THE MANY, MANY MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP'S IMPEACHMENT, AND HIS POSSIBLE CONVICTION AND REMOVAL FROM OFFICE [updated]

Only four US presidents have even faced an impeachment inquiry: Andrew Johnson in the 1800s, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton in the 1900s, and Donald Trump in 2019.

Three of them, Republican Johnson and Democrat Clinton, were like Republican President Trump today, impeached. Johnson and Clinton chose not to resign, and were not convicted or removed from office.  Republican Nixon -- accused of defying subpoenas, obstructing justice and misusing presidential power for personal gain  precisely as President Trump now is -- was warned by ranking House and Senate Republicans that even they were about to vote for his impeachment and conviction and that he would certainly be removed from office. Nixon resigned before that could happen. 

Therefore, should President Trump who was just impeached. choose not to resign, and subsequently be convicted and removed from office, he would be the first in US history. It's unlikely. It's not impossible.

When Donald J Trump called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019, was Trump unveiling corrupt acts by a US senator and his family or was Trump himself committing a corrupt act and endangering an ally for personal gain, or both? Was he abusing power? If the answer is yes, is that part of a pattern? If so, is the pattern worthy of removal from office? Was his refusal to let anyone in his administration answer Congressional subpoenas both illegal and both as an obstruction of justice and a violation of the separation of powers unconstitutional? Is it an impeachable offense? [Nixon was impeached on this charge.] How will that be decided? What could happen next? 

Only Congress and the Supreme Court, the two branches of government Constitutionally equal to the US Presidency, can officially answer those questions. Yet the US public, especially Independent voters, will play a huge part -- and it better be an informed one. 

What look like tricks to Trump supporters are often simply the Constitutional process; but what passes for the process can sometimes be a trick. There are four stages of this, each misunderstood.The truth about those stages heads a short but surprising list of confusions that need to be cleared up if the public is to make sense of this. The stages of impeachment and removal are:

1) House of Representatives inquiry, which has concluded. in this phase, a House committee examined witnesses and evidence. The inquiry was authorized by a House vote that split precisely along party lines, but the US House then formed the bipartisan committee of both Democrats and Republicans.

This impeachment inquiry was not a trial. Exactly like a grand jury, after hearing the initial evidence, the full House will decide whether the statements of the witnesses and material evidence are sufficient to merit a trial. 

Witnesses for Trump were not there for two reasons. First, they never are. Like a grand jury, the House was simply trying to determine if there was enough evidence that a trial should be held. Secondly, Republicans complained so much about the process that President Trump was invited to provide witnesses in his behalf, and/or to attend. He refused to do either.

Like a grand jury, an House impeachment committee may legally operate behind closed doors. Grand juries always do. However, after a concerted protest by those Republicans who were not on the bipartisan committee, the committee began publishing transcripts of previous witness testimony and went into world-televised hearings, for two weeks until Thanksgiving. 

Then the full House voted, again, entirely along partisan lines. On December 18, 2019, President Donald Trump was impeached....

2) By itself, impeachment carries no penalties. An impeachment by the House is like a grand jury's indictment.  However, impeachment, like a grand jury indictment, triggers a trial, in this case,

3) a Senate trial. Even the staggeringly powerful Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) cannot block or slow a trial from happening once an impeachment has been handed down. Although McConnell, who is about to take an oath to be an impartial juror, says that he'll do everything the president tells him to do, McConnell will not preside.   

Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court will run the Senate trial. President Trump will appear and his lawyers will examine all witnesses. New witnesses and pieces of evidence in addition to those surfacing in the inquiry could be called by either side. If the Senate votes to exonerate President Trump, the process will end there. If the trial results in a conviction, that would trigger....

4) removal from office, handing the US presidency from Republican Donald Trump to Republican Vice President Mike Pence. 

The US media believed that President Trump would be impeached by the House [he has been] but would not resign because Trump believes that the Senate will not remove him from office. The media believes this too because the House is dominated by the Democratic Party (82% of their voters are in favor of impeachment) and the Senate is dominated by the Republican Party (89.3% of their voters are against impeachment). Actually it's not that simple. As you'll see, there are many other forces at work.... 

PARTIES ARE NOT AS TOUGH AS THEY LOOK

Impeachment and conviction were intended by the founding fathers to be a political not a court process, with voters' opinions weighing in the balance. Most members of the House and Senate are facing re-election in 2020, so one deciding factor will be public opinion -- as the founding fathers intended. 

Political parties, which are not part of the Constitution, have intruded. The parties are private political clubs which US president George Washington warned should never be allowed to take on permanent structure, but in fact have gotten a stranglehold on the US electoral process. 

US voters are quite unhappy with that stranglehold. As voters have left both the Democratic and Republican parties, those "majority" parties have dwindled to minority status, each having about 25% of registered voters. Almost 50% of US voters are now registered Independent, which is not a party but a declaration of nonpartisan status. Because parties have grabbed the right to decide whom we choose between, Independents do sometimes briefly register Democratic or Republican for primaries, but only to support specific candidates -- not because they support the party. 

Full disclosure, I am an Independent. 

As almost half the population, Independents are important in the question of impeachment and removal precisely because they're not partyliners. Republicans are 90% against impeachment, Democrats are 82% for it (another 10% want to get rid of Trump but through the 2020 elections). Independents are watching. In mid-November, 2019, according to 538 Blog's aggregate of polls, 51% of Independents were in favor of having an impeachment inquiry, 47.5% were in favor of impeachment (indictment) and 47.2% favored trial, conviction and removal. One clue to what's happening will therefore be how those usually overlooked Independent numbers change in future polls. Right now, 12/19/2019,  with impeachment already in play, Independent support for removal is falling slightly.

THE STREETS

Protests also affect politicians who face election. As the full house impeachment debate began, the streets of every big US city and many rural towns filled with pro-impeachment rallies. (Duluth Minnesota held big pro-Trump rallies.) That night the streets filled with proTrump protests.

WHAT IS PRESIDENT TRUMP ACCUSED OF DOING?

In the late 1700s, when the Constitutional guidelines were set down, the founding fathers were quite worried that a US president might secretly use his official power for personal advantage, especially in making deals with foreign powers. The US was a weak, developing nation. Modern US presidents wield the money, military might and political power of the most toweringly dominant nation in human history.Therefore the concern about US presidents using their power for personal gain, against the best interests of the United States, in dealings with foreign powers not only persists; it has increased.

Ukraine is a US ally, a developing country with the largest landmass in Europe, under violent attack. The vastly larger and more powerful Russia, which straddles Europe and Asia, has already seized part of the Ukraine and is trying to conquer the rest. Ukraine, its society destabilized, has a huge corruption problem, arguably the worst in the world. President Volodymyr Zelensky was recently elected to end the war and clean up the corruption.

A very sympathetic US Congress, on a bipartisan basis voted to send military aid to Ukraine and funded it. Unquestionably, President Trump blocked the military aid to Ukraine which had been ordered and funded by Congress, and Trump did so secretly, without telling Congress. Although his office officially released the military aid on the day the blockage was discovered by Congress, as of 12/18/2019, the day of his impeachment, that military aid has still not reached Ukraine. 

President Donald Trump is thus accused not only of using US might for personal ends, but of in the process of withholding military aid -- voted by the US Congress for Ukraine, which is being invaded by Russia -- in order to force a foreign president to help him in his 2020 political campaign. That would be a violation of the emoluments clause and would also be a violation of the separation of powers. 

Then, the accusation goes, he used his presidential power to obstruct investigation of his deeds by telling his administration members to ignore Congressional subpoenas -- and thus both obstructed justice and again overrode the separation of powers, giving himself dictatorial power.

What justified secretly giving Russia an additional advantage in the already lopsided war and endangering a US ally? The Trump argument is that Ukraine was corrupt, but Congress knew that going in. Reportedly, President Trump, in early 2919 insisted through private channels (led by his lawyer, ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani who was in Ukraine) and more recently through more official channels (like US ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland) that Ukraine had to investigate former Vice President Joseph Biden's son Hunter. 

Hunter was earning an exceptionally high salary as a board member of a Ukrainian corporation, without any skill in the industry involved. Making hay out of a relative's high political office, as Hunter unquestionably does, is a glaring problem in the US, not only with congressional offspring making world business deals but with presidential relatives holding high security clearances and offices without previously earning such positions. It is not illegal.

Trump's forces however allege that Hunter's father Joe Biden, while US vice president under President Obama, had used his office to oust Victor Shokin, whom Trump calls a "a tough-on-crime Ukrainian attorney general" in order "to protect Hunter". Vice president Biden indeed used the might of the US government to force out Shokin-- but because Shokin was not prosecuting political corruption. That prosecutor general was in fact so crooked that the international business community was up in arms. 

Still, Joe Biden is a US senator and as noted was at the time US vice president. Had he done anything politically for that corporation, the amount that it paid Hunter could be construed as an attempted bribe. Yet there is so far no known evidence that Biden did anything in return. 

[Rumors do abound. The same sort of questions are raised when Saudi sheikhs rent two floors of a Trump hotel but don't stay in them. There's an article out right now alleging that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner in a phone call with the head of Saudi Arabia, greenlighted the arrest of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally murdered, and that Turkey has the recording -- which Turkey's President Erdogan used to blackmail Trump into withdrawing from Syria. All such rumors are just air until there's proof. Giuliani has so far come up dry.]

Even if the evidence somewhere exists, should Trump have withheld military aid from an ally in order to get to that information on his at the time most probable opponent in 2020?

In whose interest? President Trump's allies point out that the US strong-arms other countries all the time. (Democrats profess to be horrorstruck at the statement but of course they know it's true.) To get rid of the corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor, for  example, Biden withheld US aid money. That however was because the international business community was clamoring for it. The cutting edge here was thus not whether Trump was twisting arms but whether he was twisting arms with all the might of the US government in pursuit of US interests or in pursuit of his own personal interests.

In the part of the call made public, President Trump repeatedly praises Shokin, the flagrantly corrupt prosecutor general whom Biden forced out of office, says that's "the kind of guy we want", and at length Trump dissed the former US Ambassador Masha Yovanovitch, who had helped Biden depose the corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor general. 

Trump in the call also mentions "Cloudstrike", which refers to President Trump's contention that Ukraine not Russia hacked the 2016 US election and hacked the Clinton/Podesta/ DNC computers. The president is convinced that Ukraine "still has the computer" though some argue that the computer is arguably not needed forensically.