Yep, this is the stuff you go to prison for
For awhile now, the question hasn’t been whether Donald Trump will be ousted from office, as that’s become abundantly clear. The only real questions have been when and how he’ll be ousted. Although not everyone has agreed with me, I’ve felt for awhile that Trump will end up going to prison after he’s ousted, though not everyone who reads Palmer Report has agreed with that prediction. After yesterday’s bombshells, I think it’s safe to say that the odds of Trump going to prison just went way, way up.
It’s difficult to pin down precisely where the threshold is for a U.S. President going to prison, because he’s never happened before. Bill Clinton didn’t go to prison when he technically committed perjury and obstruction of justice, because in reality he was only lying about his sex life, and it was ultimately deemed harmless by most of the public. George W Bush didn’t go to prison for war crimes in Iraq, even though he should have, because there’s just no precedent for criminally trying a president whose policies happen to include crimes. Richard Nixon would have gone to prison for Watergate if he hadn’t been pardoned. Because Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy extends to state level crimes, federal pardons can’t save him.
Nixon was unique in that he committed crimes for the sole purpose of trying to alter the outcome of an election, and then he committed additional crimes while trying to cover it up. These weren’t policy crimes by a politician gone off the rails. Nixon was going around ordering burglaries. These are the kinds of crimes that average Americans commit, and go to prison for. Burglary is a clearly understood precedent. So is being on the take.
Donald Trump has committed the most severe crime in United States history when he conspired with the Russian government to rig the election in his favor; it was everything Nixon did, plus treason. But it’s also been a difficult crime for the average person to understand, because it’s so complex. It’s been a long battle to prove that most of Trump’s top campaign staffers were working for Russia the entire time. Even then, without a tape of Trump and Putin plotting out how they were going to rig it all, even the legal proof of Trump’s guilt may not be clearly understandable in the court of public opinion.
So it’s a big deal that since Donald Trump took office, his fixer Michael Cohen has been on the take on Trump’s behalf. Michael Avenatti published evidence that Cohen was taking money from the Kremlin, which controls Trump, and from AT&T, which now admits it was trying to gain influence over Trump. This is the equivalent of a security guard taking a payoff from thief who needs access to a vault. It’s a clearly understood crime. It’s the kind of thing people go to prison for. It’s the kind of thing Donald Trump will go to prison for.
