According to a report released on Wednesday in the Washington Post, Donald Trump is seriously discussing the possibility of his own impeachment with his legal team in recent days and weeks, and sources inside the White House attribute the discussion to the very real possibility of a Democratic sweep of the 2018 midterm elections.
President Trump has been considering the addition of the attorney who currently represents his son-in-law Jared Kushner — Abbe Lowell — to his own legal team soon. Lowell is a high-profile criminal attorney that had many wondering why he wasn’t on the President’s legal team already.
Trump’s aides inside the West Wing as well as departing White House counsel Don McGahn have repeatedly raised the specter of impeachment, according to the Post, in order to try and convince the President to dial back his rhetoric and perhaps rein in some of his social media excesses and tendencies to simply act without weighing potential outcomes. Some even say that the President is “isolated,” preferring to spend his time watching television — presumably scanning the news for stories that are favorable before tweeting quotes from the conservative pundits he sees on the screen.
The lawyer who took over from John Dowd in April, Rudy Giuliani, was intended to be the legal superpower that Donald Trump needed on his team: A communicator with experience in “making deals” legally, as far as negotiating the terms of interviews, depositions, and the like. Giuliani quickly dispelled the image of himself as a legal powerhouse when he inadvertently admitted during a live television interview that his client had reimbursed his former lawyer for “hush money” payments to a former nude model and an adult film actress — a claim that Trump had up until that point denied.
Giuliani told the Post that he and Trump have “talked a lot about impeachment at different times,” and noted [his opinion] that “they can’t charge him.”
That’s not necessarily the case. While there has been a lot of talk that a sitting President can’t be indicted, that’s technically never been decided by the Supreme Court — generally, there is simply deference to the legal guidance from the Watergate era.
We are long past Watergate, however, according to most legal scholars and in fact, the lawyers who were involved in Watergate.
Despite all of this effort by his staff, however, to mitigate the President’s behavior with carefully-timed releases of distracting information and ominous warnings to the Commander in Chief that Democrats would likely storm Congress in a sweeping power shift, triggering not just the potential for impeachment but Congressional hearings that might make the Devin Nunes media circus look tame, the Post report notes a stunning lack of one thing in particular from Trump: A plan to deal with any of it.
An anger backed by fear, sources say, is triggered in Trump when someone mentions “the i-word.” But for now, this sophomore President isn’t even studying for the midterms.
Featured image via screen capture
