House Judiciary Honing In On Trump and Corruption
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | SEPTEMBER 5, 2019
“The House Judiciary Committee is shifting gears as it moves forward with its impeachment inquiry.”
The House Judiciary Committee is shifting gears as it moves forward with its impeachment inquiry.
The Committee announced it will hold hearings this fall on the hush money payments President Trump made just prior to the 2016 presidential election to keep quiet his alleged affairs with Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels years earlier.
This is the case which resulted in Michael Cohen’s plea bargain, in which President Trump was treated (although not by name) as an unindicted co-conspirator in the violation of campaign finance laws.
In originally announcing the Judiciary Committee investigation of President Trump in March 2019, the Committee listed three areas to be pursued by the Committee: obstruction of justice, abuses of power, and corruption.
In addition to the hush money case, the corruption area encompasses a number of other matters that the Committee could pursue.
These include Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits Trump from accepting financial benefits from both foreign and domestic interests without approval of Congress; other matters involving Trump’s misuse of his office for personal financial gain; and Trump’s potential corrupt misuse of the pardon power to influence the actions of others.
In pursuing these matters, the Committee has the ability to bypass Trump’s unprecedented, across-the-board stonewalling of congressional oversight of his Administration (itself a potential impeachable offense) as a number of the witnesses to be called on the corruption matters have never worked for the Trump Administration and therefore fall outside any assertion of executive privilege.
There are still some 100 House Democrats who have not indicated they support impeachment and public opinion polls still show a majority of Americans opposed to impeaching President Trump.
It remains to be seen whether the Judiciary Committee’s new focus on developing a public case on the corruption issue will move the needle on impeachment, with the Committee intending to make a decision on whether to go forward with articles of impeachment before the end of 2019.
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Fred Wertheimer is the Founder and President of Democracy 21, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen our democracy and ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections. See previous Notes from Fred here.
