Impeach Now — Part 4 — Criminal. I’m going to spell out why I believe…
By: Gregory Boyce
Tags: Felix Sater, Trump Soho, Impeachment, Donald Trump

I’m going to spell out why Donald Trump needs to be impeached immediately.

Trump is a Criminal

Has Trump committed crimes in office? Yes. Just real the Mueller Report and listen to Michael Cohen’s admissions.

Has Trump committed crimes in his career? Hell yes. There is no question.

Trump used his charity as a personal piggy bank, using it to buy goods for his private business and paying off personal expenses.

Trump SoHo is another great example of a pattern of criminal behavior. Trump’s business lied to investors about the property.

Trump SoHo was a built in collaboration with Bayrock, the employer of Felix Sater. Sater worked as a Wall Street broker until his career ended when he stabbed a man in the face with a broken margarita glass.

Sater’s story is a familiar plotline in the Trump-Russia narrative: An opportunistic ex-con ingratiates himself into the Trump Organization, landing a rent-free office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, then brokers connections between the future president, Trump’s family and company, and Russian elites, eventually including the Kremlin. When the unbecoming details of Sater’s past — his secret prosecution, his ties to organized crime — come to light, the president disavows their relationship.

Sater was one of the individuals who tie Trump to Putin.

“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater famously wrote in a November 2015 email to Michael Cohen, then Trump’s personal attorney, that was first published in the New York Times. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it…I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

Separate from the question of his ties to Putin and Trump, this is a man that various parts of our government has trusted for decades. He was an informant for the FBI, CIA and other government agencies. Why did we trust him?

Trump also has a long record of intimidation and payoffs.

Now that he’s in office, does he follow the rules? No.

“The GSA Office of General Counsel recognized that the President’s business interest in the lease raised issues under the U.S. Constitution that might cause a breach of the lease, yet chose not to address those issues,” said Inspector General Carol F. Ochoa. “As a result, GSA foreclosed an opportunity for an early resolution of these issues and instead certified compliance with a lease that is under a constitutional cloud.”

Ultimately the question is if we should trust a criminal who is committing crimes to lead the country. I don’t see a way that the answer can be yes.

The only thing Ice Cube gets wrong was detailed by Mueller in his testimony.

The introduction to the Volume II of our report explains that decision. It explains that under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited. A special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider. The department’s written opinion explaining the policy makes several important points that further informed our handling of the obstruction investigation. Those points are summarized in our report, and I will describe two of them for you. First, the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president, because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now. And second, the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing. And beyond department policy, we were guided by principles of fairness. It would be unfair to potentially — it would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge. So that was Justice Department policy. Those were the principles under which we operated. And from them, we concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime. That is the office’s final position, and we will not comment on any other conclusions or hypotheticals about the president. We conducted an independent criminal investigation and reported the results to the attorney general, as required by department regulations.

The message is clear. Any charges for crimes cannot be filed until he is out of office. That means impeachment or election.

Now, Trump knows what he did. Presumably, he knows that the thing keeping him out of jail is his Presidency. That makes him desperate. That makes him even more dangerous.

Our future is in the hands of the House of Representatives. Their role is not to determine if impeachment would work, their role is to determine if impeachment is necessary. From there it goes to the Senate, who have their own responsibilities.