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There should be no illusions about the difficulty of impeaching this president. He has built a cult of personality among his supporters, who dwell in an alternative reality where the president’s critics are the ones truly guilty of the offenses of which Trump has been accused. He retains the support of conservative media outlets, who provide a steady drumbeat of fawning praise and conspiratorial disinformation. And Republican legislators who once excoriated the president for his politics, his racism, and his personal conduct have bound their fate to his.
But there should also be no illusions about what the weight of evidence against Trump says: The president is a crook.
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There’s also:
Obstruction of justice and perjury are crimes that turn on state of mind, but the details in the BuzzFeed News report would leave Trump with few defenses. “If President Trump instructed Michael Cohen to testify to Congress, giving an account of the Russia project that Trump knew to be false, that’s obstruction of justice,” said Bruce Green, a law professor at Fordham and a former associate counsel in the Iran-Contra investigation. “It’s hard to imagine that Trump would have had an innocent ‘state of mind.’ The only viable legal defense would be ‘It didn’t happen.’”
Well, another legal defense would be “incompetent to stand trial,” but that would just lead to removal through 25th Amendment proceedings rather than impeachment.
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There’s still Pence to deal with too. Trump for Pence is not an improvement.
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If Pence isn’t implicated, I think much of Trump’s base would look on him as an usurper of Trump’s divinely-appointed… presidency.
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Fingers crossed that there’s been so much law breaking willy-nilly, that Pence has been implicated as well and goes down with the rest of the sinking ship.
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I hate to be a downer here, but next after Pence in the Presidential order of succession is Pelosi, and there’s no way that the Republican-held Senate is going to convict both Trump and Pence, if it means Pelosi gets the job. Trump alone, maybe. But not both.
There might be a remote possibility of convicting Trump, having him nominate a decent Republican as VP, and have that person confirmed by both House and Senate, and then have Pence impeached and the new guy assume the Presidency… but that seems like a huge stretch.
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Remember, Pence was involved in the transition team. I think Manafort recommended Pence and Pence recommended Flynn???
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I’m not saying that Pence isn’t just as guilty as Trump.
I’m saying that between a successful vote to impeach and convict Trump, and the vote to confirm a new Vice President, Pence could be caught on camera robbing a bank, confess to it on Fox News, and brag that he was going to do it again next week, and the Senate would still refuse to convict him, since Pelosi would be the next officer in the presidential succession.
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Pence is evil. He’s not a genius (his nickname was “Mike Dense”) but he can spell “coffee” and “hamburger” and “tap.” He can probably refrain from Adderall-fueled Twitter rants, repeating every Fox News talking point, keeping the federal government hostage over a stupid symbolic wall, publicly using racist nicknames for other politicians, publicly leching on his own blood relatives, singing the praises of dictators, referring to Nazis as “very fine people” and so on. And I seriously doubt that in the < 2 years he’d have left, he would get much past the House.
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Oh, I don’t expect Repubs to convict Pence; I know they’d likely rather die than see Pelosi take office.
I hope he’s compromised to the point that it hamstrings him worse than Gerald Ford was after Nixon resigned and he gets even less accomplished before the next incoming admin kicks him to the curb.
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Why can’t we crack the problem of rich, lying, bigots who advocate against the rest of us just making a living? Having a life. This is not new, but it’s also getting old.
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You’re preaching to the choir, yo.
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I know. 
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What do you bet this whole deal was orchestrated by the WH to make the MSM look bad, like the Dan Rather business.
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That would represent a level of strategy I’ve seen no evidence of at the WH.
Far more likely, it seems to me, that SDNY let some stuff slip and SCO had to point out some parts were right, so parts were wrong (but they can’t say which is which because reasons).
My $0.02
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Maybe the Pence transition team is laying chalklines.
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Now if only the Washington Post would do the same.
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