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The Founders Would Have Called Out Trump for Bribery


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“Where are the high crimes and misdemeanors?” That’s the question opponents of impeachment keep asking as Democrats investigate President Donald Trump.

“There aren’t any high crimes and misdemeanors,” Rush Limbaugh declares. “There aren’t any impeachable offenses.”

“There are no high crimes and misdemeanors,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise insists.

That ambiguous phrase, high crimes and misdemeanors, comes from the Constitution. “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” it states.

But there is no need to debate whether Trump’s behavior with respect to Ukraine rises to the threshold of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” whatever that actually means.

Look again at the Constitution: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Bribery is at the heart of the Ukraine allegations. If the rough transcript of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president and various testimonies given to House investigators are accurate, Trump was soliciting a bribe.

 

Michael Gerhardt: The impeachment inquiry is fully legitimate

The bribe would be obvious to everyone if Trump and the people acting on his behalf had told the Ukrainians, We’ll release your military aid, but do us the favor of contributing $1 million to Trump 2020.

Instead, they pressed Ukraine for a favor as valuable to Trump 2020 as $1 million: They asked Ukraine to launch, or at least to announce, a corruption investigation into the Biden family. In return, Team Trump implied, Ukraine would get its military aid or an Oval Office meeting.

Trump asked for a favor that would benefit him politically and tied it to foreign aid. He sought a thing he valued because it would help him get reelected with the implied promise that it would change his behavior as president.

It doesn’t matter that Ukraine didn’t deliver the thing of value––mere solicitation of a bribe is verboten. Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich went to prison for soliciting money in exchange for an appointment to the U.S. Senate. It didn’t matter that he never got paid. The recording of his request was enough.

 

The bribery charge sticks to Trump whether one looks to federal law or to the understanding of bribery in the era of the Framers.

Aaron Blake reports on current law at The Washington Post:

The federal bribery statute says someone has committed bribery if he or she is a “public official” who “directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally … in return for … being influenced in the performance of any official act.” The argument here would be that Trump sought politically helpful investigations from Ukraine in exchange for releasing military aid and/or granting a much-sought Oval Office meeting for its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. To date, six officials have said there was some kind of quid pro quo there.

As for bribery as the Framers understood it, a trio of attorneys writing at Lawfare quote 18th- and early-19th-century legal treatises to show that the constitutional understanding was even broader than what federal law now prohibits––put simply, bribery was “understood as an officeholder’s abuse of the power of an office to obtain a private benefit rather than for the public interest.”

 

They go on to explain:

The understanding of bribery at the Founding maps perfectly onto Trump’s conduct in his call with Zelensky. As noted above, Trump made clear to Zelensky that he was asking him for a “favor”—not a favor to benefit the United States as a whole or the public interest, but a favor that would accrue to the personal benefit of Trump by harming his political rival. Trump’s request that Zelensky work with his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, underscores that Trump was seeking a private benefit. And Trump was not seeking this “undue reward” (to quote “Russell on Crimes” and the Delaware statute) as a mere aside unrelated to the president’s official role. Rather, he did so in the course of an official diplomatic conversation with a head-of-state.

In fact, Rudy Giuliani has since stated, “The investigation I conducted concerning 2016 Ukrainian collusion and corruption, was done solely as a defense attorney to defend my client against false charges, that kept changing as one after another were disproven,” characterizing his own actions as something not done to benefit the American people, but done “solely” to benefit Trump.

Frank O. Bowman III: The common misconception about “high crimes and misdemeanors”

The Lawfare authors continue:

The transcript makes clear that Trump tied together the request for a personal favor with the delivery of military aid. But even if he had not made such a direct connection, this sort of corrupt use of public office to obtain a private benefit fits squarely within the definition of bribery when the Constitution was written.

Moreover, given the specifics of the allegations against President Trump, it is noteworthy that nothing worried the Founders more than the possibility that the president would be corrupted by a foreign power. As Gouverneur Morris said about impeachment during the Constitutional Convention, “[The President] may be bribed by a greater interest to betray his trust; and no one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay without being able to guard [against] it by displacing him.”

In reference to other Trump scandals, a debate about what constitutes “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” may be necessary. But on the Ukraine matter, that debate doesn’t matter. What matters is whether Trump is guilty of “Bribery” as it is used in the Constitution. It would appear that he is.

This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/impeachment-bribery/601591/?utm_medium=offsite&utm_source=yahoo&utm_campaign=yahoo-non-hosted&yptr=yahoo

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those founding fathers are now part of the Deep State Coup...

B/A

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Just in case you think I'm saying you're Demonic controlled!!

I DON'T

 

Parataxic distortion

 is a psychiatric term first used by Harry S. Sullivan to describe the inclination to skew perceptions of others based on fantasy. The "distortion" is a faulty perception of others, based not on actual experience with the other individual, but on a projected fantasy personality attributed to the individual.

For example, when one falls in love, an image of another person as the “perfect match” or “soul mate” can be created when in reality, the other person may not live up to these expectations or embody the imagined traits at all.

The fantasy personality is created in part from past experiences and from expectations as to how the person 'should be', and is formulated

in response to emotional stress.

This stress can originate from the formation of a new relationship, or from cognitive dissonance required to maintain an existing relationship.

Parataxic distortion serves as an immature cognitive defense mechanism 

against this psychological stress and is similar to Transference.

Parataxic distortion is difficult to avoid because of the nature of human learning and interaction. Stereotyping of individuals based on social cues and the classification of people into groups is a commonplace cognitive function of the human mind. Such pigeonholing allows for a person to gain a quick, though possibly inaccurate, assessment of an interaction.

The cognitive processes employed, however, can have a distorting effect on the clear understanding of individuals.

In essence, one can lose the ability to

'hear the other'

through one's own projected beliefs of what the other person is saying

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1 minute ago, bostonangler said:

So now you are against the Constitution and the Founding Father? Read it the law, it is spelled out right there in-front of you. Unless you just choose to live in denial, there is no question Trump is a criminal by definition...

 

B/A

I made no comment about the constitution or Trump. 

I suggest you read the post above. 

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Wait, I thought Pehosi and Schifty Schiff didn't need a quid pro quo just the quid. Bribery is just another term for quid pro quo. The demonrats just changed the terminology for low info voters to coincide with the Articles in the Constitution. Another sham fantasy by the demonrats. Shifty Shiff for brains has a new nickname... Squidward.

Edited by Theseus
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What ever you do don't let the Delusional Left get a hold of this or somehow they will turn this opinion into and Impeachable Offense, High Crimes and some how treason.

 

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Newshound Guru Jeff   Don’t forget I have strongly suggested to you that Donald Trump is definitely in charge of all this…It’s the US government that actually poured trillions of dollars into the country of Iraq and the US is the one that shed blood for Iraq.  So really the U.S. is in charge not so much the IMF and World Bank.  They may have a little say but not on timing. IMO the timing of this is all dictated and directed by the Trump Administration and I will promise you that he’s gonna use the timing of the rate change to benefit his political gainseven to eight months before the US November elections…it’s all unfolding right before your eyes.

 

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Karsten

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