Impeaching for obstruction of justice alone is like arresting someone solely for resisting arrest. You might be able to abuse a pleb like that, but that's not gonna fly when it's the president.
If you're arrested and resist that is a legitimate crime, the legitimacy of the arrest itself is irrelevant. Just so obstruction requires no underlying crime. It is a crime against justice itself
But Trump cannot obstruct an investigation into a crime that didn't occur. He must have Mens Rea, a corrupt intent but he can't have that if there was nothing to cover up?
That wouldn't be and why Clinton was impeached even though the Democrats said OOJ was not an impeachable offense let alone grounds for removal. Trump is not known to have obstructed justice.
So far I have not seen any discussion here about the role played by the speaker of the House in impeachment proceedings. Recall that under Clinton, speaker Newt Gingrich was hellbent on impeaching him because he (and other Republicans) was actually hiding his own sexual scandals. He, like so many right wing television evangelist types, accused Clinton of destroying the moral fabric of society and needed to be punished for doing so. But behind closed doors, Gingrich was doing the same and worse. Republican Dennis Hastert who followed him as speaker was even more perverted. FAR more so. Compared to Clinton, both got off virtually scot free. Today, Pelosi does not pursue a course against Trump because she personally has nothing to hide. Therefore, any impeachment movement against him is and has always been dead in the water.
Quite a few Senators are convinced the majority of their electorate are as bigoted as they are. I think they are mistaken and will find that out in 2020. Once a vociferous minority elects you it becomes very hard to eschew their support even if they are alienating you from the majority. Trump himself is in that position now, how much more his toadies.
If you intend to obstruct an investigation then the corrupt intent is against justice itself. It doesn't matter if the investigation is fruitful or not, you are not allowed to have impeded it.
What you fail to recognize is Trump is not popular in the establishment Republican party and if they saw the electorate turn against him due to real evidence of real obstruction they would gleefully throw him under the bus. All the left is attempting here is to claim they won't impeach because the Senate won't convict even with hard evidence of an impeachable offense but the truth is there is no such evidence so hiding behind the senate is a convenient out.
He is known to have been accused of everything from treason to boiling babies alive but none of it is real.
Thanks to Mueller, they're really not ambiguous at all. How many prosecutors have spoken up to say they would move to indict based on what's contained in the Mueller report so far?
If the evidence in the Mueller report is not hard evidence then there is no such thing as hard evidence but the fact of the matter is that there is plenty of evidence and Trumpers don't care. The Republican Party is truly in thrall to their worst members; a cadre of alt.right and closet Nazi nabobs who want to turn the US into an authoritarian and ethnicist Fourth Reich. We need to sweep them clean in 2020 or it is very possible we will never get another chance as they definitely do NOT believe in playing by the rules of democracy. (or really any rules at all for that matter)
So you think it's legit to come after someone when you know it's bullshit and then make up a crime after the fact? Trump may in fact be guilty of obstructing an obvious attempt to frame him. So ****ing what? Try to remove him from office for that, and you'll find yourself in a civil war. Your coup has failed, and the people responsible should just go hide before justice finds them.
Congress has ostensibly read the Mueller report and if they think theirs hard evidence of obstruction they need to present it to the American people in impeachment proceedings. Put up or shut up. **** or get off the pot.
"I'm sorry I shot these uniformed police when they came to arrest me. but the warrant was issued in error " "Well, we have to let you go then, there was no crime, our bad" Law enforcement are not psychic, they do not swoop down on crime scenes and know all the circumstances before even exiting their cars They have to investigate to find things out and anyone who impedes such an investigation is guilty of a serious felony, sometimes even worse than the offense under question. I guess it comes from watching too many crime shows, where people lie to police and then nothing happens to them because it turns out they didn't murder the guy anyway. Try lying to a cop when he asks where you were at a certain time and place just because you don't want somebody else to know one time, see what happens in real life. Trump was accused of something and then tried to fire his accuser, or their representative. That is illegal. What I (and any other person not completely addled by the sight of a grown man covered in weird orange dye) can't figure is WHY anyone who was innocent would even do such a thing in the first place. Perhaps our Trumpers can answer that.
Not a question of fruitful but whether it existed in the first place How can he have corrupt intent when the investigation will never find anything?
The corrupt intent is to impede the investigation. You can't just say, "I'm innocent, therefore I have every right to stop you from investigating me. "
I thought Trump was going to be thrown out in 90 days? #TrumpWontLast90Days In case you forgot, your friends on this forum made plenty of threads saying such
Gingrich accused him of the crimes the OIC charged him with what are you talking about? If he had been so concerned about his private life don't you think he would have tried to bury impeachment instead? Which of them committed perjury in a federal court and before a grand jury? Gingrich had a failed marriage, so what? No one knew about Hastert until long after he left office but had it been found out while he was he would have been immediately gone. Did the Democrats remove Clinton?