Impeachment Finally Looks Inevitable!! But Conviction Would Still Take a Miracle (Although Strange Things Can Happen in DC)!

Who would have thought that a whistleblower report from within the administration primarily about a phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president would form the cornerstone of a rapidly building impeachment case over presidential abuse of power and seeking dirt on a political rival from a foreign government? And yet here we are, with new revelations almost daily about the actually months long but previously mostly under the radar Ukraine scandal, at the heart of which sits (and scurries around) crazy Rudy Giuliani. The White House must really regret their public release of the so-called transcript of that call, which Trump still claims was perfect(!!) but which any rational person, including multiple White House officials who heard the call and saw the transcript, would realize is a highly alarming smoking gun for presidential abuse of power! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Trump in typical fashion publicly defended his requests to the Ukrainian president and his simultaneous withholding of almost $400 million of vital military aid to Ukraine with a variety of changing rationales, even saying that China should investigate the Bidens in the process! Since then, the administration including the State Department, which is involved up to its neck in this mess, has resumed its nearly complete stonewalling of House investigations into this and related scandals, although House subpoenas for witness testimony now seem to be making headway, such as with former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovich (who was sacked under pressure from Trump apparently due to her refusal to go along with Giuliani and other corruption schemes) who testified despite State Department attempts to block that. It seems that crazy Rudy may have been the root cause of all of this, digging up and promoting baseless conspiracy theories about Ukrainian involvement in 2016 election meddling on behalf of the Democrats, which Trump would obviously give his right arm to be able to prove, as well as additional baseless conspiracy theories about Biden and his son, which would also be golden for Trump. Now with the indictment and arrest for campaign finance law violation of two foreign associates of Giuliani as they were about to fly out of the country on one way tickets the same day they had lunch with Giuliani, it is reported that Rudy himself is under SDNY investigation for lobbying law violation, and could also face indictment. And if those two foreigners end up flipping, we could find out a whole lot more incriminating information about Giuliani’s activities, some of which could lead back to Trump. It is highly predictable that Trump will start distancing himself from his lawyer-cum-political fixer a la Michael Cohen, which will be fun to watch. It will also be fun to watch Giuliani hysterically trying to publicly talk himself out of this mess. And will there ever come a time when Giuliani turns on Trump a la Michael Cohen?

With increasing public support for impeachment and even a Fox News poll now showing 51% of voters (of course mostly Democrats and independents) favoring impeachment AND conviction, impeachment in the House now seems inevitable, although it could still be a number of months away depending on how much more investigating the Democrats want to do before moving ahead. I still think they should include more rather than less in the articles of impeachment, including obstruction of justice from the Mueller report and obstruction of Congress to the greatest extent possible, despite those all being more confusing to the average voter, since it is the Senate, not the average voter that will be voting on conviction, and they can concentrate on Ukrainegate for public support. Although most House and Senate Republicans shamefully continue to be either silent or publicly supportive of Trump in this matter in view of Trump’s continued rock solid base support, there seems to be a growing discomfort with this whole situation, compounded by widespread anger over Trump’s recent disastrous impulsive decision to remove a small number of US troops and thereby allow Turkey to invade northern Syria and attack our Kurdish allies. I have to wonder whether a significant number of Republican senators are not quietly discussing whether they (as well as the country) would all be better off with Trump booted out of the White House, in which case he would be a much less influential and politically threatening force to deal with, and could very well end up getting indicted himself. Of course, they would still need to deal with the wrath of their constituents, but only some of them will be up for reelection in 2020, and voters have relatively short memories. The spectacle of many Republican senators doing a hypocritical 180° flip from their slavish Trump support would be quite something to behold! Unfortunately, at this point that scenario still looks extremely unlikely!

One interesting scenario to contemplate is if Trump either loses the next election or sees that he will be convicted in the Senate, he might decide to resign and get Pence to blanket pardon him a la Nixon/Ford, although whether Pence would agree to that is debatable.