THREAD: The charges Democrats are leveling here are, on their face, laughably inadequate to support impeachment.
First, they claim Trump acted to "obtain an improper personal benefit, while ignoring or injuring the national interest." They aren’t charging bribery, because this doesn’t fulfill the elements of bribery: they can’t show what the bribe was, or the intent to commit such a crime.
So that means they’ve widened out the charge itself to include “ignoring or injuring the national interest,” which is far more general than the specific intent for bribery. Virtually every president could be charged with “ignoring or injuring the national interest.”
See, e.g., Barack Obama telling the Russians on hot mic that he has flexibility after the election, or Barack Obama's IRS targeting his political opponents.
The second charge, obstruction, is even more absurd. There is literally NO legal grounds for obstruction, since every subpoena legally issued has been challenged in the courts, and Democrats have refused to wait for the outcome, charging ahead anyway.
Even WaPo notes that Congress has never charged "obstruction of Congress" in the absence of "obstruction of justice," because there's another name for that: checks and balances. Only after the judiciary weighs in does obstruction of Congress become obstruction of justice.
This is empty, empty nonsense. And the Democrats know that it is. Which is why they are truly impeaching pre-emptively. They articulate clearly that if they don't impeach, Trump will steal the election.
We're now set up for a 2020 election in which both sides will claim that a result they don't like is fundamentally illegitimate: Dems will claim Trump cheated and GOP will claim Dems abused power to drive down Trump via impeachment.
The #ArticlesOfImpeachment are a joke. They are the legal analogue of a prosecutor redefining first-degree murder to include accidental death (robbing the crime of its vital intent component), and then going ahead and charging first-degree murder.
