assaulted immigrant women in prisons in places outside the view of security cameras. When the Inspector General launched an investigation, ICE deported the victims and the witnesses to stop them from testifying.
• In October 2020, the New York Times reported that, of the immigrant children the Trump Administration took from their parents over two years ago, 545 have not been returned to their parents -- because the Trump Administration deported their parents and now can't find them.

• According to a New York Times investigation, Donald Trump and his father routinely and systematically evaded taxes from the 1980's to the 2000's. If Obama had done this, an impeachment investigation would have begun within the week.
• ProPublica revealed that as recently as 2017, Trump told lenders that he was making lots of money from his buildings and his properties would be a good investment. At the same time, he told New York City tax officials that the same buildings were barely turning a profit. Trump was either evading taxes or defrauding his investors and creditors.
• Another New York Times investigation revealed that Trump committed tax evasion for years.

  "Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years, largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
  Trump's "finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
  "The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
  "Most of Mr. Trump's core enterprises - from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington - report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.
  Trump's tax "records go much further toward revealing the actual and potential conflicts of interest created by Mr. Trump's refusal to divest himself of his business interests while in the White House. [These refer to emoluments violations, detailed above.] His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.
  "At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business. In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,602 to [Trump's] Washington hotel, where the group held at least one event during its four-day World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians.
  "The Times was also able to take the fullest measure to date of [Trump's] income from overseas, where he holds ultimate sway over American diplomacy... in his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million. And while much of that money was from his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland, some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny geopolitics - for example, $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey." Trump paid taxes in those countries but paid only $750 to the IRS that year.
  "Trump walked away from his failing casino business in 2009, claiming losses -- and claimed a tax refund of $79 million. However, Trump was only legally able to claim that refund if he didn't receive stock in the new company. Trump did -- which means he will likely have to repay that $79 million to the IRS, along with another $21 million in interest and penalties.
  "Trump's tax returns strongly imply that he paid his children salaries for working at his companies -- and then paid them again as 'consultants,' writing off $26 million in 'consulting fees' on his taxes." It's possible that "the fees were a way to [illegally] transfer assets to his children without incurring a gift tax."
  Trump "is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years."

  If Obama had done any one of these things, he would have been impeached the next day.

  In 2023, Mother Jones reported that Trump received $291,000 in gifts during his presidency, and didn't pay taxes on any of it.

• According to the New York Times, Trump told Axios that he intends to use an executive order to repeal the Constitution's guarantee of birthright citizenship. (The 14th Amendment guarantees that everyone born in the United States is an American citizen.) Trump apparently does not know that the only way to repeal part of the Constitution is to pass an amendment. This process requires the consent of Congress and a majority of State legislatures, and generally takes years. Had Obama threatened to use an executive order to strip the citizenship from millions of innocent Americans, Congress would have launched an impeachment investigation the next day.

• In April 2019, Trump ordered a group of border patrol agents not to let any migrants enter the country under any circumstances. After Trump left, their supervisors told the agents to disregard Trump's instructions because they were illegal. The Constitution requires the President to "take care that the laws are faithfully executed." If Obama had ordered government workers to break the law, he would have been impeached the next day.
• Conservative columnist Max Boot writes: "Donald J. Trump, in violation of his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, attempted to investigate and prosecute his political opponents. On three occasions, Mueller found, Trump asked the Justice Department to initiate investigations of Hillary Clinton. More recently, Trump and his attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, attempted to initiate an investigation of Joe Biden."
• Boot also writes: "Donald J. Trump, in violation of his oath to uphold Article 1, section 9 of the Constitution (“No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law”), attempted to misuse his emergency powers to spend funds on a border wall that Congress did not appropriate."
• In August 2019, the Trump Administration announced they would stop enforcing the Endangered Species Act. As noted above, the President's legal responsibility is to ensure "the laws are faithfully executed." The President must enforce all the laws; he does not get to choose which he will enforce and which he will ignore.

• Trump has said several times that he may not leave office when his term ends. If Obama had suggested he would not leave office when his term ended, Congress would have launched an impeachement investigation immediately.

• In 2019, Trump mistakenly said that hurricane Dorian was heading to Alabama -- and then altered a weather map with a sharpie pen in a clumsy attempt to cover up his mistake. It's illegal to counterfeit a government weather forecast. When NOAA officials had to correct Trump, Commerce Secretary Ross threatened to fire them.
  An insightful analysis from The Atlantic points out that "The saga of Dorian is a snapshot of Trump's refusal to accept the reality of a world that looks any different than what he wants to be true, and a demonstration of how such an instinct in a leader is incompatible with the requirements of democracy... In an emergency situation, Trump's routine falsehoods have left the average citizen with little reason to trust any presidential declaration on public safety...
  "Trump's behavior regarding Dorian is yet another example of his strained relationship with the truth, something that is at this point so routine as to be barely worth commenting on. [Trump makes] statements without any thought or care to what the truth might be. [Trump's lies are] a way of insisting that the world take the shape he wants it to have, regardless of the facts on the ground.
  "If [Trump] declares that he is a genius and surrounds himself with people who are slavish enough to agree, then he can, as far as he is concerned, remake the world into one in which he received top marks at Wharton. If he plays the character of a successful businessman on The Apprentice, he can run for office - and win - on the imagined strength of his business record. He can create a world in which he receives adulation for things he has never actually done.
  "But there are some things in the world that are not amenable to being reshaped at the president's whimsy. Among them is the weather. If it is raining, it is raining, whether or not Donald Trump tells you that he is getting wet.
  "It is striking that the administration's instinct was to see NOAA Birmingham's actions as an affront to [Trump], rather than considering whether they might have been directed by a responsibility to the people of Alabama or an allegiance to the facts of the forecast. Everything orbits around Trump - the only person whose experience of the world matters..."
  Lying about an approaching hurricane may not qualify as a high crime, but had Obama done that, he would have been impeached later that month.

• According to Newsweek, Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner may have broken the law by refusing to keep written records of their meetings with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, and Saudi government officials. "Trump had at least five different meetings with Putin with no notetaker in the room, meaning an official record of the meeting does not exist. Trump also confiscated a State Department interpreter's notes after meeting with Putin in Germany, and had a private meeting with Kim in Vietnam with two interpreters but no record was produced."

• In December 2017, Senator Al Franken, Congressman John Conyers, and Congressman Ruben Kihuen all resigned or retired amidst allegations of sexual harassment. Trump has been accused of harassing and assaulting more women than all three of them combined.
  Trump denies the allegations, and is innocent until proven guilty. However, in 2005 Trump was caught on tape bragging about using his wealth and celebrity to get away with the behavior he now claims never happened. Specifically, Trump boasted about groping women, including married women, without their consent. The recording was made eight months after marrying his current wife.
  In 1998, Congress impeached then-President Bill Clinton for sexual misconduct, but has (so far) ignored the far worse allegations against Trump. Moreover, if Obama had been accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault, he would have been impeached five minutes later. Tell Congress to investigate Trump's behavior.
  In 2023, a jury determined that Trump attacked columnist E. Jean Carroll twenty years ago and awarded her $5 million in damages.

• In June 2019, Trump told an interviewer he would accept foreign help in his re-election campaign. The Federal Election Commission chairwoman pointed out the next day that would be illegal. If Obama had said he didn't see anything wrong with breaking the law, he would have been impeached later that week.
  Trump should have been impeached and removed from office when he threatened to break election laws, because he broke them a month later.
  In 2014, Russia conquered Ukraine's Crimea peninsula. This was widely condemned by Americans of both parties and all around the world. In 2016, Trump became the Republican Party's Presidential candidate. His only significant contribution to the Republican Party platform was removing the paragraphs condemning the Russian conquest. Russia continues to pose a significant military threat to Ukraine.
  
  
• According to the Washington Post, Congress appropriated military aid to Ukraine in September 2018. In July 2019, Trump illegally suspended that aid. A week later, Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump told Zelensky he would give him the military aid if Zelensky launched an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden for corruption. (As noted above, Trump claimed that Biden was corrupt. In real life, Biden had opposed the corruption Trump claimed he supported.)
• Biden is currently running for President against Trump. By withholding foreign aid and then using that aid as leverage to extort an allied country into helping him with his re-election campaign, Trump betrayed the United States' national security, broke the Impoundment Control Act, abused his power, broke campaign finance laws by soliciting help from another country, offered American taxpayers' money as a bribe to a foreign government, and accepted foreign emoluments. Trump was caught red-handed trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. If charged and convicted of these crimes, he could face ten years in prison.
• Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, both publicly admitted to this. They eventually released a transcript of the call. Within a month, Trump's chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and Acting Ambassador William Taylor also confirmed the quid pro quo. Other witnesses confirmed this in depositions, including NSC officer Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland. Rudy Giuliani's associate Lev Parnas and former National Security Advisor John Bolton confirmed it a few months later. By admitting to the crime, Trump tried to make it seem like it was normal and routine -- nothing to get upset about -- instead of a criminal act. Mulvaney told reporters "We do that all the time with foreign policy... And I have news for everybody. Get over it." Mulvaney lied: it's not normal for any President to sacrifice our national security in order to advance his political career.
• According to the impeachment inquiry report, the point was not to actually investigate Biden, but to smear Biden in public to damage Biden's credibility. Trump wanted Zelinsky to make the announcement in order to make Biden look bad. Trump didn't care if the investigation itself actually took place - presumably because he knew Biden was innocent and an investigation wouldn't actually find anything. Later communication between the Ukrainians and Ambassador Sondland made at clear that Zelinsky's announcement that his government was investigating Biden was required before Trump would free the frozen aid. Trump hoped that the announcement would weaken Biden's candidacy enough for Trump to defeat him in 2020. Moreover, Trump insisted that Zelensky announce the sham investigation himself, not have a subordinate do it. One Trump administratin official worried that Zelinsky might do that, and then Trump would withhold the assistance anyway. Trump eventually released the aid when news of his scheme to bully Zelinsky became public.
  Putin tried to frame Ukraine for the Russian cyberattacks in 2016 -- the crimes Putin himself had ordered. Trump bought Putin's lies, hook, line, and sinker, despite the efforts of Trump's advisors to convince him otherwise. Trump appears to hate Ukraine, and told his advisors that Ukraine was "all corrupt, terrible people". Trump actually appears to believe Putin's lies that Ukraine is out to get him, and Trump conducted American foreign policy based on the assumption that Putin's lies were true.
  Giuliani later told CNN in all seriousness that - instead of Putin ordering cyberattacks to help Trump win the 2016 election - Ukraine had somehow interfered in that election to help Hillary Clinton. Moreover, Giuliani said he'd asked Ukraine to investigate a bribery allegation against then-former Vice President Biden -- allegations that were exposed in 2024 as Russian disinformation.
  
  
• Read Mother Jones' analysis and the Huffington Post's analysis of the call for background on the issues Trump and Zelensky discussed. Notably, Trump still refuses to acknowledge Putin's 2016 cyberattack and talked to President Zelensky about widely discredited conspiracy theories in order to shift blame away from the Russian dictator. The call indicated that Trump actually believes Putin's propaganda that Ukraine, not Putin himself, was behind the 2016 cyberattack. Trump later called in to a Fox News program and confirmed this on live television. Business Insider points out that Trump admitted to the exact crimes for which the House of Representatives later impeached him.
• The Atlantic later pointed out that America's Justice Department could not investigate Biden because there was no reason to think Biden had done anything illegal -- so Trump pressured Ukraine to do it instead. In other words, Trump tried to coerce a foreign government to go after an innocent American citizen. If Trump can do that to Biden, he can do that to any of us. He can do it to you.
• That September, Vice President Pence met President Zelensky and told him -- on Trump's orders -- that the United States would continue withholding aid until Zelensky's government took stronger action against "corruption." The Washington Post demonstrates that Pence knew all about the Trump-Zelensky phone call five weeks earlier. The Ukrainian President would have understood immediately that Pence was reminding him to find something Trump could use against Joe Biden.
  Laughably, Pence claims he had no idea what he was saying and was an innocent pawn. There are two possibilities here.
  • Pence is lying. He deliberately abused his power and broke campaign finance laws. (Ambassador Gordon Sondland told Congress that Pence knew all about the plan to pressure Ukraine into damaging Biden.)
  • Pence is telling the truth. Pence's national security advisor was present for the Trump-Zelensky call and briefed him about it afterwards, but Pence forgot all about the briefing. Pence was given a transcript of the call, but he didn't read it. Pence flew to Europe to meet with a foreign leader, but he didn't bother preparing for the meeting. (Pence's staff denies that he went to the meeting unprepared.) During the meeting, Pence was so clueless when he delivered Trump's message that he didn't realize he was abusing his power and breaking campaign finance laws. The Vice President's defense is that he was too incompetent to have any criminal intent.
• Trump also sent his private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to meet with Ukrainian officials. Giuliani works for Trump and is not a government employee. According to Bloomberg and Politico, by negotiating with a foreign government on behalf of Trump personally -- not the United States -- Giuliani broke the Logan Act. Since Giuliani's mission was to coerce said foreign government to help Trump win the 2020 presidential election, Giuliani also broke campaign finance laws. (Giuliani's associate, Lev Parnas, released documentation proving this.) Giuliani returned from Ukraine with wild stories claiming Biden had taken bribes, his whole family was corrupt, and so on. Several years later, the Ukranians who told Giuliani this were revealed to be Russian spies. They were arrested and charged with treason.
• Trump's attempt to bully Ukraine into helping him steal the 2020 election forced the House of Representatives to act. The House launched an impeachment investigation soon after the call became public knowledge. (Ironically, the investigation only covered Trump's abuse of power with Ukraine, not the many other examples of malfeasance detailed above.) A week later, Trump committed the same crime again -- on live television -- by asking the Chinese government to look for dirt on Biden.
• Trump also falsely claimed the whistleblower who revealed the crime had committed "treason" and threatened them (in his usual roundabout way) with execution. Since Federal law protects whistleblowers, Trump committed another crime: witness intimidation. (Since Trump freely admitted abusing his power and claims there's nothing wrong with doing that, by Trump's own logic the whistleblower did nothing wrong by revealing it.)
• It is Congress' legal responsibility to investigate when the President and Vice President commit crimes. Unsurprisingly, White House Counsel Pat A. Cipollone wrote a letter to the House of Representatives vowing that the Trump Administration would neither provide subpoenaed documents nor allow any witnesses to testify. By refusing to cooperate with the investigation, Trump committed another crime: obstruction of Congress.
  Trump claims he did nothing wrong. If that's true, his best move would be to cooperate with the investigation in every way -- because the investigation would exonerate him.
• Imagine for a moment that Somalia was facing an invasion from neighboring Kenya. Now imagine that President Obama suspended foreign aid to Somalia, then called the Somali President and told him he'd give him the aid... if the Somali government announced they were investigating Mitt Romney for corruption. Obama would have been impeached five minutes later.

• With the House of Representatives preparing to impeach Trump over the Ukraine scandal, Trump made campaign contributions to Senators who will decide whether or not to remove him from office. Republican lawyer Richard Painter -- who served in the second Bush Administration -- wrote that this amounts to bribery. Under the circumstances, it's a felony (bribing the jury) for Trump to fund any Senator's re-election campaign. According to Painter, any Senator who accepts Trump's contributions also committed a felony by taking the bribe. (The four Senators named in the Politico article include Colorado Senator Cory Gardner, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, and Georgia Senator David Perdue.)
• As noted earlier, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is married to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. A member of Trump's cabinet, Chao used her position to approve Federal transportation projects specifically designed to help her husband's 2020 re-election campaign.

• In February 2020, Trump fired Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and Vindman's brother Yevgeny from their positions in the State Department and the National Security Council. He did this in retaliation for Sondland and Lt. Col. Vindman testifying in response to a Congressional subpoena. Yevgeny Vindman had nothing to do with it. Raw Story reports that it's illegal to fire someone for obeying the law.
• In March 2020, Trump broke the law again by firing Inspector General Michael Atkinson. The law required Atkinson to inform Congress of the whistleblower complaint against Trump, and when he did so, Trump fired him.
• In May 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked Trump to fire a State Department Inspector General who was investigating Pompeo for misusing taxpayer funds. Trump obliged. Congressman Eliot Engel said "Mr. Linick's firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation."
  If President Obama had done this, Congress would have impeached him the next day. For this alone, Trump and Pompeo must both be impeached, removed from office, and barred from ever holding office again.

In December 2019, the House of Representatives finally impeached Trump... for abuse of power and obstructing Congress surrounding the Ukraine scandal. (Those were open-and-shut cases. Trump confessed to abusing his power soon after the scandal broke, and confessed to obstructing Congress soon after he was impeached.)

The Republican-controlled Congress enabled Trump's corruption for two years. In 2018, the Democrats campaigned on investigating Trump and won control of the House. The new Democratic majority elected Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. Though the House Democrats had the ability to impeach Trump, the decision to remove Trump from office was up to the Senate -- which still has a Republican majority. Pelosi looked at the numbers and concluded that impeaching Trump was hopeless. Even if the House impeaches Trump, she reasoned, the Senate requires a two-thirds supermajority to remove Trump from office. In other words, 20 Republican Senators, both independent Senators, and every single Democratic Senator would have to agree to convict him. Pelosi decided that there was no point in the House impeaching Trump just for the Senate to vote along party lines and acquit him. To the chagrin of the 53% of the electorate who wants Trump removed, Pelosi stonewalled her own party for almost a year, insisting that the Democrats should focus on voting Trump out of office in 2020.

The Ukraine scandal changed this. After Pelosi spent most of 2019 trying to force the pro-impeachment wing of her party to stand down, Trump was caught trying to steal the 2020 election. Pelosi realized that if the House didn't stand up to Trump, he would succeed in stealing the election and it would be impossible to vote him out. When Pelosi finally threw her support behind the impeachment effort, almost the entire House Democratic caucus voted in favor of impeachment.

• Before the Senate trial began, Trump bribed four Republican Senators (Cory Gardner, Joni Ernst, Thom Tillis, and David Perdue) with campaign contributions. Meanwhile, Trump's Transportation Secretary, Elaine Chao, approved Federally-funded transportation projects designed to help re-elect her husband, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.
• McConnell announced in December 2019 that he would put Trump's lawyers in charge of Trump's Senate trial and subsequently turned the trial into a joke. "I'm not an impartial juror," McConnell said in December 2019. "I have made up my mind," Senator Lindsey Graham agreed. "I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here."
  At the trial, McConnell and the Senate Republicans refused to allow any new evidence -- then complained that the House hadn't provided any new evidence. Most importantly, McConnell refused to allow any witnesses to testify, a decision opposed by 75% of Americans. McConnell even tried (unsuccessfully) to hold parts of the trial at 2 AM.
• Indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas told interviewer Anderson Cooper that Senator Graham had known about Giuliani's efforts to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into smearing Biden from the very beginning. For the record, Graham originally said that it would be "very disturbing" if there had been a quid pro quo. Graham then changed his mind, saying even if there had been a quid pro quo he wouldn't vote to remove Trump. Parnas said Graham had known about the quid pro quo all along.

  "I haven't had any contact with [Graham]," Parnas said, "but because of my relationship with Rudy Giuliani, I have a lot of information about his dealings. It was like surreal then to watch Lindsey Graham up there, sitting there. He is out there talking about all the stuff that this is a sham, this should go away. At the end of the day, he was in the loop just like everybody else. He was very good at the relationship with Rudy Giuliani. He was aware of what was going on going back to at least 2018, maybe earlier...
  "Rudy told me not once but on several occasions that he spoke to Lindsey Graham about the situation, that Lindsey was always aware. Again, I don't know how deeply involved. I didn't speak to Lindsey Graham... We didn't interact. So I can only speak from what Rudy told me... Senator Graham was involved before even I got involved with Mayor Giuliani. So he had to have been in the loop and he had to know what's going on."

• When the trial opened, each Senator swore an oath "to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws." As noted above, McConnell and Graham had already publicly stated they had no intention of doing so. Gardner, Ernst, Tillis, and Perdue had just accepted Trump's campaign contributions. USA Today reported that Senator Rob Portman was also involved in Trump's attempt to cover up the Ukraine scandal. However, there is no evidence that any of these seven compromised Republican Senators considered recusing themselves. There is no evidence that Chief Justice John Roberts (who presided over the trial) or the Senate Ethics Committee ever considered disqualifying them. Neither the House Managers nor any other Senators filed motions to remove Senators who had shown blatant bias (as McConnell and Graham had.)
• Critically, former Senator Jeff Flake told an interviewer that 35 Republican Senators privately agreed that Trump was guilty and would vote to remove him -- if the vote were held in private. Flake said the Senators wouldn't break with Trump publicly because they're afraid of him.
  The obvious solution was to hold the final vote on whether to acquit or remove Trump behind closed doors. The Senators could have easily decided to vote in private. The results would have been announced at once, but the Senate could have easily decided to wait until one year had passed to disclose which Senators voted guilty or not guilty. Had they done that, the Republican Senators would have been free to vote according to the evidence. Since the vote was not held in private, some Senators likely voted to acquit Trump because they were afraid of the defendant retaliating against them.
• There was one exception. In a moving speech on the Senate floor, Republican Senator Mitt Romney repeated Trump's lies about Joe Biden and stated that he usually agrees with Trump's politics. Nevertheless, Romney acknowledged that Trump had indeed abused his power and courageously voted to remove him.
  Sadly, Romney's defense of the Constitution and the rule of law were not enough to sway his fellow Republicans. Senators Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski publicly acknowledged that Trump was guilty -- and still voted to acquit him. (Collins' interview with CBS News is especially worth reading. She admitted that Trump was guilty, then tied herself into knots trying to justify her vote to acquit him. Her antics would be funny if she wasn't a United States Senator deciding the future of our country.)
• As expected, in February 2020, the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump of the crimes he'd confessed to a few weeks earlier. The vote was almost along party lines. Romney was the only Republican to join 45 Democrats and 2 independents in calling for Trump's removal.
• As noted above, 53% of Americans believed Trump should be removed from office for his abuse of power. 75% of Americans wanted the Senate to hear from witnesses. These things did not happen because they were blocked by Mitch McConnell and the Republican-controlled Senate. Ironically, the Republican Senators represent a minority of Americans, even though they have a 53-47 Senate majority. According to Mother Jones, "senators representing 153 million Americans outvoted senators representing 168 million Americans."
• The bottom line: the trial was a sham. Of the 100 jurors, seven had either been implicated in the scandal themselves or had taken bribes from the defendant. If this had been any other trial, those seven would have been disqualified as jurors. McConnell publicly announced he was working with the defendant to set the rules of the trial, mocked the ideas of fairness and impartiality, and refused to call witnesses or allow new evidence. Any other legal proceeding with rules like that would have ended in a mistrial. (Sign the petition calling on the Senate to expel McConnell.)
  
  What If?

  What if Chief Justice John Roberts or the Senate Ethics Committee had disqualified McConnell, Ernst, Gardner, Graham, Perdue, Portman, and Tillis? What if the House Managers or a Senator had filed a motion to challenge and remove Senators who had shown blatant bias? A Democratic-majority Senate could have called former National Security Advisor John Bolton, Trump's Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and Mulvaney aides Michael Duffey and Robert Blair to testify under oath. They could have subpoenaed testimony from Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. They could have called Trump to testify in his own defense. (USA Today suggests a list of questions those witnesses should answer.)

  What if the Democratic-majority Senate had held the final vote in secret? That would have freed the Republican Senators to vote according to the evidence instead of voting out of fear that Trump would retaliate against them. It's possible that Jeff Flake was right, and 34 more Republicans might have voted to remove Trump. Trump might have been convicted 82-11, and would have been the first President to have been thrown out of office. Mike Pence -- who was not impeached despite being involved in the Ukraine scandal -- would have been sworn in as the next President.

  This didn't happen -- because 52 of the 53 Senate Republicans refused to remove Trump even after he confessed to abusing his power and obstructing Congress in the attempt to steal the 2020 election.

  What if President Obama had abused his power and obstructed Congress in an attempt to steal the 2012 election? The Republican-controlled House would have impeached him in a heartbeat, and the Republican-controlled Senate would have removed him in a matter of hours. If Obama had done what Trump did, he'd have gone to prison for ten years.

  The Constitution requires the President to see that the laws are faithfully executed. It requires the Senate to remove a President who commits high crimes and misdemeanors. The 52 Republican Senators made a mockery of justice, a mockery of the Senate as an institution, and a mockery of the high offices they hold. The American public must vote those 52 Senators out of office. In the meantime, the Senate must remove Mitch McConnell from his position as Republican Leader.

Notably, the House did not impeach Trump for:

• Emoluments violations (Trump has used the Presidency to promote his businesses every day since taking office);
• Aiding the enemy as an accessory after the fact by covering up Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's cyberattacks and manipulation of the 2016 election;
• Dereliction of duty by refusing to defend future elections against Putin;
• Dereliction of duty by refusing for months to enforce sanctions against Russia;
• Obstruction of justice by firing then-FBI director James Comey and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions;
• Obstruction of justice by his ten attempts to shut down or mislead the Mueller investigation into Putin's attacks;
• Obstruction of Congress by his refusal to turn over his tax returns, something he pledged to do in 2016;
• Violating the Internal Revenue Code by Ordering Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to defy a Congressional subpoena for said tax returns;
• Violating the Attorney General Succession Act;
• Lying to Congress in his three State of the Union addresses;
• Subornation of perjury by directing his attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie under oath;
• Attacking the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press by threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of television networks who broadcast accurate news stories about him;
• Attacking the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press by arresting reporters and asking the Senate to investigate them for publishing accurate news stories about him;
• Witness intimidation of fired Justice Department and State Department officials;
• Violating the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments by forming a commission whose purpose was to prevent minorities from voting;
• Libeling former President Barack Obama, former FBI director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Clinton aide Huma Abedin, Congressman Adam Schiff, former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, millionaire George Soros, FBI agent Peter Strzok, former Vice President Joe Biden, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and television host Joe Scarborough by falsely accusing them of crimes, including murder and treason;
• Campaign finance violations on at least seven separate occasions;
• Violating the Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments by conspiring to commit child abuse, conspiring to commit child endangerment, and contempt of court;
• Tax evasion;
• Issuing illegal orders to Border Patrol officers and the Justice Department;
• Threatening to violate the Fourteenth Amendment (guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in the United States);
• Threatening to violate the Twenty-Second Amendment (refusing to leave office when his term ends);
• Counterfeiting a government weather forecast;
• Bribery, exortion, and violating the Impoundment Control Act in relation to the Ukraine scandal; and
• Sexual harassment and assault.

By impeaching Trump for two illegal acts and ignoring fifty others, it seemed the House of Representatives wanted Trump to be acquitted. Notably, the House declined to impeach Mike Pence or anyone else involved in Trump's wrongdoing.

As noted above, even though Trump confessed to abusing his power and obstructing Congress relating to the Ukraine scandal, the Republican-controlled Senate held a sham trial and acquitted him without calling witnesses or considering new evidence. In effect, Senate Republicans -- with the notable exception of Mitt Romney -- told Trump and the rest of the country that they have no problem with him trying to steal elections.

The House of Representatives must finish the job. They must hold hearings, subpoena documents, and call witnesses to testify under oath about Trump's many other illegal and unethical acts. For instance, as journalist David Corn wrote in Mother Jones:

"Imagine bringing forward in high-profile, televised hearings a series of witnesses who have firsthand accounts to share. Felix Sater, the former felon and onetime Trump business associate, could testify about the deal he was negotiating on behalf of Trump for a Moscow tower project — while Trump was running for president, expressing positive views about Russia and Putin, and denying he had any business interests in Russia. Richard Gates, Trump's deputy campaign chair, who has been a cooperating witness for Mueller, could talk about the campaign's attempts to acquire inside information on WikiLeaks' plans for releasing Democratic emails swiped by Russian hackers — and about the curious interactions Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, had during the campaign with a Russian oligarch and a business associate who allegedly had ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort could perhaps be hauled in from prison to be questioned. Donald Trump Jr. could be subpoenaed to talk before the public about that infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, where he, Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with a Russian emissary whom they believed would bring them dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of a secret Kremlin operation to help Trump win the presidency. Trump Jr. might well decline to appear, or take the Fifth; then Democrats could hold another hearing with an empty chair — and with graphics showing how Trump Jr. made false statements about the aim of the Trump Tower meeting once it became public months after the election. (Trump Jr. has given private testimony to congressional committees and been subpoenaed by the Senate Intelligence Committee for a return engagement; none of these sessions have been held in public.)
"A hearing could cover how Trump and his campaign aides in 2016 repeatedly denied Russia was attacking the United States — even after Trump had been briefed by the US intelligence community that such an assault was occurring. Call former Rep. Paul Ryan to the witness table to explain how he and Republican Sen. [Republican] Leader Mitch McConnell, following Trump's lead, refused during the campaign to blame Russia for targeting the election. Put Michael Flynn, Trump's top national security adviser during the campaign, in the chair. Ask Ivanka Trump about the Moscow project."

The House must investigate Trump's efforts to bribe Republican Senators with campaign contributions. They must call intelligence officers to testify about Putin's cyberattacks and Trump's efforts to cover them up. They must call witnesses to testify about Trump's efforts to obstruct Mueller's investigation into those cyberattacks. They must investigate Trump's long history of campaign finance violations. We must hear from officers like former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen who enforced Trump's family separation policy. We must hear from ICE agents who carried out those orders. We must hear from lawyers who investigated it and innocent asylum seekers who were caught in it. Psychologists must testify on the trauma Trump's policies inflicted on children. The House must call the sixty women who claim Trump harassed them to testify under oath about their experiences.

By revealing every law Trump has broken -- laws that protect all Americans, regardless of party -- the House must expose the entirety of Trump's wrongdoing. When voters nationwide see 52 Republican Senators choosing to protect Trump instead of protecting our country from Putin's cyberattacks -- and so on -- Trump and his Senate enablers will be voted out of office in 2020.

In the months after Mitch McConnell and the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump in a sham trial, Trump went on to commit sixteen more impeachable offenses.

• In April 2020, Trump cut funding to the World Health Organization in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is illegal for the President to withhold funds that Congress approved. This may not rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors," but if Obama had done this, Congress would have impeached him the next day.

• According to Politico, Gizmodo, and the Huffington Post, in June 2020 Trump and Attorney General William Barr ordered military police to fire rubber bullets and use tear gas and flash-bang grenades to disperse a peaceful group of unarmed civil rights protesters outside the White House. This violated the protesters' First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The police also attacked journalists who were covering the protest. Trump's and Barr's order was illegal, and they must both be impeached, removed from office, and barred from ever holding office again. If Obama had ordered military police to attack so-called Tea Party protesters with batons, tear gas, and flash bang grenades, he would've been impeached five minutes later.

• A few days after Trump gave a speech condemning the evils of fascism and totalitarianism, American citizens in Portland, Oregon reported that people were being grabbed off the street and forced into unmarked vans by people in military fatigues claiming to be police. These "police" had no identifying insignia and did not identify themselves verbally. They did not have warrants. They did not tell the detainees that they were being arrested or why.
  That's not law enforcement. It's kidnapping.
  Kidnapping American citizens is a crime. It violates the First Amendment (protecting freedom of speech and "the right of the people peaceably to assemble"); the Fourth Amendment ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,"); the Fifth Amendment ("No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"); and the Sixth Amendment ("the accused shall enjoy the right to... be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.")
  The kidnappers were eventually revealed to be Border Patrol agents (operating in a state with no international border) claiming they were enforcing an executive order meant to protect federal property. However, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported: "Officers are also detaining people on Portland streets who aren't near federal property, nor is it clear that all of the people being arrested have engaged in criminal activity. Demonstrators... think they were targeted by federal officers simply for wearing black clothing in the area of the demonstration."
  Mother Jones reported that a Border Patrol spokesperson claimed they used those techniques to protect themselves and the suspect from "a large and violent mob." A video proved that statement was a lie. (One of the people kidnapped, Mark Pettibone, said he had done nothing illegal, had no idea that the men who seized him were government officers, and did not know why he was detained. He was taken to a building, searched, and asked if he would answer questions. He declined and asked for a lawyer. He was released after 90 minutes, left the building, and discovered he'd been inside Oregon's federal courthouse. Another detainee, an attorney named Jennifer Kristiansen, was arrested by officers who did not identify themselves, did not advise her of her rights, and did not tell her why she was being arrested. She was released the next day, but her personal items were never returned.)
  Gizmodo pointed out that Border Patrol claims that their officers always wear Border Patrol insignia and always identify themselves to detainees are blatantly false, and several videos prove that.
  The Border Patrol is supposed to patrol America's international borders, not engage in domestic law enforcement. Border Patrol officers haven't been trained in crowd control. They haven't been trained on how to interact with protesters or American citizens. It's not their job. As comedian Seth Meyers pointed out, "When a secret paramilitary force is abducting peaceful protesters in the dark of night without identifying themselves, that means even they know what they're doing is a flagrant abuse of power." Governments only snatch peaceful, law-abiding protesters off the street for one reason: to terrify the population into complying with the leader's will. There are words for this: state terrorism, police state, secret police, authoritarianism.
• Trump and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf justified these crimes with more lies -- calling peaceful civil rights protesters "violent anarchists." (Wolf has no idea what he's talking about -- a scary thing for the acting Director of Homeland Security. Civil rights protesters want their rights protected by law. Anarchists want to abolish government. The two groups are diametrically opposed. No one would have any legal rights if there weren't any laws.)
  According to CNBC, Wolf claimed Portland "has been under siege... by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city." This claim has no basis in reality.
  Oregon Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, Governor Kate Brown, and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler were furious. "Platoons self-designated and self-mobilized by Donald Trump to be flown thousands of miles into US cities to attack Americans fits the definition of abuse of power in any democracy," Wyden wrote. "The legal justification is absurd - [this] has nothing to do with statues. If that executive order is their basis of their authority, they are massively exceeding it and those involved should find their federal employment terminated before this is all resolved."
  "This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety," Brown wrote. Trump "is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government."
  "Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters," Merkley wrote.
• Newsweek reported that the federal agents committed a crime by destroying medical equipment during a protest. Later that night, federal agents tear-gassed the Mayor of Portland when he was trying to address protesters.
  According to the New York Times, Border patrol officers shot an independent journalist in the face with a rubber bullet and broke the hand of a Navy veteran. "Can we call it fascism yet?" the columnist asks. "These agents, operating outside their normal roles, are by all appearances behaving lawlessly."
• Acting Secretary Wolf refused to honor local authorities. "I offered them DHS support to help them locally address the situation that's going on in Portland, and their only response was: 'Please pack up and go home.' That's just not going to happen on my watch." Wolf showed incredible toughness and bravado against the terrifying threat posed by peaceful, unarmed American citizens marching to protest racism. (If only Trump and Wolf could show the same courage addressing the situation in Afghanistan -- where Russian Military Intelligence has been paying warlords to kill American soldiers. Obviously, that's not going to happen on their watch.)
• True to form, Trump lied about the situation at a news conference. "We've done a great job in Portland. Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail. We very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we'll quell it again very easily." The New York Times and the Washington Post reported that the protests were mostly peaceful before the Border Patrol arrived, but: "As police, both local and federal, have responded to demonstrators with increasing force, the protests have grown more unwieldy and determined." (A friend who lives in Portland told me: "There was a stretch of about 40 days pre-feds showing up that was entirely peaceful. Things - mostly - only turned violent when the feds showed up. The last two nights have been moms and dads protesting.") Mother Jones reported that after the Border Patrol showed up, the protests got larger.
• Trump then vowed to send the Border Patrol to use the same tactics against American citizens in other cities. Which ones? Those with mayors that don't belong to his political party. (Notably, his party lost the popular vote in three of the last four elections.) Newsweek pointed out: "Trump is also sending troops to Kansas City, Albuquerque and Chicago. He says he'll send them to New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland as well... all cities with Democratic mayors, large Black populations and no violent unrest. Trump can't find federal personnel to do contact tracing for the coronavirus but has found thousands of agents for his secret police."
• Oregon's Attorney General has filed suit, seeking an injunction against the Border Patrol's "kidnap and false arrest" of American citizens. "They have made it impossible for them to be individually identified by carrying out law enforcement actions without wearing any identifying information, even so much as the agency that employs them," the lawsuit states.

  "Oregonians have the right to walk through downtown Portland at night, and in the early hours of the morning.
  "Ordinarily, a person exercising his right to walk through the streets of Portland who is confronted by anonymous men in military-type fatigues and ordered into an unmarked van can reasonably assume that he is being kidnapped and is the victim of a crime.
  "Defendants are injuring the occupants of Portland by taking away citizens' ability to determine whether they are being kidnapped by [criminals] dressed in paramilitary gear (such that they may engage in self-defense to the fullest extent permitted by law) or are being arrested (such that resisting might amount to a crime).
  "State law enforcement officers are not being consulted or coordinated with on these federal detentions, and could expend unnecessary resources responding to reports of an abduction, when federal agents snatch people walking through downtown Portland without explanation or identification.
  "Defendants' tactics violate the rights of all people detained without a warrant or a basis for arrest, and violate the state's sovereign interests in enforcing its laws and in protecting people within its borders from kidnap and false arrest, without serving any legitimate federal law enforcement purpose.
  "Citizens peacefully gathering on the streets of Portland to protest racial inequality have the right to gather and express themselves under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
  "Defendants' actions are undertaken with the intent of discouraging lawful protest and therefore constitute an illegal prior restraint on the First Amendment right of Oregonians to peacefully protest racial inequality.
  "The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable seizures, and in particular prohibits federal officials from seizing a person without a warrant or an exception to the warrant requirement. And the State of Oregon has enacted laws that make it a crime to detain a person without authority.
  "...Defendants did not have a warrant to seize Pettibone or the other citizens who have been detained, and will continue to seize individuals off the street without a warrant, in the absence of an injunction, and no exception to the warrant requirement justified or will justify those seizures.
  "...Oregon's own police agencies are therefore injured, by roving federal officers confusing citizens about whether they are obligated to comply with [unidentified] armed men ordering them into unmarked vans.
  "Defendants' actions described above constitute a public nuisance because they unreasonably interfere with the general public's right to public safety, public peace, public comfort, and public convenience."

• Anyone who violates the Constitutional rights of innocent American citizens -- and anyone who orders their subordinates to do so -- must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This includes Trump himself. He (and Acting Secretary Wolf) must be impeached, removed from office, and barred from ever holding office again. They must then be arrested, charged, provided with legal representation, tried, and convicted of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. In the meantime, Border Patrol agents must refuse to obey illegal orders. (If Obama had sent the Border Patrol into American cities with no international border, ordered them to roam around in the middle of the night in unmarked vans wearing military fatigues with no insignia or identification and snatch Tea Party protesters off the street with no warrants, he'd have been impeached the next day.)
• Congress is currently considering legislation requring federal agents to wear visible identification, prohibiting them from using unmarked vehicles, and limiting their deployment without permission from a mayor or governor. Tell your senator to support this legislation.
• The Border Patrol spent just under a month in Portland. According to the Washington Post, they pulled out at the end of July. The protests continued -- but with no provocation, they were entirely peaceful.
• Two years later, Homeland Security Department lawyers released a report of the incidents in Portland. According to Gizmodo, this report revealed that Trump and Wolf had decided that the peaceful civil rights protesters were part of a secret left-wing terrorist conspiracy and had ordered their subordinates to find proof of this. The Homeland Security officials then compiled dossiers on all the protesters they'd kidnapped. (This was part of a larger effort to create dossiers on all the protesters.) However, the officials weren't able to prove any ties between the protesters. That's because -- contrary to Trump's and Wolf's claims -- the peaceful civil rights protesters weren't terrorists, and most of them didn't know each other.

• In Buffalo, New York, police officers shoved a 75-year-old unarmed civil rights protester to the ground and fractured his skull. (At this writing, the protester -- Martin Gugino -- has been released from the hospital and is recovering at home.) Trump later libeled Gugino by making the nonsensical and obviously false claim that he was trying to sabotage the police with some kind of super high tech tracking equipment. The behavior of Buffalo police isn't Trump's fault, but libeling an innocent person is.

• The Constitution reads: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." According to the New York Times, Russian Military Intelligence has been offering bounties to Taliban militants to kill American soldiers serving in Afghanistan. Trump was briefed on this in February 2020 -- and did nothing about it.
  Trump should have imposed sanctions on Russia, labeled Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, and bombed Russian interests in Afghanistan. Instead, Trump pushed for Russia to be re-admitted to the Group of Seven Industrialized Nations. Trump wanted closer ties with Russia when they were paying the Taliban to kill Americans.
  Trump falsely claimed he hadn't been briefed on the bounties, and later called the New York Times story a "hoax." According to Politifact and the Washington Post, Trump has called all number of things hoaxes that later turned out to be true -- from the 2016 Russian cyberattack to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
  The Trump Administration claims that Trump "always puts the safety and security of U.S. service members above all else." That's the real hoax. Two Administration officials told the Washington Post that Trump has no intention of doing anything about the Russian bounties. The Post points out that Trump cares more about impressing Putin than he does about the lives of American soldiers. Trump doesn't believe in "America First." He believes in "Putin First."
  If President Obama had refused to believe intelligence reports that Putin was paying Afghan warlords to kill American troops, he would have been impeached five minutes later.
  
• In September 2020, the head of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis filed a whistleblower complaint that Trump -- along with Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf -- are covering up Putin's ongoing attempts to illegally manipulate the 2020 election. (Wolf is still serving in the Trump Administration even though his term as Acting Director has expired.) The complaint also indicated that the Trump Administration routinely exaggerated the threat posed by left-wing extremists while ignoring the much greater threat posed by white supremacists.
  Trump and Wolf committed treason by covering up an ongoing enemy cyberattack. This is the definition of "giving... Aid and Comfort" to America's enemy -- Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

• In February 2020, long-time Trump friend and confidant Roger Stone was convicted of lying to Congress, obstructing Congress, and witness tampering. Stone was sentenced to over three years in prison. A few days before he was to report to prison, Trump commuted Stone's sentence so he would not have to serve prison time.
  Trump's clemency order mocked justice. 195,000 people are convicted of crimes and sent to prison every year - but clemency is only available to criminals who are rich, white, and friends of Trump. As the New Republic observed:

  "Organized crime syndicates rely on a simple but potent act of fealty: If you protect the boss, the boss will eventually protect you. So does the Trump administration. By commuting Stone's sentence, Trump has ably protected himself-and cemented his status as the most corrupt president in the nation's history.
  "The facts of Stone's case are largely indisputable. In the spring of 2016, Russian intelligence operatives carried out cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. They absconded with troves of internal emails and documents... Those materials made their way to WikiLeaks, which had a history of publishing sensitive information about the U.S. government. By April, Stone had told Trump campaign officials that he was in contact with WikiLeaks about the material. Rick Gates, a top Trump campaign aide, later testified that he heard Stone tell Trump by phone in July 2016 that a damaging WikiLeaks release was imminent.
  "Shortly before the Democratic National Convention in late July, WikiLeaks published thousands of internal DNC emails, some of which show top Democratic officials favoring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during the primaries. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned... Over the next few months, Stone publicly and privately bragged that he was in contact with WikiLeaks and that more dirt would be coming. His predictions reached a fever pitch in October, shortly before WikiLeaks released Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's stolen emails as well.
  "...Congressional investigators questioned Stone at length about his direct interactions with WikiLeaks as well as communications through an intermediary. Stone chose to lie multiple times to the House Intelligence Committee about what had happened. He also threatened witnesses who could contradict his version of events.
  "Special counsel Robert Mueller's office charged Stone last year on seven counts, including making false statements to Congress and witness tampering. Stone did not conduct himself well at trial: Judge Amy Berman Jackson imposed a gag order on him after he posted an image of Jackson's face next to crosshairs on Instagram. A D.C. jury found [Stone] guilty in November. Federal prosecutors initially recommended a sentence of seven to nine years in prison. Then Attorney General Bill Barr... intervened on Stone's behalf, withdrawing that recommendation and submitting a far more lenient one in its place.
  "If the attorney general's office showed the same zeal in opposing lengthy sentences for every defendant it prosecuted, it could justify its intervention in this case. If Trump was willing to free federal prisoners convicted of nonviolent crimes who weren't his friends or allies, he could claim a fig leaf of credibility here. Instead, the White House spent the last few weeks threatening protesters with 10-year prison sentences for vandalizing statues. The Trump administration believes in prison abolition for its henchmen and mass incarceration for everyone else."

  The Atlantic provides a brief timeline of contacts between Stone and the Trump campaign.

  "It is not illegal for a U.S. citizen to act... as a go-between between a presidential campaign and a foreign intelligence agency, and Stone was not charged with any crime in conjunction with his Trump-WikiLeaks communications. But it's a different story for the campaign itself. [The] Trump campaign was vulnerable to charges of violating election laws against receiving things of value from non-U.S. persons. [The] campaign could have found itself at risk as some kind of accessory to the Russian hacks... a very serious crime indeed. So it was crucial to the Trump campaign that Stone keep silent and not implicate Trump in any way.
  [That] is what Stone did. Stone was... convicted of lying to Congress about his role in the WikiLeaks matter. Since Stone himself would have been in no legal jeopardy had he told the truth, the strong inference is that he lied to protect somebody else. Just today... Stone told the journalist Howard Fineman why he lied and whom he was protecting. 'He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn't.'
  "An American private citizen worked with foreign spies to damage one presidential candidate and help the other. That president accepted the help. When caught, the private citizen lied. When the private citizen was punished, the president commuted his sentence."

  A few days later, The Atlantic published an essay by two political science professors. The essay points out that, although the President has the power to issue pardons and commute sentences, that power does not extend to granting clemency to his co-conspirators.

  "The power to grant 'pardons and reprieves' includes the power to commute, or reduce, sentences after convictions. But this power is constrained by a limit: 'except in cases of impeachment.'
  "...There is a strong argument, rooted in the Constitution's text, history, values, and structure, that in addition to banning the prevention or undoing of an impeachment, this phrase also bans a president from using the pardon and reprieve power to commute the sentences of people directly associated with any impeachment charges against him.
  "...The articles of impeachment... explicitly invoke [Trump's] 'previous invitations of foreign interference in United States elections' and 'previous efforts to undermine United States Government investigations into foreign interference in United States elections.' ...That would mean [Trump] can't use the pardon and reprieve power to commute the sentences of those charged with crimes related to Russian interference in the 2016 campaign - including Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress and obstructing its investigation into Russian election interference.
  "...The Constitution's Framers were deeply concerned about presidents abusing power to protect co-conspirators... the Constitution requires the president to 'faithfully execute the law.' Its thrust is to insist that no one, not even the president, is above the law. It granted the president the power to pardon for acts of mercy, not self-preservation.
  "The Framers granted such powers as the pardon only because they believed that impeachment would be a check on the office if the power was abused. That's why the pardon and reprieve power itself has to be limited in the rare case in which its abuse subverts the impeachment check.
  "Stone is the co-conspirator the Framers feared. His commutation... has all the hallmarks of the kind of self-regarding act feared by the Framers and prohibited by the Constitution's text, values, and structure. Even more concerning, it involves an attempt to subvert a congressional investigation that, unimpeded, may have unearthed even clearer evidence of the president's impeachable offenses."

  The New York Times printed a column by a former Watergate prosecutor. He pointed out:

  "Mr. Mueller's team convicted Mr. Stone for covering up for Mr. Trump. By granting clemency to Mr. Stone, [Trump] expands the cover-up. Mr. Trump's purpose has been clear: to prevent Mr. Stone and others (like Paul Manafort and Mr. Flynn) from recounting the full truth about the actions of the Trump campaign in 2016 concerning Russian interference. It is no coincidence that the only former Trump confidant in federal prison is the one who truthfully testified against Mr. Trump, his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen.
  "Mr. Trump's grant of clemency to Mr. Stone was an unconstitutional use of the presidential clemency power. The Constitution obligates the president to 'take care that the laws shall be faithfully executed.' It does not permit a president to grant clemency or to pardon a co-conspirator, an obvious conflict of interest.
  "Even Bill Barr has said as much. When asked at his confirmation hearing if a president can 'lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipient's promise to not incriminate him,' he answered: 'No. That would be a crime.'

  Imagine Putin's spies had stolen information from Mitt Romney in 2012 and had leaked it to WikiLeaks to cause the maximum amount of damage to Romney's presidential campaign. Imagine Stone had acted as a go-between, giving then-President Obama inside information about future leaks. Imagine Stone had lied under oath about it and had threatened witnesses. Imagine Stone was convicted -- and Obama commuted his sentence a few days before he went to prison. Obama would have been impeached later that week.

• Though the President has the power to pardon those convicted of federal crimes, he does not have the power to pardon friends, subordinates, or co-conspirators who broke the law on his behalf. Trump's pardons of Flynn, Stone and Manafort were illegal.
• A year after he was voted out of office, Trump pledged to pardon the January 6th rioters if he became president again. Moreover, he called upon his supporters to "stage the biggest protests we've ever had" if he's charged with crimes. Former federal prosecutors told Salon that Trump's statements provide evidence of criminal intent, and could also be obstruction of justice and witness intimidation.

• In July 2020, Ivanka Trump - Donald Trump's daughter and senior advisor - violated federal ethics laws by using her official government position to endorse a product. Donald Trump did the same thing the next day. Though this is illegal, it probably does not rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" the Constitution requires for impeachment. Consequently, these illegal acts went down as another example of the Trumps breaking the law, never facing any consequences for it, and blatantly rubbing their privilege in Americans' faces. Congress and the courts sighed, shook their heads, and ignored the scandal that would have cost any previous presidential advisor their job. Of course, had Michelle Obama done that, the Republican-controlled Congress would have started an impeachment investigation within a week.

• In July 2020, Trump tweeted that "2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history... Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???"
  Trump's claims about voting fraud are groundless.
  The president does not have the authority to delay elections. Only Congress can do that. With Republicans controlling the Senate and Democrats controlling the House, there's no way Congress will agree to it.
  The tweet was typical Trump behavior. His purpose was to say something outrageous to see if he could get away with it. If there was a backlash, Trump would claim he'd been joking. If there wasn't, he'd do it, legal or not.
  The tweet had a second purpose: to divert attention from the terrible economic news that came out the same day. According to the Commerce Department, the American economy shrunk during the last quarter by the greatest percentage since the Great Depression.
  Surprisingly, one of Trump's most partisan supporters -- law professor Steven Calabresi -- wrote in the New York Times that Trump's tweet was grounds for impeachment. Ironically, Calabresi wrote in 2019 that it was unconstitutional for the FBI to investigate the 2016 Russian cyberattack, and Calabresi wrote earlier in 2020 that it was unconstitutional for the House to investigate Trump's attempt to steal the election by bullying the Ukrainian government into launching a baseless criminal investigation against Joe Biden. Calabresi's earlier arguments had all the facts wrong -- but this time, Calabresi may have a point.

  "I am frankly appalled by the president's recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats' assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president's immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.
  "The nation has faced grave challenges before, just as it does today with the spread of the coronavirus. But it has never canceled or delayed a presidential election.
  "President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election. Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again."

  Trump has a right to his opinion, even when he justifies his opinion with lies. As noted above, the Constitution requires that the President be impeached and removed for "high crimes and misdemeanors." Trump venturing his opinion that the election should be delayed is not a "high crime" as defined by the Constitution. It would be a "high crime" for Trump to try to delay the election. However: if President Obama had written that tweet, Congress would have launched an impeachment investigation immediately. If writing a tweet would be an impeachable offense for Obama, it should be an impeachable offense for Trump.

• According to Slate, Trump told Special Investigator Robert Mueller that he did not remember discussing Wikileaks with his advisor Roger Stone. The Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that wasn't true. "The Committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone's access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions." Trump committed perjury when he told Mueller otherwise. The Republican-controlled Congress impeached then-President Bill Clinton for lying under oath to investigators. In doing so, they established that perjury is an impeachable offense. Trump committed the same crime, and he must also be impeached.

• As noted above, the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments guarantee the right to vote to all American citizens eighteen years of age or older, regardless of color, race, or gender.
• In 2020, Trump installed one of his campaign donors, millionaire Louis DeJoy, as Postmaster General. A Washington Post investigation revealed that DeJoy illegally circumvented limits on how much a single person can donate to political candidates for years. He did this by pressuring his employees to donate to Republicans and then reimbursing them with bonuses.
• After becoming Postmaster General, DeJoy told Congress he has no idea how much it costs to mail a postcard and has no clue how many absentee ballots were used in the last election. That hasn't stopped him from making drastic changes that cripple mail delivery. According to the New Yorker and the Huffington Post, DeJoy:
  • Reassigned twenty-three top executives -- the experts who know how the Post Office operates;
  • Eliminated all overtime, writing that if there is a "shortage of people... the mail will not go out;"
  • Tripled the price of mailing absentee ballots;
  • Removed mailboxes from Indiana, Montana, New York, and Oregon;
  • Removed 671 automatic sorting machines from post offices around the country;
  • Committed mail fraud by mailing postcards containing false information about absentee ballots. (This essay's author received one.)

• According to Cornell Law School, it's illegal to "knowingly and willfully obstruct or retard the passage of the mail." By trying to slow the mail, Trump and DeJoy have committed crimes. Law and Crime reported that tampering with a federal election is also a crime. "Just because you run the bank doesn't mean you get to steal the money. This reeks of mail and election fraud -- the scheme to defraud using the removal of mail sorting machines without reason as a means to inhibit mail in voting. These are felonies and should be investigated and prosecuted appropriately."
• "You know who delivers the Amazon package the final mile to rural Americans?" The New Yorker asked. "The U.S.P.S. You know how people get medicine, when the pharmacy is an hour's drive away? In their mailbox. You know why many people can't pay their bills electronically? Because too much of rural America has impossibly slow Internet, or none at all."
• Why is Trump doing this? He's trying to steal the election by preventing people from voting. He thinks that if he can stop people from using absentee ballots -- the way he is voting this time -- he will force everyone to vote in person. Republican city and State governments will then drastically reduce the number of polling places, especially in Democrat-leaning districts, forcing Americans to wait in huge lines all day during a pandemic in order to vote. Trump thinks people will give up on voting rather than risk their health. He admitted as much in an interview, explaining that he's blocking Post Office funding so they won't be able to deliver absentee ballots. "Now, they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. Now, if we don't make a deal, that means they don't get the money. That means they can't have universal mail-in voting, they just can't have it."
• According to NBC Philadelphia, Trump is seeking a court order outlawing special drop boxes for absentee ballots.
• According to Slate, "In 34 states, you don't just have to have your absentee ballot postmarked by Election Day. It has to be received by Election Day. So you can see how a well-meaning person could drop off their ballot a few days early, and it still wouldn't reach the destination on time." In the Michigan primary, "some people weren't getting their ballot until literally the day before." According to USA Today, American soldiers serving abroad -- or at bases outside their home States -- rely on absentee ballots. So do college students and the elderly -- and requests for absentee ballots have tripled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump is betraying the country, including his own supporters.
  
• Though a massive public outcry forced DeJoy to stop removing mail sorting machines, he says he won't return the 671 machines he stole. Those are 10% of the sorting machines in the country. Even though the Postal Service informed 46 States that they would have trouble getting absentee ballots in on time, DeJoy claims the sorting machines "are not needed."
• In September 2020, Trump announced that he planned to file a lawsuit forbidding States from counting absentee ballots that arrived after election day. Trump's plan is to prevent the Post Office from delivering ballots on time, then persuade the courts to throw out ballots that didn't arrive on time.
• Internal Post Office documents show that DeJoy's changes caused sharp declines in mail processing and delivery. Though the problems can be fixed, it's too late to fix everything by Election Day.
• CNN reported thast DeJoy owns $30 million stock in a Post Office contractor. DeJoy thus stands to personally profit from sabotaging the Post Office -- a potentially illegal conflict of interest.
• If Obama had appointed a Postmaster General who stood to profit financially by sabotaging postal workers' ability to do their jobs, Obama would have been impeached within days. Both Trump and DeJoy must be impeached and removed from office. Sign MoveOn's petition to fire DeJoy. Also: sign Democracy for America's petition calling on Congress to pass a law fully funding the Post Office and requiring DeJoy to return the stolen sorting machines and mailboxes.
• According to Salon, multiple court orders instructed DeJoy to fix the damage he caused. As of October 2020, he has not fully complied. "Despite being subject to multiple injunctions, defendants have not improved their service performance," said Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Salon reported: "USPS data shows that mail disruptions have been particularly pronounced in key swing states... This has sparked alarm in states like Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, where ballots will be rejected if they arrive after Election Day. In Detroit, for example, only 71% of mail arrived on time in October versus 92.2% in January. Some major cities in North Carolina have also experienced 10% drops in on-time arrival rates... Workers in Michigan claimed that they were instructed to focus on package delivery over mail ballot collection."
  What do we do?
  • Register to vote.
  • Apply for an absentee ballot.
  • When your ballot arrives in the mail, fill it out that day and take it to your local drop off location, such as the county election office, as quickly as possible. (If you live in southern California, make sure it's a real drop box and not a fake one planted by the Republican Party.) Only mail it if you can't deliver it in person.

• According to CNN, Trump announced that he would seek an unconstitutional third term.
• Trump claims he should get a third term because "they spied on my campaign" in 2016. No one spied on his campaign, but even if someone had, the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution specifically forbids any President from being elected to more than two terms. There are no exceptions.
• Even if the Republican party were crazy enough to nominate a candidate who cannot become President, it would be illegal for him to serve even if elected. It would be illegal for the Chief Justice to swear him in. He couldn't sign executive orders. He couldn't sign legislation. He couldn't veto anything. He wouldn't be the President.
• By Trump's logic, if he should be able to serve a third term because he was the target of an investigation, then Bill Clinton should be able to run for a third term too.
• Trump says he likes the idea of being President for life.
• Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." If President Obama had announced he intended to break the law -- any law -- Congress would have launched an impeachment investigation immediately.

• Trump made another attempt to steal the 2020 election by telling his supporters to vote twice. Voting twice is illegal under federal law. By telling people to do it, Trump committed another crime: subordination of election fraud. He made the statement in North Carolina -- a state where telling someone to vote twice is a felony. If President Obama had done that, he would be in jail awaiting trial.
• According to The Atlantic, Trump reached out to States with Republican-controlled legislatures and pressured them to steal the election for him. His scheme is to convince the State legislatures to award him their electoral college votes regardless of how the people in those States actually vote. If Obama had done this, he would have been impeached immediately.
• According to the Associated Press, the Trump campaign pressured local election offices to ignore rules that don't favor Trump. "'It's clearly based on an overall strategy to disrupt the election as much as possible,' said Barry Richard, who represented... George W. Bush's campaign in the 2000 Florida recount. 'You're really seeing a broad-based, generalized strategy to suppress the vote by the Republican Party.'"
• According to the Washington Post, Trump rushed the confirmation of another Supreme Court justice just five weeks before the election. This gave his party a 6-3 majority on the Court. If the Supreme Court ends up ruling on whether or not to hold recounts -- as happened in 2000 -- or rules on which electors are valid, Trump wants to make sure the Court votes in his favor regardless of what the facts are or what the law says. If Obama had nominated a new Supreme Court justice in an election year... right.
• Trump called upon his supporters to go to polling places and intimidate voters. The New York Times reported: Trump's "poll watchers will challenge ballots and the eligibility of voters... the question is how far Mr. Trump's supporters will take the exhortations to protect a vote the president has relentlessly, and baselessly, described as being at risk of widespread fraud." Voter intimidation is illegal. If President Obama had committed subordination of voter intimidation, Congress would have impeached him the next day.
• According to CBS, CNN, the New York Times, and Slate, the Republican Party illegally placed fake ballot drop-off boxes around southern California. This is election fraud. State authorities issued a cease-and-desist order, and local law enforcement are investigating. Shockingly, the local Republican Party announced that they would defy the cease-and-desist order and, instead of removing the fake boxes, would add more. "We'll see you in court," said Republican Party spokesman Hector Barajas. Trump may not be personally responsible for this, but his party committed the crime in the effort to re-elect him.
• Similarly, Texas Republicans filed a lawsuit asking a court to throw out 100,000 legally cast ballots. As above, Trump may not be personally responsible for this, but his party did this in the effort to re-elect him.
• As comedian Seth Meyers said, Trump "doesn't want to win the election. He wants to destroy the election, just like he destroyed the debate." The New York Times agreed: "Mr. Trump wants Americans to be either too disgusted or too afraid to cast their ballots. Throughout the nation's history, tens of millions of Americans have been made to feel this way. They never gave up the fight for a fairer and freer democracy. Neither should Americans today. The best response to a would-be autocrat like Donald Trump, and the only way to begin to extricate the country from this long nightmare, is to show up and be counted."

• According to Vanity Fair, Newsweek, CNN, and the New York Times, Trump said he might refuse to leave office peacefully if he loses the 2020 presidential election. "Well, we're going to have to see what happens," he said.

  Imagine the unthinkable: a reporter actually having to ask President Obama if he would leave office peacefully if he lost the 2012 election. Imagine the unthinkable: Obama replying "we're going to have to see what happens" instead of "yes." Obama would have been impeached immediately.

• A few days later, Trump told a crowd that the only way he would lose the upcoming presidential election was if the other side cheated. "We're not going to lose this except if they cheat... but we don't want to be cheated, and be stupid, and... we'll know that there were thousands and thousands of ballots that made the difference through cheating. We're not going to stand for it." Trump is the most consistently unpopular president in the history of polling, and almost every poll taken for months has indicated he will lose to the other candidate. As noted above, the only one cheating is Trump.
  

• As detailed above, Trump made many attempts to steal the 2020 election. He tried to bully the Ukrainian government into launching a baseless criminal investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden based on a laughable conspiracy theory made up by people who don't understand how computers work. Trump asked the Chinese government to do the same. Even though Trump's the most unpopular president in the history of polling, he told supporters many times that the only way he could lose was if the other side cheated. Trump tried to stop the use of absentee ballots -- and then used one himself. Trump sabotaged the Post Office, slowing the mail, and then argued that absentee ballots that arrived after Election Day should not be counted. Trump sued States to force them to remove people likely to vote against him from the voter rolls. Trump threatened to illegally delay the election. Trump tried to stop local authorities from using ballot drop boxes during a pandemic. Trump broke the law by encouraging his supporters to vote twice. Trump encouraged his supporters to engage in illegal voter intimidation. He lost anyway.
• According an Axios article written three days before the election, Trump's poll numbers were so bad he realized he was going to lose. He then plotted to stay in power anyway by declaring victory on election night regardless of the real results and then claim that votes against him were fraudulent. Meanwhile, Trump ally Steve Bannon told associates a few days before the election that Trump planned to declare victory and stay in office no matter how the election went. The day before the election, Trump ally Roger Stone also told interviewers that Trump should declare victory before the votes were counted. Furthermore, Stone staid that Trump should send armed guards to stop the electors from meeting. Then, Trump should ask a judge to throw out electoral votes he didn't like and make sure the case was decided by a judge Trump had appointed. (Three years later, a former employee of Trump's personal attorney - Rudy Giuliani - claimed in a lawsuit that her former boss had discussed ways for Trump to remain in power if he lost the 2020 election. The cornerstone of Giuliani's plan for Trump to blame "voter fraud" if he lost and claim victory regardless of the outcome.)
• Election Day was Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented number of Americans used absentee ballots. Social distancing rules meant voting took much longer than normal. Poll workers nationwide labored around-the-clock for the next several days counting the votes. As results trickled in, Trump said that poll workers should continue counting votes in States where he was behind -- hoping he would catch up -- and then said that poll workers should stop counting votes in States where he was ahead, hoping to prevent his opponent from catching up. (Comedian Seth Meyers demonstrated just how absurd this was.) Trump then lied -- exactly as he'd planned to do -- claiming he'd won the election when there were millions of ballots still to count.
• It took until Saturday, November 7, for enough States (47 out of 50) to count enough ballots to determine who had won the election. The answer was clear. The Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, had become President-Elect. By the end of that day, Biden had won the Electoral College 290-214 and led the popular vote by a margin of four million. (The final tally was 306-232. Biden won the popular vote by seven million.)
• Trump cheated. When he lost anyway, he declared victory and immediately started looking for ways to stay in power illegally. Trump knew he'd lost the election, and admitted it in private to his aides -- but he spent the next two months publicly claiming he'd won. He told his subordinates to do the same, and falsely accused his opponent of cheating. Since Trump couldn't stay in power legally, he tried to stay in office via fraud. This was straight out of the Nazi playbook: tell a Big Lie that flies in the face of the facts, and repeat it so often that people start believing there must be something to it. This rested on a psychological principle: people want to believe in their leaders, and don't want to believe the President of the United States would risk making a fool of himself by lying so much and so audaciously about something so important.
• Trump then refused to work with the Biden transition team even after all fifty States and the federal government confirmed the election had been secure and nothing had been rigged.
• Outgoing Secretary of State Pompeo announced there would be a second Trump Administration. Trump's press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said Trump would be the one inaugurated in January. They said this about the candidate who everyone knew had lost.
• Trump then fired Christopher Krebs, the Homeland Security Department's head of election security. Krebs is a Republican and a Trump appointee, and his job included running a government website dedicated to debunking election-related disinformation. Trump fired Krebs for agreeing with other Homeland Security officials that the "election was the most secure in American history." No votes were hacked, changed, lost, sabotaged, or thrown out. Desperate to convince people otherwise, Trump fired Krebs for doing his job - telling Americans the truth.
  
• Trump then claimed there had been widespread illegal voting among minorities, and filed 61 frivolous lawsuits trying to get the court system to throw minority votes out. Since there was no widespread illegal voting, Trump had no evidence, and his lawsuits were laughed out of court. Trump's frivolous lawsuits weren't illegal, but they were blatantly racist and violated the spirit of the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments. In this country we uphold democracy. When they lose elections, American politicians aren't supposed to ask a judge to overturn the results by having the votes against them thrown out. (At this writing only two adults in the entire United States have been charged with trying to vote twice. Those people -- a white man from Pennsylvania and a white man from Nevada -- both voted for Trump.)
  The purpose of Trump's frivolous lawsuits wasn't to win. They were meant to promote Trump's Big Lie that he "won... in a landslide" and Biden stole the election. They were meant to promote the false narrative that the corrupt Donald Trump is actually the one fighting corruption. They were also meant to dupe Trump's supporters into sending him money to pay for court costs -- but, according to the fine print, Trump's mostly using their donations to fund his lavish lifestyle. (For instance, Trump paid his son's girlfriend $60,000 to give a three minute speech.) Moreover, Trump and his campaign told their supporters all sorts of crazy lies about the election being stolen and asked them to donate money to help them prove it in court. Trump and his people knew perfectly well that the election hadn't been stolen, and they admitted this in private -- but their lies duped their supporters into sending them millions of dollars anyway. (Comedian John Stewart compared what Trump and his attorneys were saying in public ("FRAUD!!") and what they actually said in courtrooms ("not... fraud.")) Since Trump and company knew all along they would never be able to prove anything, their attempts to raise money under false pretenses may violate federal wire fraud statutes.
  Trump's Big Lie pushed Putin's propaganda that democracy is hopelessly corrupt and doesn't work.
  Moreover: the Associated Press reported in 2022 that, when Trump filed lawsuits trying to get the courts to overturn the election, "Trump signed legal documents challenging the results of the 2020 election that included voter fraud claims he knew to be false," and "Trump under oath verified the complaint was true to the best of his knowledge." If President Clinton had made statements under oath that he knew to be false... yeah.
  According to Reuters, Trump's Big Lie convinced 50% of the people who voted for him that Biden stole the election, even though the opposite is true.
  The Washington Post found that only 27 of the 249 Republicans in Congress will acknowledge that Biden won the election. The others are too scared of Trump to acknowledge the truth: we had a normal election and Trump was voted out of office.
• The December meeting of the Electoral College is almost always a formality, but according to the letter of the law that's when the next President is formally elected. According to Reuters, Politico, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Vox, and Mother Jones, Trump's plan was to bully Republican State legislators in States that Biden won into illegally appointing Trump-supporting electors instead. These fake electors would cite Trump's Big Lie about Biden cheating, proclaim themselves the "real electors," and commit election fraud by declaring Trump the winner. "A senior Trump campaign official told Reuters its plan is to cast enough doubt on vote-counting in big, Democratic cities that Republican lawmakers will have little choice but to intercede. The campaign is betting that many of those lawmakers, who come from districts Trump won, will face a backlash from voters if they refuse to act. The campaign believes the longer they can drag this out, the more they will have an opportunity to persuade lawmakers to intervene, the official said."
  Trump bribed an Arizona State legislator to help make this happen. Bribery is a crime and an impeachable offense.
  At the same time, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani coordinated efforts by Republicans in States that Biden won to send forged certificates to the Federal government falsely claiming that Trump had won those States' electoral votes. That's conspiracy to commit election fraud. While Giuliani was doing this, reactionary Republican activist Virginia Thomas -- wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas -- contacted multiple Arizona and Wisconsin legislators urging them to commit election fraud and betray their constitutents by declaring a fake set of Trump supporters the "real" electors.
  Trump began his political career by championing the racist lie that then-President Obama wasn't really born in the United States, wasn't really an American, and thus wasn't legally President. Trump's first term ended with the same racist lies with which it began. He argued that the eighty-one million innocent American citizens who voted against him -- especially minority voters in big cities -- aren't real Americans, and thus their votes shouldn't count. In Trump's racist mind he wasn't stealing the election. He thought he was stealing it back from the voters of color in big cities who (in his racist opinion) shouldn't have been allowed to vote in the first place. It's typical Trump: do something corrupt, and then claim to be the one fighting corruption. Do something racist, and then say your critics are the real racists. Do something un-American, and then say your critics aren't real Americans. Try to steal an election, then accuse the other side of stealing it. Break the law, then accuse the other side of breaking it. Try to replace democracy with dictatorship, then accuse the other side of attacking democracy. Betray the Constitution, and then say your critics are the real traitors.
  Republican Senator Mitt Romney -- who was his party's candidate eight years ago -- took Trump to task. "Having failed to make even a plausible vase of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law," Romney wrote, "the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President."
  Trump wants there to be one set of rules for billionaires and another for everyone else. He wants one set of rules for Democratic presidents and a different one for Republican presidents. He wants one set of rules for white voters and another one for minority voters. He wants one set of rules for Republican voters and a different set for Democratic voters. Moreover, if Trump can abuse his presidential authority to try to get Democratic votes thrown out, future Democratic presidents can abuse their power to try and get Republican votes thrown out.
• According to Slate, Senator Lindsey Graham - a close Trump ally - pressured Georgia's elections supervisor to commit election fraud by throwing out legally cast ballots from minority districts. The supervisor - a lifelong Republican who voted for Trump - refused. Under Georgia law, Graham committed a crime: Solicitation to Commit Election Fraud.
  Graham must be expelled from the Senate. He must then be indicted, tried fairly, and convicted. Tell the next Attorney General to investigate. (In 2023, a grand jury called for Graham's indictment, but he was never prosecuted. Sign the petition urging prosecutors to charge him.)
• A few weeks later, Trump followed Graham's example and also committed solicitation to commit election fraud. According to the Washington Post, Trump called Georgia's Governor Brian Kemp, a close ally, and pressured him to call a special session of the State legislature that would throw out the votes against him. Trump told Kemp to appoint Trump-supporting electors instead. Under Georgia law, neither the Governor nor the legislature has the power to do this. Trump made similar requests of Republican legislators in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump also committed Criminal Solicitation to Commit Election Fraud, along with a second crime: Conspiracy to Commit Election Fraud.
• In December 2020, Trump invited retired General Michael Flynn to the White House. At their meeting, Flynn urged Trump to declare martial law in order to stay in power -- repeating things he said publicly earlier in the month. (As noted above, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI three years earlier, and Trump pardoned him.) According to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and retired Marine Raoul Contreras, by doing so, Flynn committed sedition -- a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Wilkerson recommended that Flynn be recalled to active duty and court-martialed. Moreover, if Flynn had urged President Obama to stage a military coup, Congress would have launched an impeachment investigation at once.
  (Flynn later went on a speaking tour where he said "If we are going to have one nation under God - which we must - we have to have one religion... one nation under God, and one religion under God." What religion does Flynn mean? His own, of course. Flynn wants the Federal government to violate the First Amendment and force everyone in America to join his church.)
  
• Trump's campaign officials and aides told him repeatedly that he'd lost fairly. So did the Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department. However, Trump was determined to stay in power at all costs. When sycophants like Governor Kemp, Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Pompeo, Senator McConnell, and Attorney General Barr told him it couldn't be done, Trump decided they'd betrayed him. Instead, Trump embraced crackpots like Giuliani, Flynn, attorney John Eastman, and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell who did play along with him. (According to the New York Times, the Daily Mail, and Raw Story, Powell claims that the Democrats, the Republicans, the Cubans, the Iranians, the Chinese, the Clintons, the voting machine manufacturers, the CIA, the media, and billionaire George Soros all conspired with President Chavez of Venezuela -- who died seven years ago -- to steal the election from Trump. Powell has no evidence for this because none of it's true, and the voting machine manufacturers are suing her for defamation. Months later, Powell told a judge that she didn't expect any reasonable person would take her wild stories seriously. In 2023, she pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy.) Trump's monomaniacal fixation on staying in power became so extreme that even Trump Administration loyalists were frightened.
  There is a Constitutional remedy for this situation. When the President is deranged and unable to fulfil his duties, the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet can invoke the 25th Amendment. The President must then temporarily step down -- involuntarily if necessary -- and the Vice President becomes Acting President. That's never going to happen, though. Mike Pence -- the sycophant-in-chief -- refused to stand up to Trump, and other cabinet members -- Attorney General Barr, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Homeland Security Secretary Wolf, and Health Secretary Azar -- resigned rather than try.
• On January 2, 2020, Trump called Georgia's elections supervisor (just as Graham had a few weeks earlier) and solicited the supervisor to commit election fraud. "All I want to do is this," Trump told the supervisor. "I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state... We won by hundreds of thousands of votes." Trump then threatened the supervisor with criminal charges if the supervisor didn't play along with Trump's latest crackpot lie that ballots supporting him were illegally destroyed before they were counted. Not only did Trump commit election fraud, he also committed extortion. Trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election is unconstitutional, and conspiring to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States is sedition.
• Imagine the unthinkable. What if Mitt Romney had won the 2012 presidential election and President Obama had claimed victory anyway, making baseless claims of voting fraud? What if then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced they weren't leaving? What if Obama and Clinton had tried to bully governors and State legislators into betraying their constituents? What if Obama and Clinton had tried to install their own supporters in the Electoral College so they could steal the electoral victory the voters denied them? What if Obama and Clinton had filed frivolous lawsuits trying to get the votes against them thrown out? What if Obama and Clinton had solicited election fraud? What if Obama and Clinton had threatened election supervisors with prosecution if they didn't falsify the vote totals? It wouldn't have mattered that Obama and Clinton were scheduled to leave office in two months. The House would have impeached them immediately, and the Senate would have removed them from office the next day. (Ironically, President Biden would have been sworn in eight years earlier.)
  In 2023, a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, indicted Trump and eightteen co-defendants with racketeering for their attempt to steal the 2020 election. In other words, the defendants are charged with commiting many small crimes as part of a conspiracy to commit a larger crime. These crimes included soliciting public officers to betray their oaths; false statements and writings; impersonating a public officer; forgery; filing false documents; criminal attempts to influence witnesses; comspiracy to commit election fraud; computer trespass; computer invasion of privacy; and conspiracy to defraud the State. The total was 41 charges, including 13 felonies. Trump's co-defendants included five of the six unindicted co-conspirators mentioned in the earlier federal indictment (see below) -- Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesebro. Other co-defendants include Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and his lawyer, Jenna Ellis. (Chesebro, Ellis, Meadows and Powell pleaded guilty.)
  Read the indictment. Unlike the federal indictments (below), this document is repetitive and fairly dry, but it successfully documents the scale of Trump's criminal enterprise.
• January 6th is the day that the Electoral College sends their votes to Congress, who then confirms the election of the next President. Though this ceremony is a formality that holds no legal weight, Trump and John Eastman came up with the crazy idea that either Congress or the Vice President could retroactively cancel the last election by refusing to certify the Electoral College's results. According to CNN, NBC News, and The Atlantic, Eastman and another lawyer tried to convince Vice President Pence of this. By giving Pence the aforementioned fake electoral votes, they hoped to provide him legal cover to delcare the fake votes real, the real votes fake, and "elect" Trump instead of Biden. Pence knew this was nonsense, but he consulted the Senate parliamentarian to find out if there was any possible way that would work. The expert assured Pence that the Vice President's role is ceremonial only, and there was nothing Pence could do to alter the election results. Moreover, White House lawyers and Justice Department lawyers warned Trump and Eastman that their conspiracy was against the law. Not only did it violate the Electoral Count Act, it also constituted Conspiracy to Obstruct a Congressional Proceeding.

  Eastman knew perfectly well it was illegal for Pence to do this - it violated the Electoral Count Act - but urged Pence to do it anyway. Eastman apparently believed that Pence could be persuaded to illegally declare Trump the winner of the election, and then Trump could pardon him and everyone else involved with the conspiracy. Eastman went so far as to seek a presidential pardon for himself. (The January 6th Committee later recommended Eastman be charged with Conspiracy to Defraud the United States and Obstruction of an Official Proceeding.)

  When Pence told Trump it could not be done, Trump personally tried to strong-arm Pence into committing election fraud on his behalf. "You can do this," Trump told him. "You're too honest... I don't want to be your friend anymore if you don't do this." Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, said that Trump deliberately used that language to threaten Pence the same way a crime boss would. According to Cohen, Trump meant that if Pence wasn't his "friend," he was an enemy. Pence would have understood what happens to a crime boss's enemies. Notably, this was also illegal: it's a crime to solicit another person to break the law, even if the coercion attempt doesn't work.

  This was part of a broader Trump conspiracy to attack the election from every direction. He illegally pressured Justice Department officials to falsely declare the election corrupt; he illegally pressured State election officials not to certify the election results; he illegally pressured State legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to illegally overturn the results; he tried to get the courts to illegally overturn the results; and he tried to get Pence to illegally overturn the results. When all this failed, he spent the month of December telling his supporters to gather in Washington, DC on January 6th. Trump's plan was to incite the mob to blackmail Pence and Congress. (This was another crime: conspiracy to obstruct a Congressional proceeding.) If Pence would not declare Trump the victor out of loyalty to his boss, Trump thought the violent mob would force Pence to break the law -- or kill him if he refused.

  Why?

  After four years of enabling Trump, helping Trump's voter suppression efforts, and participating in Trump's attempt to extort the President of Ukraine, Vice President Pence refused to go along with Trump's conspiracy to commit election fraud on January 6th.

  Why would Pence be Trump's greatest sycophant for four years, defy Trump for one day, then return to being sycophant-in-chief immediately afterwards?

  A possible answer: Pence wasn't defying Trump. He was trying to protect Trump from Eastman. Pence knew Eastman's plan wouldn't work, and furthermore, he knew it was against the law. The American people had elected Joe Biden in November, the Electoral College had confirmed it in December, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent Biden from becoming President on January 20th. Pence was loyal to Trump, and he was trying to prevent his boss from throwing his presidency away over a lost cause. Pence didn't go along with the conspiracy because he wanted to stop Trump from committing another high crime and getting himself impeached again.

  Trump didn't listen to Pence, and that's exactly what happened.

  Pence isn't a hero who stood up to the President of the United States when his boss ordered him to commit a crime. He isn't a patriot who chose loyalty to America over loyalty to Trump. Pence refused to violate the Electoral Count Act because he was trying to shield his boss from making a colossal mistake.

  Pence all but confirmed this theory two years later when someone asked him if Trump should be prosecuted for his crimes. Pence replied: "I don't know that taking bad advice from crank lawyers is a crime." Pence was wrong, of course. If a lawyer tells the President it's okay to commit a crime, that doesn't magically make it legal - especially if the lawyer asks the President to pardon him if they get away with it.

  Trump invited his supporters to a rally on January 6th. That morning of the 6th, Trump addressed the crowd -- many of whom were armed -- and told them the same Big Lie he'd been telling everyone for over two months. He claimed he wasn't trying to steal the election -- the people who won it fairly were the ones who had stolen it. He claimed he was the one trying to save democracy -- by refusing to leave office after losing a free election. He claimed Congress and the Vice President had the power to unconstitutionally overturn the will of the voters. He told his supporters to go to the Capitol building and save the country from the American majority who had rejected his cruelty.

  Moreover, Trump knew perfectly well his supporters were armed, and he ordered the security guards to allow people with guns into the rally. "They're not here to hurt me... Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here." Two aides urged Trump on the days leading up to the rally to tell his supporters to protest peacefully, and Trump refused.

  "Big tech," Trump lied, "rigged an election. They rigged it like they've never rigged an election before...
  "Hundreds of thousands of American patriots are committed to the honesty of our elections and the integrity of our glorious Republic. All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they're doing and stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved.
  "We will not take it anymore and that's what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal... we won this election, and we won it by a landslide. This was not a close election. I say sometimes jokingly, but there's no joke about it, I've been in two elections. I won them both and the second one, I won much bigger than the first... We didn't lose.
  "We're gathered together in the heart of our nation's Capitol for one very, very basic and simple reason, to save our democracy.
  "Democrats attempted the most brazen and outrageous election theft. There's never been anything like this. It's a pure theft in American history, everybody knows it.
  "Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. After this, we're going to walk down and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down.
  "You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong... Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections, but whether or not they stand strong for our country.
  "Today, we see a very important event though, because right over there, right there, we see the event going to take place. And I'm going to be watching, because history is going to be made. We're going to see whether or not we have great and courageous leaders or whether or not we have leaders that should be ashamed of themselves throughout history, throughout eternity, they'll be ashamed. And you know what? If they do the wrong thing, we should never ever forget that they did. Never forget. We should never ever forget.
  "And Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our constitution and for the good of our country. And if you're not, I'm going to be very disappointed in you... So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do.
  "And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
  "So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we're going to the Capitol... we're going to try and give our Republicans... the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue."
  

  This was a crime: inciting a riot. Since Trump had failed to stay in power via fraud, he tried to stay in power by inciting violence to blackmail or kill anyone who got in his way.

  Trump broke his word immediately. Instead of walking down Pennsylvania Avenue with them like he said he would, Trump went back to the White House.

  According to the Washington Post, Reuters, and the Huffington Post, the mob -- mostly white men, including white supremacists carrying guns and waving Confederate flags -- marched to the Capitol building, shoved their way past bewildered police officers, smashed windows, stole personal and public property, and vandalized offices. The rioters attacked police with lead pipes, beat reporters, and threatened to murder the Vice President and the Speaker of the House. One of the rioters was shot and killed in the crossfire. A police officer was brutally beaten and died the next day. One rioter was trampled by other rioters and died at the scene. Two other rioters died on the scene of medical emergencies. 140 police officers were hurt; some were left permanently disabled. (So much for the president and the party of law and order. As far as Trump and the rioters were concerned, blue lives don't matter.) Vice President Pence and members of Congress were forced to hide or flee the building.

  "The rioters," The Atlantic observed, were "imbued with the culture of impunity of the Trump era. This is a moment when bad behavior goes unpunished. The president has told his supporters that loyalty to his cause trumps fidelity to the law, and he has reinforced that message by handing out pardons to aides who get in trouble for putting him ahead of the law. The crowd he summoned to Capitol Hill on January 6 took that message to heart." Rolling Stone later reported that some of the people who planned the riot had been told by the Trump campaign -- or Trump-supporting members of Congress -- that Trump would pardon them.

  Trump watched the riot on television, tweeting his support for the rioters while some of his aides begged him to tell the mob to go home. He told the people around him that he approved of rioters chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" "Maybe Mr. Pence should be hung," Trump told witnesses. "Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it."

  Senator Ben Sasse claims he heard from a White House aide that Trump was delighted to see the violence and didn't understand why everyone else at the White House wasn't cheering too. (The reason for this was simple. Trump was exhilarated to see a violent mob of his supporters fighting their way through police officers in order to force Pence and Congress to declare Trump the next president -- or kill them if they refused. Everyone else saw a violent mob attacking Congress and killing police officers.) Meanwhile, the Washington Post and CNN reported Trump's Congressional allies like Senator Lindsey Graham and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy tried calling Trump from their hiding places to get him to call the rioters off -- but Trump refused to take their calls. Graham and McCarthy then called Trump's relatives, but even they couldn't get Trump away from the television. Moreover, Trump knew the rioters were trying to assassinate Mike Pence -- his sycophant-in-chief -- and instead of calling them off, Trump cheered them on. One of Trump's lawyers urged him to tell the mob to act peacefully, and Trump refused.

  "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and out Constitution," Trump tweeted at the time. He added later: "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long."

  That wasn't true, either. In the last twenty years, the Electoral College twice awarded the presidency to candidates who lost the popular vote. In 2000 and 2016, Al Gore's supporters and Hillary Clinton's supporters turned out to protest this -- peacefully. Even after Gore's narrow but decisive victory and Clinton's popular landslide were "unceremoniously and viciously stripped away," no protest came close to being violent. The only election violence in this generation came from white supremacists who got angry because the American people voted Trump out of office.

  After watching police struggle with the rioters for hours -- and brushing off pleas from his daughter and other aides to tell the mob to stand down -- Trump finally posted a video repeating his Big Lie.

  "We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt... So go home. We love you. You're very special... I know how you feel, but go home, and go home in peace."

  As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed out, "Rather than call the rioters off, Trump indicated they were doing the right thing." Trump refused to call off the violent mob for hours because the mob was doing exactly what he wanted them to do: attacking Congress in order to prevent the transfer of power. Trump wanted the rioters to force Pence and Congress to falsely declare that he had won the election. If that didn't work, Trump hoped the mob would make it impossible for Congress to declare anyone the winner. Since he wasn't able to strong-arm Pence into committing election fraud, he thought the mob would do it for him.

  After police finally cleared the building, Congress retured to session and completed the ceremony in the middle of the night. Trump told one aide that "Mike Pence let me down," and told a different aide that posting the "you have to go home now" video had been a mistake. About a year later, Trump said he would pardon the rioters if he became President again.

  Trump was determined to hold onto power at any costs. He was willing to sacrifice democracy, the republican form of government, the Constitution, the law, the lives of police officers, and the lives of his own supporters. When his sycophants told him he'd lost fair and square, he decided they'd betrayed him, and embraced lunatics like Giuliani, Flynn, Eastman, and Powell who came up with madcap schemes for him to stay in power illegally. Trump betrayed the United States of America by inciting his supporters to attack Congress. His attempt to block the certification of the 2020 election constitutes a criminal conspiracy to commit voting fraud. Trump must be removed from office and banned from ever again serving in government. (Sign the petitions at Democracy for America and Free Speech for People.) If Trump can incite his followers to attack Congress, and Congress lets him get away with it, future Presidents will know they can incite their followers to attack Congress and they'll get away with it, too. Also: when he leaves office, Congress must strip Trump of his taxpayer-funded pension, taxpayer-funded travel, taxpayer-funded staff, and taxpayer-funded intelligence briefings. Trump is already rich and doesn't need those benefits.

  Trump later wrote that "the real insurrection happened on November 3, the Presidential Election, not on January 6." Trump called the free, fair, peaceful, and secure election the "real insurrection" because he thinks no one should be allowed to vote against him. To him, the problem wasn't that an angry mob of his supporters attacked and murdered police officers in the attempt to force another group of his supporters to break the law. As far as Trump's concerned, the problem was that the American people exercised their legal right to vote.

  For their part, the rioters refused to accept the results of a free, fair, and democratic election. Since they didn't get their way at the ballot box, they turned to terror and violence instead. They attacked the Capitol building, intending to somehow force Congress to illegally and unconstitutionally allow the candidate who was voted out of office to stay in power. (Even if Congress had voted to reject the election's results, that vote would have been unconstitutional and carried no legal weight.) The rioters attempted a coup d'etat -- a betrayal of all Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike. It was an attempt to destroy democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, and everything America stands for. Trump and the rioters tried to violently overthrow democracy, our republican form of government, and the will of the American people. They must be prosecuted to the the law's fullest extent.

  If Obama had incited a crowd of his supporters to attack Congress and the police, he would have been jailed within hours -- even if he was scheduled to leave office in two weeks. Moreover, if the rioters who charged the Capitol building had been minorities instead of white supremacists, the police response would have been quite different.

  Say President Biden retires at the end of his first term, and Vice President Harris is the Democratic nominee in 2024. Say the Republican nominee is demolished in the popular vote with 78% of the people voting against him -- but he wins the Electoral College 270-268. (This has never happened, but it is mathematically possible.)

  Would Republicans argue that Vice President Harris has the power to unilaterally refuse to certify any Electoral votes?

  Of course not. They only mean Republican Vice Presidents.

  Moreover: in November 2000, then-Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote. He was then denied the Presidency because the five Republicans on the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount and handed Florida's electoral votes to George W. Bush. Would anyone argue that winning the popular vote gave Vice President Gore the authority to throw out Florida's Electoral College votes?

  Likewise, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote -- but Trump won the Electoral College instead. Would anyone argue that then-Vice President Biden had the authority to throw out Electoral College votes he didn't like in order to install the winner of the popular vote as President?

  Of course not. It is not up to one person to decide what laws we're going to follow and which we're going to ignore.
  

  
  
• Trump lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square. Instead of accepting the outcome of a democratic election, Trump spent the next two months trying to stay in power anyway. The team that cheated lost the game, and afterwards tried to bully the referees into awarding them the other team's touchdowns.

  As commentator Keith Olbermann pointed out, Trump supporters in both the House and Senate challenged the election results in Congress, citing deranged conspiracy theories that had been debunked weeks earlier. Under the Constitution, neither Congress nor the Vice President has the power to overturn a presidential election -- but if Congress passes an unconstitutional law and the President signs it, who's going to stop them? The main reason Trump's Congressional power grab failed is because he didn't have enough votes. What if the next politician who tries to stay in power after losing an election DOES have enough votes?

  If your representatives in Congress repeated or endorsed Trump's Big Lie that he won the election, vote them out of office. People who lie to you aren't working for you and don't deserve your vote. Likewise, if your representatives in Congress or your State government supported Trump's efforts to retroactively disqualify votes he didn't agree with, vote those representatives out of office in the next election. If politicians who lose elections are allowed to go to court and argue that the innocent American citizens who voted against them should never have been allowed to vote in the first place, the next vote they try to throw out will be yours.

• On January 13, 2020 -- exactly one week after the rioters attacked Congress -- the House impeached Trump for the second time. There was one charge: inciting violence against the government.

  Notably, the House did not impeach Trump for the fifty impeachable offenses that preceded his first impeachment. Nor did they impeach Trump for his subsequent impeachable offenses, including:

  • Illegally freezing the World Health Organization's funds at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic;
  • Firing a State Department Inspector General for doing his job (investigating the misuse of taxpayer funds);
  • Ordering an attack on peaceful protesters outside the White House in violation of the First Amendment;
  • Conspiracy to commit kidnapping of peaceful protesters in Portland, Oregon;
  • Covering up Russian bounties on American soldiers serving in Afghanistan;
  • Pardoning longtime allies Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort, who either pleaded guilty to, or were convicted of, breaking the law on Trump's behalf;
  • Lying to investigators under oath;
  • Handicapping the Post Office to prevent absentee ballots from being delivered on time;
  • Announcing he would illegally seek a third term;
  • Subordination of election fraud by telling supporters to vote twice;
  • Subordination of voter intimidation by telling his supporters to challenge innocent American citizens at polling places;
  • Firing a Homeland Security Department official for doing his job (debunking disinformation); and
  • Solicitation of election fraud by extorting officials in Georgia and other States to throw out votes against him, manufacture votes favoring him, and illegally appoint his supporters to the Electoral College.
  
  Inciting a riot was an open-and-shut case. As noted above, Trump did it in plain sight. However, most of Trump's other illegal acts were also done in plain sight. The inciting a riot charge didn't even scratch the surface of the ways Trump broke the law and betrayed the United States.

  Trump's second impeachment trial went better than the first one. With a 51-50 Democratic majority now controlling proceedings, the prosecution was allowed to present evidence, which they did in a damning video. Trump's lawyers lied through their teeth and were widely panned as incompetent. On February 13, seven Republicans joined both independents and all Democrats and voted to find Trump guilty. Even though a bipartisan majority of Senators (57-43) voted against Trump, this fell short of the two-thirds majority (67-33) required to convict him.

  Tellingly, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold the trial until Trump left office. McConnell then admitted Trump was guilty -- and voted to acquit him on the grounds that Trump had left office. That would be funny if Trump hadn't incited a riot that killed five people.

  Urging the Senate to convict Trump, Congressman Jamie Raskin said:

  "What would be a high crime and misdemeanor in your first year as president, and your second year as president, and your third year as president, and for the vast majority of your fourth year as president, you can suddenly do in your last few weeks in office, without facing any constitutional accountability at all. It's an invitation to the president to take his best shot at anything he may want to do on his way out the door, including using violent means to... hang on to the Oval Office at all costs and to block the peaceful transfer of power... The January exception is an invitation to our founders' worst nightmare."

  The situation is worse than Raskin described. As noted above, Trump committed fifty impeachable offenses before his first impeachment, but House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi refused to impeach him. Convicting Trump required a 67-33 super-majority of Senators, and Pelosi knew they didn't have the votes. In other words: as long as 34 Senators refused to convict Trump no matter what he did, Trump was effectively above the law.

  Pelosi and the House finally acted when Trump was caught trying to steal the 2020 election by bullying a foreign government into launching a criminal investigation of an innocent man. In 2020, the Republican-controlled Senate voted mostly along along party lines to acquit -- even though some of the Senators who voted to acquit Trump acknowledged that he was guilty. Republican loyalty to Trump proved to be stronger than their loyalty to America, the Constitution, the rule of law, democracy, or the facts.

  Trump's second impeachment was similar. In 2021, Trump incited a riot. The rioters attacked Congress, beat a police officer to death, and tried to assassinate the Vice President and the Speaker of the House. Even though a bipartisan majority of Senators voted to convict Trump, some of those who agreed he was guilty let him off anyway. Trump was acquitted because McConnell and 42 other Republican Senators decided loyalty to a demagogue who'd just tried to have his most loyal ally killed was more important than loyalty to our country and to the lives of police officers doing their jobs.

  McConnell and his allies set a harrowing precedent. It wasn't just a "January exception" -- it was a 34-Senator exception. As far as they're concerned, a Republican President can send an angry mob to break into the Capitol building in an attempt to to murder his own supporters, and his would-be victims will still refuse to find him guilty. This means that any future President who is voted out of office can use violence in the effort to stay in power -- and as long as they have 34 Senators in their pocket, their party will acquit them too.

  As noted above, a politician who loses an election isn't supposed to file frivolous lawsuits hoping he'll find a corrupt judge who will ignore the law and reverse the election's outcome by disqualifying the votes against him after the fact. That's against everything the United States of America stands for. However, filing frivolous lawsuits is not against the letter of the law and is not an impeachable offense. Trump committed election fraud, conspiracy to commit election fraud, subordination of election fraud, solicitation of voter intimidation, extortion, and bribery in the attempt to steal the 2020 election. When that failed, he committed sedition by trying to violently prevent the transfer of power. These high crimes ARE impeachable offenses, and Trump must be prosecuted for them. (Sign the petition.)

  If there were any doubt regarding Trump's desire to destroy American democracy and become a fascist dictator, in August 2022 he demanded that he immediately (and illegally) be reinstated as President. In December 2022, he repeated that call, and demanded "the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles... in the Constitution".

  Trump admits in private that he knows he lost the election. His public lies about election fraud are exactly that - lies - and he knows perfectly well he's lying. When he became President, Trump swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution - not to terminate it. His call to shred the Constitution is blatantly illegal and should disqualify him from ever holding office again.
  

• In August 2022, a federal grand jury indicted Trump on four felony charges: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. Read the indictment. Even though it's a court filing, it's not in legalese, it's easy to understand, and it isn't boring.
• Shortly afterwards, Trump vowed to go after anyone who went after him. His threats to prosecutors and witnesses could place him in contempt of court.
• A few days after the indictment, Trump's attorney, John Lauro, admitted on television that Trump had done exactly what he's been accused of.

• After Trump was voted out of office, the CIA released a book detailing another potentially impeachable offense: dereliction of duty. Part of the President's responsibilities are to keep the country safe from attack. The CIA briefs the President daily on threats to national security -- but Trump had no interest whatsoever in these intelligence briefings. Trump refused to read anything the officers gave him. Since the officers needed Presidential authorization to act against threats, they had to trick Trump into paying attention. (For instance, Trump liked satellite photographs, so the CIA officers always included some to give him something to look at while they were trying to brief him. They reworked information into stories that would keep him interested, and they tried to jam as much information as possible into short sentences that would take up less than a single page.) For his last month in office, Trump refused to listen to any briefings at all.
  What if the CIA had learned that al-Qaeda was planning another September 11th-style attack when Trump was refusing to attend briefings?
  It may not be illegal for the President to ignore national security briefings, but if Obama had done that, he would have been impeached in a week.

• A year after Trump was voted out of office, the Washington Post reported that Trump had spent his entire presidency willingly, knowingly, and deliberately violating the Presidential Records Act.
  The Presidential Records Act was passed after the Watergate scandal to prevent future Presidents from destroying evidence of their crimes. Presidential records belong to the Presidency - not Trump personally - and it was illegal for him to destroy them. Trump routinely tore up documents -- forcing staff members to desperately tape them back together in order to avoid prosecution. "Typically," the Post reported, "aides from either the Office of the Staff Secretary or the Oval Office Operations team would come in behind Trump to retrieve the piles of torn paper he left in his wake... Then, staffers from the White House Office of Records Management were generally responsible for jigsawing the documents back together, using clear tape." Trump also regularly flushed documents down the toilet. "He did it all in violation of the Presidential Records Act, despite being urged by at least two chiefs of staff and the White House counsel to follow the law on preserving documents... One senior Trump White House official said he and other White House staffers frequently put documents into 'burn bags' to be destroyed, rather than preserving them." Mother Jones reported that Trump's habit of throwing official documents in the White House toilets regularly clogged them up.
  When Trump left office, he took fifteen boxes of top secret government materials to his residence in Florida. One of the boxes contained the map Trump had altered in his illegal attempt (above) to counterfeit a weather forecast.
  The Atlantic reports: "Everyone from the president down to the most junior federal bureaucrat swears an oath to protect the Constitution and is informed that [destroying] records is a crime. Many citizens, including those who are in or have left office, have been charged in violation of these rules, their careers destroyed or damaged, some sent to prison." According to Mother Jones, if Trump is charged, tried, and convicted of violating this law, he will be automatically barred from ever holding office again.
  If Obama had done any of this, he would have been impeached the next day.

  The Atlantic pointed out that the President himself is responsible for enforcing such laws as the Emoluments Clause, the Hatch Act, and the Presidential Records Act. Since Trump refused to do it, there was no other legal mechanism to force him and his staff to comply. "Trump learned early in his private-sector career that it is sometimes more advantageous to break the law and dare someone to call you out than to follow it-and that even if you get caught, the penalty is often a fine dwarfed by the upside of the infraction. He brought that philosophy to the White House, where he encountered rules that were even less enforceable. Trump's White House lawyers repeatedly warned him about the legal requirement to save documents, just as they warned him about other possible violations of the law, but [Trump knew] it didn't matter.
  "When Trump aides flagrantly violated the Hatch Act, which is meant to prevent executive-branch officials from dabbling in electoral politics, they knew they had little to fear, because the person in charge of enforcing the law was the president himself. 'Let me know when the jail sentence starts,' Kellyanne Conway sneered.
  "During the 2016 election, Trump welcomed Russian interference, but Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that he could not indict a sitting president. Emboldened, Trump set about soliciting foreign help even more brazenly. The one body that could punish him was Congress, but he realized that he could run out the clock on investigations by stonewalling.
  "Eventually, Congress took the dramatic step of impeaching him, but once Trump realized that the Senate would not convict him, he was back to the same behavior even before the vote occurred." Trump's later crimes were the consequence of Congress' failure to punish him for his earlier ones.

• Two years after Trump was voted out of office, the January 6th Committee Hearings proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Trump lost the election, he knew he lost the election, and he led a criminal conspiracy to commit election fraud in order to stay in power. (Watch MeidasTouch's video summarizing Trump's attempted coup. Also, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich demonstrates how Trump's actions were crimes.) Trump was legally obligated to step down, and he willingly and knowingly used violence in his attempt to stay in office.

  Moreover, Trump engaged in witness tampering in the effort to block the congressional investigation.

• Trump later violated a gag order by trying to intimidate another witness against him in a criminal trial.

• When Trump left the White House, he took at dozens of boxes of top secret government documents with him to the resort where he lives in Florida, and also took some documents to a resort he owns in New Jersey. This was theft. The documents Trump took belonged to the government, not to Trump personally. It's a crime to steal classified documents, it's another crime to possess them, and it's yet another crime to show them to anyone. Trump apparently packed the boxes himself, memorized their contents, and took some of them with him when he went on trips. The National Archives retrieved 15 boxes a few weeks later, but did not receive all of them. Over the next several months, Trump ignored several requests for the other boxes' return -- including a subpoena. One of his lawyers warned him that keeping the documents was illegal and he could be charged with a crime if he did not return them. Another lawyer suggested that Trump make a deal with the Justice Department to return the documents in return for an agreement not to prosecute him -- but Trump refused.

  According to The Guardian, after the subpoena Trump told a different lawyer to collect the stolen classified documents and return them to the Justice Department. Trump, however, hid 64 boxes of classified documents from his own lawyer so they wouldn't be returned. This was a clear case of obstruction of justice. Trump and another lawyer ended up returning about 40 classified documents, and the lawyer assured the Justice Department that all the documents had been returned. Finally, the FBI showed up at Trump's resort with a search warrant in August 2022 and seized twenty-six more boxes containing at least 300 more stolen documents.

  The FBI reported that the top secret documents hadn't been stored securely and had been mixed in with other documents. The law mandates that top secret documents be stored and reviewed in secure government buildings -- which Trump's resort is not.
  

  Some of these documents included classified information about nuclear weapons and classified data about undercover agents. If the classified information concerns an allied country's nuclear defense, it would be incredibly valuable to that country's enemies. If it concerns an enemy country's nuclear weapons, it would be incredibly valuable to our enemies, as the documents would describe how the United States would defend itself against a potential nuclear attack. These documents could also compromise the means with which the United States acquired the information -- including who our agents are or how our surveillance methods work. According to the Washington Post, some of the classified information concerned Iran (a country that's been an arch-enemy of the United States for forty years) and China. Trump left some of these documents in his office, in his bedroom, in the basement, and in a closet of the resort where he lives. Some of the documents were even stored in bathroom and a public ballroom. (There are pictures.) Trump apparently showed some of these documents to his donors and advisors. This is illegal under the Espionage Act: documents critical to America's national defense are not to be kept where foreign spies might see them. Moreover, Trump instructed his lawyers to tell the government that all the documents had been returned when he knew they had not.
  
  Trump -- who wasn't home at the time of the FBI search -- decried the search as a "witch hunt," denied the top secret documents existed, and falsely accused the FBI of planting evidence. Trump then admitted he'd taken the top secret documents, but claimed he would have turned them over willingly if he'd been asked. (This wasn't true either, as he'd ignored earlier requests, including the subpoena.) Later, Trump falsely claimed that former Presidents had done the same thing, then falsely claimed he'd declassified the top secret documents anyway. Incredibly, Trump tried to convince an interviewer that he has the magical ability to declassify top secret documents just "by thinking about it," without actually telling anyone or filling out any paperwork. That isn't true, and Trump knows perfectly well it isn't true. If the documents actually had been declassified, Trump wouldn't have tried to hide them from the National Archives or the Justice Department. Taking the documents was a crime, refusing to return them was a crime, and Trump was aware of that the whole time. Moreover, when running for President in 2016, Trump campaigned on the importance of keeping classified materials safe and insisted that people who failed to do so should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  According to the New York Times, CNN, The Atlantic, and The Independent, Trump admitted in private that he knew all along that he hadn't declassified anything, and the documents he'd stolen were still top secret. There's even a recording of him saying this. The recording was made when Trump was bragging to some aides that he'd taken top-secret documents when he left the White House, he knew they hadn't been declassified, and he knew perfectly well that he shouldn't show them the documents. Moreover, one of the classified documents Trump stole detailed what the United States would do if a war broke out with Iran -- information that would be incredibly valuable to Iranian spies. Part of the Espionage Act makes it a crime to take documents that could harm American national security or aid a foreign adversary. The Independent pointed out that, under the Espionage Act, it's illegal to take documents critical to national defense and illegal to keep them when you've been asked to return them. It doesn't matter if the documents were classified or not. Again, Trump kept these documents in cardboard boxes at the resort where he lives in rooms easily accessible to guests.

  Trump's lawyers later admitted in court that the FBI hadn't planted anything, and nothing had been declassified after all.

  ABC News later reported that on a different occasion, Trump told a guest at his Florida resort "two pieces of information about U.S. submarines: the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected." The guest then told dozens of other people. The information Trump revealed is so secret that it's illegal to reveal it and illegal to declassify it, even for the President.

  If Hillary Clinton had mishandled classified information... yeah.

  In June 2023, a federal grand jury charged Trump with 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information, 3 counts of withholding or concealing documents, 2 counts of making false statements, and 1 count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Read the indictment. Most of the document is not in legalese and is easy for laymen to understand.

  The prosecution later subpoenaed the footage from Trump's security videos. When Trump ordered the footage destroyed instead, the grand jury added three more counts of obstruction to the indictment.

  Trump later threatened the prosecutor and his family and friends, just like he had when he was indicted for campaign finance violations. Threatening a federal official for doing their job is also a crime.

• He wants to charge news organizations with treason if they report any news critical of him. This would obviously be illegal under the First Amendment (guaranteeing freedom of the press) and could lead to him getting impeached again. (If Trump can charge news organizations with treason for reporting news he doesn't like, so could Biden or any other future president.)
• He pledged to sign an unconstitutional executive order revoking the citizenship of American children born to undocumented immigrants. This is illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment and would be challenged in court -- and could lead to him being impeached again.
• He promised to pardon the 500 rioters who have been convicted of attacking the Capitol Building in January 2020 and trying to assassinate Vice President Mike Pence. So much for being the president of law and order.
• He wants the authority to hire and fire anyone who works at the Federal Government at will. This would allow him to fire Inspectors General and anyone else who thinks following the law is more important than obeying Trump's commands. As it's illegal to fire a government employee for doing their job, that could lead to another impeachment.
• He announced he would violate the Posse Comitatus Act and use the military for law enforcement. This could lead to another impeachment. He later said he would send the military against members of Congress and other ordinary Americans.
• He wants to give anyone who has a permit to carry a concealed firearm in their home state to be able to carry a concealed firearm in any other state, regardless of local laws. So much for States' rights.
• He is currently under criminal indictment for his attempts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and for stealing classified documents when he left office. He wants to "defund" the Justice Department and the FBI if they don't drop the investigations against him. Again, so much for being the president of law and order.
• He vowed to take personal control of the Justice Department and end the Department's politically neutral mission of investigating and prosecuting crimes. Instead, he wants to appoint special counsels and special prosecutors to go after anyone who was involved in any way with investigating his crimes. He will likewise use the Justice Department to persecute anyone else he considers an enemy. (Richard Nixon would be proud.)
  According to Rolling Stone, "such prosecutors would go after the usual targets: Smith, Smith's team, President Joe Biden, Biden's family, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray. [Wray is a Republican, and Trump appointed him.] But they'd also go after smaller targets, from members of the Biden 2020 campaign to more obscure government offices... Trump and members of his inner orbit have already outlined possible legal strategies, examining specific federal statutes they could wield... to go after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who delivered Trump's first indictment of this year... Trump has already vowed to sic a special counsel on President Biden if he beats him in 2024." Prosecuting innocent people without evidence is unconstitutional: it violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Trump wants to hire a bunch of crooks to go after the cops. If he can do that to them, he can do it to you.
• He wants to take personal control over the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.
• He pledged to "impound... funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs [he] doesn't like." Impounding funds has been illegal for fifty years. Once the President signs a budget passed by Congress, he can't turn around and arbitrarily defund programs later. If Trump attempted this, it could result in another impeachment.
• He will appoint an Attorney General who will drop the Federal indictments against him. This Attorney General will then go to court seeking dismissal of State criminal indictments. Trump also claims the authority to pardon himself.
  
• He plans to create an "Office of Election Integrity" either in the Justice Department or run directly from the White House. Taking a page from George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, this office will do the exact opposite of protecting election integrity. It will use the power of the federal government to do what Trump tried (and failed) to do in 2020: force the courts to throw out the votes of innocent American citizens who voted against Trump. (If Trump can force the court system to throw out the votes of anyone who voted against him, so can Biden or any other future president.)
• He called for "the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution" that would oblige him to leave office after losing an election. Not only is trying to overthrow the Constitution an impeachable offense, Trump's already been impeached for it! (If Trump can terminate the Constitution in order to stay in office after losing an election, so can Biden, or any other future president.)
• Trump plans to invoke the Insurrection Act as soon as he's sworn in and deploy the military against protesters. This would violate the First Amendment and could lead to Trump getting impeached again.
• Trump intends to prosecute former allies who later criticized or disagreed with him, including William Barr, General John Kelly, and General Mark Milley. (Trump also said Milley should be put to death.) This would violate the Fifth and Sixth Amendments and could lead to Trump getting impeached again.
• In an interview with Univision, Trump vowed that, if returned to the White House, he would bring criminal charges anyone who ran against him. This would violate the Fifth and Sixth Amendments and would lead to Trump getting impeached again. (If Trump can bring criminal charges against anyone who runs against him, so can Biden or any other future president.)
• Trump plans to round up undocumented immigrants and confine them in concentration camps while awaiting deportation. Trump said he "will use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history." According to the New York Times, "He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year. [He] is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. [He] wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized... People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe [such as Afghanistan], allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked."
  The last time Trump was in power and "cracked down" on immigrants, he rounded up innocent American citizens and legal residents along with undocumented immigrants. He also put babies in cages. Now Trump is saying those measures didn't go far enough. Regardless of your stance on immigration, any mention of concentration camps by a presidential candidate should end their political career immediately.
  Moreover: as mentioned above, Trump has repeatedly stated his intention to terminate the Constitutional guarantee of citizenship to everyone born in the United States. Since Trump plans to end birthright citizenship, then build concentration camps to house undocumented immigrants until deportation, Trump could declare anyone he doesn't like to be an undocumented immigrant and throw innocent American citizens in his concentration camps as well as immigrants. 330 million American citizens would be left scrambling to find not only their own birth certificates, but their parents' birth certificates as well. But even that might not be enough. The last time Trump was President, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers illegally detained hundreds of innocent American citizens for weeks under the false assumption they were undocumented immigrants. In some cases, ICE officials falsely accused those American citizens of "falsely claiming to be an American citizen," and refused to look at the paperwork proving otherwise -- even when the innocent Americans detained had their paperwork with them. If Trump and ICE can do it to them, they can do it to you.
• In November 2023 - a few days after the news broke about Trump's plan to establish concentration camps - Trump gave a speech where he quoted Hitler, said that immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country," and called anyone who disagrees with him "vermin." Trump said: "we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country... They'll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream. The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left, and it's growing every day. Every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within."
  
  • Communists and Marxists aren't a political force in the United States. Though there are a few Americans who have been duped by Marxist propaganda, the overwhelming majority of Americans recognize communist lies for what they are.
  • Trump is a fascist himself, though he wouldn't use the term.
  • By equating communism and fascism -- two violent, extremist political philosophies that are diametrically opposed to each other -- Trump demonstrates that he doesn't understand (or care) what those terms mean. In a nutshell, communism is a violent, extremist left-wing ideology. Fascism is a violent, extremist right-wing ideology. By saying "fascists... will do anything... to destroy America," Trump warns us of a threat from the radical right, but in the next sentence he says "the real threat is not from the radical right." Since there is no communist movement in the United States and Trump isn't warning people about himself, what is he really talking about?
  • Trump routinely throws around words like "communist," "Marxist," "fascist," and "radical left thugs" to describe anyone who disagrees with him, anyone who tries to hold him accountable for his crimes, or anyone who stands up to his bullying. None of the innocent Americans he's condemned as communists, Marxists, fascists, or thugs actually are communists, Marxists, fascists or thugs.
  • Trump plans to (1) invoke the Insurrection Act to order military strikes against innocent American citizens exercising their Constitutional right to protest, (2) build concentration camps to house illegal immigrants, and (3) "root out... the threat from within," i.e. anyone who disagrees with him. The concentration camps built to detain illegal immigrants will quickly become concentration camps for anyone who opposes Trump.
  • Trump will justify confining innocent American citizens in concentration camps by claiming they are "communists," "Marxists," "fascists," "radical-left thugs," and "vermin." He'll make those claims hoping to dupe everyone else into believing it couldn't happen to them or anyone they know. It's a standard fascist tactic: build concentration camps and detain minorities, thus getting people used to the idea of concentration camps while assuring everyone else it could never happen to them. Once the general population has accepted concentration camps as normal, anyone who criticizes the concentration camps ends up in one.
  • Ironically, Trump has nothing but praise for real communist dictators like Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. He's also repeatedly praised actual fascist strongmen like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary, and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.
• In December 2023, Trump was interviewed on camera by his close ally, Sean Hannity. Hannity bent over backwards to give Trump the opportunity to walk back his earlier statements, such as his plan to bring criminal charges anyone who opposes him. Instead of doing what Hannity was blatantly trying to get him to do -- reassure voters that he would never "break the law,... use the government go after people, [or] abuse power as retribution against anybody" -- Trump replied that he would be a dictator, but only on the first day of his term. Trump doubled down on those comments a few days later, saying "I wanna be a dictator for one day."
• Trump then vowed to "indemnify our police officers. This is a big thing, and it's a brand new thing, and I think it's so important. I'm going to indemnify, through the federal government, all police officers and law enforcement officials throughout the United States." Indemnify means "to secure against hurt, loss, or damage." So: Trump wants to protect all police officers from prosecution or lawsuits if they break the law.
  Most police officers are brave heroes dedicated to protecting their communities, but tragic stories of corrupt, negligent, or racist officers constantly make headlines. Trump is proposing to make an entire vocaton immune to any kind of legal accountability. What happens when people -- even good people -- are above the law and cannot be prosecuted if they commit crimes?
  In other words: Trump wants to make it so law enforcement officers don't have to obey the law themselves and can't be held accountable if they commit crimes. Though most police officers are dedicated public servants, they are human. The profession -- like all professions, from lawyers to priests to teachers -- does occasionally have some bad apples. Trump wants to make it so the police officers who murdered suspect George Floyd in broad daylight in front of a crowd -- or entered the wrong apartment and shot the sleeping Breonna Taylor dead -- can't be arrested, prosecuted, or even fired. If police officers don't have to obey the law, there's nothing anyone can do about it if a police officer -- even with good intentions -- tortures a suspect in order to force them to confess, and it later turns out they got the wrong guy. No one will be able to do anything if an officer plants evidence against a suspect in order to catch the bad guy, and it later turns out they got the wrong man. No one will have any recourse if a police officer searches an innocent without a warrant, enters an innocent person's house and seizes their guns without a warrant, arrests peaceful protesters, arrests a journalist every time she has an article published, stands outside a church every Sunday and arrests everyone who tries to enter, and so on.
  Moreover, According to The Atlantic, Trump "says he will [force] cities to adopt policing policies favored by conservatives, such as stop-and-frisk, as a condition for receiving federal grants."
• In January 2024, Trump's attorney argued in court that President Trump could order a SEAL team to assassinate a political rival and Trump could not be prosecuted for it. The lawyer explained that criminal prosecution could only take place if President Trump were first impeached by the House and then removed from office by the Senate. So, if 66 Senators vote to convict Trump but 34 vote not to, Trump could literally get away with murder. Moreover, if Trump were to order an innocent American citizen assassinated and then resign from office before being impeached, he could not be prosecuted for ordering murder -- ever. (The last time Trump was impeached, his attorneys argued the exact opposite -- that a criminal President who was leaving office could not be impeached, and should be prosecuted instead.)
  Attorney Peter W. Drum wrote: "So, let's expand Trump's next sedition plan. He orders SEAL Team Six to assassinate all of the candidates running for President and simultaneously orders a surprise attack on Congress where all Senators and Representatives are imprisoned. Now, he can't be prosecuted for any crime because he can't be impeached."
• In 1949, the United States and a group of democracies in North America and Europe formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a mutual defense pact where all members agreed to come to the defense of any single member who was attacked. The Constitution says that all treaties are the supreme law of the land, and the President's job is to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed. Our allies did not hesitate to come to our defense when the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001.
  In February 2024, Trump said he'd encourage Putin to attack our most faithful allies and would ignore our treaty obligations to come to their defense. This is un-American, illegal, and unconstitutional.
• In May 2024, Trump said he would deport any student who protests. It's illegal and unconstitutional to deport innocent American citizens exercising their First Amendment right to assemble peacefully. This won't stop Trump, though. The Washington Post reports that Trump illegally deported dozens of American citizens during his first term.

Trump wants to throw out the votes of innocent American citizens, prosecute innocent people, and order military strikes against anyone who protests. If he can do it to them, he -- or any future president -- can do it to you.

As commentator Keith Olbermann pointed out:

"There are laws against attempting to overthrow the government of the United States of America, whether by violence or fraud.
"The people who did this to our democracy in 2020 must face the imminent prospect of going to prison for how they assailed freedom these last five years. [They] must live the rest of their lives in abject fear of going to prison if they try it again." Failure to prosecute them will "reassure them that whatever laws they break next time, they will not face the consequences, because they are not facing the consequences this time.
"Illegal acts must have consequences, otherwise simply, they cease to be illegal. If you cannot prosecute a former president when he broke the law, why would any future present [obey] the law?"

Trump is running for President in the 2024 election. This is illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads "No person shall... hold any office... under the United States... who, having previously taken an oath... to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same." However, enforcing this statute is up each State election supervisor -- usually the Secretary of State.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote,

"Donald Trump lost re-election but refused to concede and instead claimed without basis that the election was stolen from him, then pushed state officials to change their tallies, hatched a plot to name fake electors, tried to persuade the vice-president to refuse to certify Electoral College votes, sought access to voting-machine data and software, got his allies in Congress to agree to question the electoral votes and thereby shift the decision to the House of Representatives, and summoned his supporters to Washington on the day electoral votes were to be counted and urged them to march on the US Capitol, where they rioted.
"But Trump is running for re-election, despite the explicit language of... the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits anyone who has held public office and who has engaged in insurrection against the United States from ever again serving in public office.
"...What if Trump gets secretaries of state and governors who are loyal to him to alter the election machinery to ensure he wins? What if he gets them to prevent people likely to vote for Joe Biden from voting at all?
"What if he gets them to appoint electors who will vote for him regardless of the outcome of the popular vote?
"What if, despite all of this, Biden still wins the election but Trump gets more than 20% of Republican Senators and House members to object to slates of Electors pledged to Biden, and pushes the election into the House where Trump has a majority of votes?
"Trump tried these tactics once. The likelihood of him trying again is greater now because his loyalists are now in much stronger positions throughout state and federal government.
"in state after state, and in Congress, Republicans who stood up to Trump have now been purged from the party. And lawmakers in what remains of the Republican party have made it clear that they will bend or disregard any rule that gets in their way."

Write to your State's election supervisor and demand they disqualify Trump from the ballot as the Constitution requires. Sign the petitions at Free Speech for People, Inequality Media, and MoveOn.

According to Rolling Stone, one of Trump's reasons for running for President is that he's facing criminal investigations from both the Federal government and from State goverments. Trump intends to use the power of the Presidency to protect himself from prosecution.

In August 2024, Trump filmed a campaign commercial at Arlington National Cemetery. It's illegal for any candidate to campaign there. Arlington officials informed Trump and his staff of this, and were pushed aside. Though the Army declined to press charges, had former president Obama broken the law and exploited fallen American soldiers the way Trump did, Trump would have been the first to call for Obama's arrest and prosecution.

• As noted above, Mike Pence -- the chair of the so-called "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity" -- wanted to prevent innocent American citizens likely to vote against him from voting. This violates the 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments. In its first month, Pence's Commission violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, the E-Government Act, and the Privacy Act. Though the Commission has been disbanded, Pence must be impeached and removed from office. (Had former Vice President Joe Biden done this, he would have been impeached within the week.)
  Pence also obstructed justice by impeding efforts to investigate the Trump campaign's ties to Putin. Pence was also involved in the Ukraine scandal.
  
• In March 2019, Attorney General William Barr received Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Report on the 2016 Russian cyberattack. In under two days, Barr wrote a misleading four-page letter to Congress summarizing Mueller's findings. Mueller then wrote to Barr, objecting to the Attorney General's failure to "capture the context, nature, and substance" of the report. Two weeks later, Barr told Congress that he didn't know whether Mueller supported his conclusions or not. Barr committed perjury, either deliberately or through incompetence. Either way, Barr must be impeached and removed from office. (Sign the petition. Had former Attorney General Janet Reno done this, she would have been impeached within a week.)
  Barr went on to block the prosecution of at least two of Trump's friends. After the Justice Department brought charges against Trump's friend Michael Flynn, Flynn entered a plea bargain where he confessed to a minor crime to escape prosecution for major ones. Barr then dropped the case against Flynn entirely -- even though Flynn had already pleaded guilty. A few weeks later, Barr fired U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman. Mr. Berman had been investigating Trump's friend Rudy Giuliani's failure to register as a lobbyist for a foreign government.
  If Barr had worked in the Obama Administration and had dropped charges against a friend of Obama's who had already pleaded guilty, Barr would have been impeached within ten minutes. Had he fired a colleague to stop him from investigating a different friend of Obama's, Barr would have been impeached within five.
  As noted above, Barr censored the Mueller Report, not as a matter of national security, but to cover-up Trump's obstruction of justice and prevent Trump from being indicted. In doing so, Barr himself obstructed justice.
  Barr later intervened to reduce the sentence of Trump aide Roger Stone. Barr committed perjury again in 2020 when he told Congress he had no idea that Trump said he would protect Stone if Stone kept quiet. Barr knows perfectly well that Trump said that -- it was in the section of the Mueller report he redacted. Write to Congress and demand they impeach and remove Barr.
• According to The Intercept, Betsy DeVos lied to the Senate during her confirmation hearing. Under the standard established by then-Senator Jeff Sessions, DeVos must be impeached and removed from office. (Sign the petition.) DeVos later violated her own department's rules by using her personal email account to conduct government business. Though this in itself is probably not an impeachable offense, Trump and his associates have spent years condemning Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing.
  As Secretary of Education, DeVos violated a court order and was held in contempt of court. She then violated the Hatch Act. In any other Administration, she'd have been fired by now.
• Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's advisor, broke the law by using her government position to promote Ivanka Trump's business. A year later Conway violated the Hatch Act. She violated the Hatch Act four more times in the following months. She must also be impeached and removed from office.
• The Senate confirmed Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary even after he was caught lying under oath about his tenure at OneWest at his confirmation hearing. Under the standard established by then-Senator Jeff Sessions, Mnuchin must also be impeached and removed from office.
  According to CNN, Secretary Mnuchin later used his official position to promote a movie he produced, breaking the same law Conway had a few weeks earlier. If Mnuchin were serving in the Obama Administration, Congress would have impeached him the next day.
  Mnuchin later violated the Internal Revenue Code by refusing to turn over Trump's tax returns to Congress. Had Mnuchin refused to turn over Obama's tax returns, Congress would have impeached him within the week.
• According to SplinterNews, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross stole millions of dollars from his partners and lied under oath about divesting from his business and stock holdings. Later, Ross illegally added a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Had an Obama Administration official done this, he would have been impeached within the week.
  After Trump mistakenly said that hurricane Dorian was heading to Alabama, NOAA officials had to correct his mistake. Ross then threatened to fire the NOAA officials who provided accurate information to the public. Ross was angry they had told the truth -- because the facts contradicted what Trump had said.
  It would have been illegal for the NOAA officals to lie to the public. Had an Obama Administration official threatened to fire people for upholding the law, he would have been impeached later that week.
  Sign the petition calling on Ross to be impeached and removed from office.
• As noted above, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao used her office to approve transportation projects designed to help her husband, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, win re-election. No other States or elected officials received special treatment. Chao must be impeached and removed from office for ethics violations, and McConnell must be expelled from the Senate.
• According to ThinkProgress, White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino, Jr. told followers to mount a primary challenge to Congressman Justin Amash. (A fellow Republican, Amash opposed Paul Ryan's bill that would have terminated 24 million Americans' health care.) This is illegal under the Hatch Act. Scavino broke the law, and must be impeached and removed from office.
• In February 2017, FCC commissioner Michael O'Rielly also broke the Hatch Act by using his official position to tell people to vote for Trump. O'Rielly must also be impeached and removed from office.
• As noted above, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf illegally stayed in office after his term expired. He violated the Constitutional rights of innocent American citizens protesting racism. He covered up an ongoing illegal cyberattack by an enemy nation. He also violated the Hatch Act by using his official government position to campaign for Trump. He must be impeached and removed.
• During the Republican National Convention in August 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also violated the Hatch Act by using his official government position -- and taxpayer dollars -- to campaign for Trump.
• According to RawStory, Trump picked his son-in-law, millionaire Jared Kushner, to be his senior advisor. In order to gain top-secret security clearance, Kushner told the FBI -- in writing, and under penalty of perjury -- that he had not met with foreign government officials. That wasn't true. Kushner had met with Russian government officials and bankers a few months earlier. Under the standard established by then-Senator Jeff Sessions, Kushner must also be impeached and removed from office.
  Kushner was also caught trying to establish a back-channel where he could secretly consult with the Russian government without anyone else knowing about it. According to Politico, this may have been illegal. "If one knows that a secure communication line exists between U.S.-based Russian diplomatic facilities and Moscow, one certainly knows why it exists... to help Russian government officials evade U.S. surveillance capabilities. An effort on the part of an American government soon-to-be official to use a channel expressly intended to undermine the U.S. government - comes awfully close to the line of aiding and abetting the clandestine intelligence activities of a foreign power that presumably take place out of those very facilities."
  Moreover, the Intercept reported that Kushner's father Charles tried unsuccessfully to convince a Qatari government official to invest in his real estate company. A month later, Qatar and Saudi Arabia (both American allies) got in a diplomatic dispute. Jared Kushner "subsequently undermined efforts by [then-]Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff" in order to punish Qatar. Though this may not be an impeachable offense, if President Obama had a son-in-law who used his position in the United States government to punish an allied country who refused to give him a business loan, Obama would have been impeached within the month. (The Intercept also cited a Washington Post story detailing how "the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel, and Mexico... had been privately discussing how to use Jared Kushner's real-estate investments as a way to gain leverage over him in order to influence official U.S. policy.")
  Finally, Kushner and his wife -- Ivanka Trump -- used personal email accounts to conduct government business. Though this is not illegal -- so long as the emails are forwarded to a government server to be preserved -- Trump and his family have spent the last three years castigating Secretary Clinton for doing the same thing.
  Kushner must be impeached and removed from office. In any other administration, he would have been fired years ago.
• Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar did not comply with a court order instructing him to return illegally incarcerated children to their parents. Columnist Eugene Robinson points out that "The Trump administration's kidnapping... of the children of would-be migrants should be seen as an ongoing criminal conspiracy. Somebody ought to go to jail."
  Azar must also impeached and removed from office. If an Obama Administration official had failed to comply with a court order, that official would have been impeached immediately.
• According to Forbes, Trump's advisor Peter Navarro also violated the Hatch Act in order to campaign for Trump. He must also be impeached and removed from office.
• After the Trump Administration was voted out of office, the Office of Special Counsel listed thirteen former Trump Administration officials who broke the Hatch Act knowing full well what they were doing and knowing they would never face any consequences. These officials included Mark Meadows, Jared Kushner, Kayleigh McEnany, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, Robert O'Brien, Mike Pompeo, and Chad Wolf.
• Pompeo's Hatch Act violations may have only been the tip of the iceberg. According to AlterNet and the Cititizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washinton, Pompeo's "alleged misconduct included false or misleading statements to the agency's legal department, misuse of government resources on personal and political activities potentially prohibited by the Hatch Act, verbal abuse of employees by Mike and Susan Pompeo, and directives to staff not to communicate in writing in order to evade transparency laws."
• Investigators determined that Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, may have broken federal law by failing to register as an agent for a foreign government. According to Rolling Stone, "Guiliani would have been paid $300,000 or $500,000 to help [then-Ukrainian official Yuriy] Lutsenko recover money from foreign bank accounts that Lutsenko claimed was owed to Ukraine's government. Giuliani also recommended that Ukraine compensate [Giuliani associates Victoria] Toensing and [Joe] DiGenova with least $250,000 to help publicize the accusations against Biden and Burisma." Giuliani is not a government employee, but he is a member of Trump's inner circle. If the allegations are true, Giuliani must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Members of Congress must resist Trump or resign. If your representative or your Senators don't stand up to Trump, vote them out of office in favor of someone who will. See SwingLeft.org and JusticeDemocrats.com.

Impeachment and removal will not happen unless we demand it. Tell your Senators and Congressmen to stand up to Trump the same way Congress stood up to Nixon. See Indivisible: a Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda for information on how to pressure Congress. Sign the petitions at Impeach Donald Trump Now and Need to Impeach.

Legacy Links: [But Today, I Confess: Political Satire in Verse] | [Obamawatch] | [The Legacy of George W. Bush]