The Russian investigation in the US — Who stands to gain? Who will feel the pain?

Dec 18, 2018 Letters

---

 

DEAR EDITOR,

A nation on an investigation waits to determine a president’s fate. The lingering question on everyone’s mind is——Are we seeing the end of Donald Trump’s presidency?
As the Russian investigation continues to play out on the US center stage, two recent bombshells caused the nation to pay further attention.
Two memoranda – one from the Department of Justice prosecutors with the Southern District of New York, and another from the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller – were released by federal prosecutors on Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer.
The said documents, it is alleged, make the case against Trump much clearer than ever before, and while their original intent is to guide Cohen’s sentencing, they carry much more weight.
A straightforward time line is visible via Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s seven-page memorandum, and court documents form Cohen’s guilty plea last week. Additionally Robert Mueller’s office issued a document saying Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had lied to prosecutors even after agreeing to cooperate.
These documents certainly served as fuel to the pyre of the administration-watchers hoping to see the death of the Trump administration. However, short thought, it is still an extremely long way from these documents to president Trump’s door, and be warned that the journey is fraught with peril for all involved.
The risk to the president is blatantly clear—that prosecutors will link him to offenses grave enough to warrant impeachment, and that the Democrats who will take control of the House in January will quickly oblige.
Should Trump manage to hang on to enough Republican votes in the Senate to avert impeachment, nevertheless, the process in itself is likely to be somewhat humiliating. By the same token, impeachment would also be high risk for Senate Republicans.
The Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mc Connell is adept at wielding Senate procedure to protect his caucus from hard votes. However, if the House chooses to impeach the President, then the Senate majority Leader cannot simply refuse to conduct a trial. Plainly stated, if Trump is impeached, each Republican senator would essentially have to justify either voting to remove a president still popular with much of the Republican base, or endorsing whatever transgression had put him in the dock.
Chickens do come home to roost, even in the fullness of time, and what goes around also comes around. For example, Republican Senator for South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, would have to deal with his inner demons and the ghost of comments past—advocating two decades ago for the impeachment of the then President Bill Clinton.
Others will also be affected, particularly the nation’s suburbs, where voters have been swinging more firmly toward Democrats with every obnoxious @realDonaldTrump tweet; they would probably react badly to any offense that plausibly spurred the president’s impeachment.
Few Republican senators would want to anger those voters by upholding the president’s behavior. Again they would be equally averse to anger Trump’s rural and exurban base by throwing the president to the wolves.
The greatest danger may be the one with which the Democrats have to contend—that the investigations end up with not sufficient evidence to justify impeachment, and the Democrats nonetheless go ahead and impeach Trump anyway.
Should Mueller’s special investigation conclude without a direct and determinative link between President Trump and Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, the Democratic base would still cry out to impeach him regarding the campaign finance violations that prosecutors have connected to the hush-money payments. Should the activists cry out loud enough, impeachment may well take place, basically because no one in the Democratic caucus wants to be the one who breaks the bad news to them.
It is at this juncture that the shoes get changed and Jason of Beverly Hills is replaced by Florsheim, with each team taking the other side of the field. The Democrats would have their own Lindsey Graham problems — Charles Schumer, Democrat, New York – and Nancy Pelosi, Democrat – California, trying to explain why Trump’s behavior is worse than a president having sex with a 22-year-old White House intern and then concealing the affair with a spot of perjury. If the push for impeachment is about the legal violations involved in concealing some sexual impropriety instead of Russia’s interference in the elections , it will probably backfire, in the selfsame manner that the Clinton impeachment blew up for Republicans.
What the Democrats can do is reverently articulate that they are disquieted about campaign finance, and not sexual misconduct, but in the public square the debate will be over the sex. And while #MeTooMovement may have changed the calculus in Washington, there still remain millions of less politically engaged voters across the country who do not necessarily thrill to the call of identity politics, or are desirous of having Congress embark on a forensic investigation of the president’s sexual history.
Should this be where this all ends up? Sad to state, but the Democrats are likely to end up regretting it.
Arguably, there’s a lot of “ifs” all strung in a row. Unfortunately, none of them can be resolved until Mueller speaks, and reveals the extent of the possible allegations. Although the nation is not hoping for that —yet The Democrats may fall flat
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. One thing is absolutely certain as tomorrow follows yesterday, is that in the annals of American history, 2019 will take pride of place as being one of the more tumultuous and repulsive entries.

Y. Sam

---

---