Kitabı oku: «The Case for Impeachment», sayfa 5

THE ROAD TO IMPEACHMENT

Nixon’s first political campaign, a successful run for Congress in 1946, would mirror in many ways Trump’s first campaign—for president of the United States. Fighting for average Jane and John Doe against a corrupt and even treasonous Washington establishment, Nixon campaigned as the outsider. He exploited voter fear and resentment by smearing his opponent Jerry Voorhis, a middle-of-the road Democrat, as a Communist sympathizer.²⁸

Nixon rode his anti-Communism all the way to a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1950, defeating former movie star Helen Gahagan Douglas, who he branded as a Communist sympathizer. He distributed literature, printed in black ink on pink paper, with the dark warning that Douglas voted in lockstep with the socialist member of Congress Vito Marcantonio. Douglas forever became known as the “Pink Lady,” but Nixon couldn’t shake the name she had plastered on him: “Tricky Dick Nixon.”²⁹

Right-wing extremists rallied to Nixon’s cause. Gerald L. K. Smith, the notorious anti-Semite, exhorted voters to reject a woman “who sleeps with a Jew,” a reference to the fact that her husband, Melvyn Douglas, had a Jewish father and a Christian mother. Nixon repudiated Smith’s support, but the damage was done.³⁰

In 2016, the outpouring of support for Donald Trump by anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists far exceeded what Nixon experienced. For these extremists, the advent of Trump has “been an awakening,” in the words of Richard B. Spencer, who some journalists credit with coining the term “alt-right” to describe his movement. Like Nixon, Trump belatedly and tepidly rejected such support, but he openly courted it by appointing Steve Bannon as his campaign manager and then his chief White House strategist.³¹

As the CEO of Breitbart News, Bannon bragged that “We’re the platform for the alt-right.” Under his watch, Breitbart belittled conservative editor Bill Kristol, as a “Renegade Jew.” It warned that “Political Correctness Protects Muslim Rape Culture.” It smeared the NAACP, saying, “NAACP Joins Soros Army Planning DC Disruptions, Civil Disobedience, Mass Arrests,” and glorified the Confederacy saying, “Hoist It High and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage.” It equated feminism with “cancer,” and warned of a “Dangerous Faggot Tour” coming to college campuses.³²

In 1952, after Eisenhower tapped him for the second spot on his presidential ticket, the press reported that Nixon’s business backers had set up a secret slush fund for him. “Tricky Dick” defused the scandal and demonstrated his mastery of showmanship and the media by delivering a brilliant televised speech that rather framed himself as a humble, uncorrupted man of still-modest means. The clincher came when Nixon admitted to receiving one gift, his little dog, Checkers. With this so-called “Checkers speech,” the most-watched television event to date, Nixon pulled off his first political comeback and saved his place on Eisenhower’s ticket. Donald Trump would later prove to be Nixon’s equal and even his superior in exploiting free media.³³

In 1960, Nixon easily won the Republican nomination for president, but lost narrowly to his former House colleague John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s narrow margins of victory in Illinois and Texas prompted Republicans to challenge the vote count in court despite an official disavowal from Nixon, who refused to disparage American democracy and was already planning his next political resurrection. Nevertheless, GOP Representative from Minnesota and former missionary Walter Judd preached a sermon on voter fraud that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s cry against the same more than a half century later: “A party can still lose an election if it is not sufficiently alert and tough in policing registrations and voting booths and counting procedures to make certain that only legitimate votes are cast and all votes legitimately cast are honestly counted.”³⁴

After losing the presidency in 1960, Nixon lost again two years later when he ran for governor of California. In his post-election press conference, Nixon delivered a 15-minute self-absorbed, Trump-style harangue against his enemies in the press, whom he blamed for his loss. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference,” he said before walking away.³⁵

Yet the resilient Nixon won another presidential nomination in 1968, when Michigan Governor George Romney, his closest rival, and the father of Mitt, wrecked his campaign by attributing earlier support for the War in Vietnam to “brainwashing” by American generals and diplomats. In his winning general election campaign, Nixon returned to the attack strategies that had served him well in his earlier campaigns for the U.S. House and Senate. Through his surrogate, vice presidential nominee Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland, he smeared his Democratic opponent Vice President Hubert Humphrey as “soft on inflation, soft on Communism, and soft on law and order.” Agnew belittled anti-war demonstrators as “spoiled brats” who “take their tactics from Castro and their money from Daddy.” Reprising the success of his “Checkers” speech Nixon expertly played the press, gaining wide-spread coverage often in carefully staged settings of his own choosing.³⁶

Trump too is a creation of the media. He expertly played the media in his campaign as a show they could not ignore. According to a study by mediaQuant, in the year before the election, Trump received some $5 billion in free media coverage, compared to $3.2 billion for Hillary Clinton, an extraordinary edge of $1.8 billion.³⁷

Once elected, Nixon’s paranoia, his obsession with secrecy and control, and his penchant for punishing enemies guided the organization of his administration. He ran his presidency through the National Security Council (NSC) and his White House staff, led by chief of staff Bob Haldeman and his aide John Ehrlichman. Trump too would place importance on his NSC and centralize decision-making in the White House.³⁸

As President, Nixon’s loathing of any independent check on his presidency led to a deep-seated animosity toward the media. “The press is your enemy.” “Enemies,” he underscored. “Understand that? … Don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.” Nixon threatened journalists with banishment from the White House. He went as far as to wiretap the phones of his own aides suspected of disloyalty and journalists he found particularly troublesome. His surrogate Agnew famously blasted the press as the “nattering nabobs of negativism.” “Our real game plan,” wrote political advisor Lyn Nofziger, “[is] making our own point in our own time and in our own ways that the press is liberal, pro-Democratic and biased.”³⁹

IS THE LONG NIGHTMARE OVER?

Following Nixon’s resignation, Gerald Ford was now president, even though he had never been elected to any position higher than member of Congress from Grand Rapids, Michigan. In his most notable decision as president, Ford issued a full and unconditional pardon to Nixon for any crimes he may have committed against the United States. “Our long national nightmare is over,” he said. Ford was wrong. The nightmare of Watergate lives on in America’s collective memory, and resonates as a loud and clear warning to President Trump.⁴⁰

John Dean, Nixon’s former White House counsel whose testimony helped uncover the truths of Watergate, warned that Trump could be headed for a Nixonian crash. “The way the Trump presidency is beginning it is safe to say it will end in calamity,” Dean said. “It is almost a certainty. Even Republicans know this!”⁴¹

CHAPTER 3
Flouting the Law

____________

“I’m very confident he’s not breaking any law.”

—Kellyanne Conway, November 21, 2016

A SERIAL LAWBREAKER

Since his early days in business, Trump has elevated himself again and again above the laws that govern others. Andrew Johnson broke a law that he believed was unconstitutional; Donald Trump has broken many laws for personal gain. No other president comes close to matching his history of violations.

As a private citizen, Donald Trump has escaped serious retribution for his crimes and transgressions. He’s settled civil lawsuits charging him with breaking racketeering and civil rights laws, paid fines that he could well afford, protracted litigation, and concealed lawbreaking for many years. There are two avenues of impeachment opened by Trump’s practice of disregarding the law. First, although unlikely, the House of Representatives could vote articles of impeachment and the Senate could convict Trump for illegal acts that occurred prior to assuming office. The Constitution specifies no time limits on any of its enumerated impeachable offenses. There is no statute of limitations and no judicial review of decisions made by either the House or the Senate. Past actions could also become part of a larger impeachment.

There are several laws that I believe Trump might break while in office. His expansive view of presidential authority echoes Richard Nixon’s claim that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Nixon was wrong and paid a heavy price for his error. As the expression goes, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

VIOLATION OF THE FAIR HOUSING ACT

Sheila Morse, an undercover real estate “tester” of housing discrimination for the Human Rights Commission in the early 1970s, still vividly remembers the work. When black people began to complain that building managers were denying them the chance to rent an apartment, the commission dispatched Morse, who is white, to see if she would receive a different response. Morse recalls, among other episodes, that the division dispatched her to a specific apartment building where a black man had complained that when he inquired about a FOR RENT sign posted outside the building, the superintendent had told him that the apartment was rented and the sign was still posted in error. When Morse arrived at the location, the sign was up, and the superintendent immediately welcomed her into the building, showed her the vacant apartment, and assured her that she could sign a lease the next day. “I guess I was the right color and the gentleman was the wrong color,” Morse concluded.¹

When Morse, an official of the commission, and the rejected black applicant confronted the superintendent, he said, “I’m only doing what my boss told me to do—I am not to rent to black tenants.” The superintendent’s “boss” was Trump Management, which owned and operated the building; Donald J. Trump was the president and his father, Fred Trump, was the chairman of the board. Thus marked the first of Trump’s many clashes with the law.²

Based on the findings of testers like Sheila Morse, complaints from minorities, and evidence that the company “discouraged rental to blacks” and had secretly marked minority applications with codes such as “C” for colored, the United States Department of Justice sued Trump’s company in 1973 for violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Rather than attempting to resolve the matter, Trump hired Senator Joseph McCarthy’s former lawyer Roy Cohn to attack the Justice Department and obstruct their efforts to enforce the law. After two years of extraordinary obstruction and delay, which the head of Justice’s Civil Rights Division said exceeded anything he had witnessed in seventeen years at the bar, Trump reached a settlement with the government in 1975.³

Trump spun the settlement into proof that his company had done nothing wrong, contrary to his two years of obstruction, his avowed reluctance to settle lawsuits, and the weight of the evidence. The government “had the [racial] coding, they had the testers, and had the testimony of people who worked there,” said former Justice attorney Elyse Goldweber. “It was an important, significant step for enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. It was a big deal.” It was clear to everyone except Trump that he had flagrantly broken the law.⁴

The government found that Trump’s promise to correct the rental practices at his properties proved of little avail. A year later, the Justice Department dispatched white and black testers to Trump buildings and found again that his managers were denying black people apartments or steering them to selected properties. Justice officials concluded that “an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump management organization.” Justice reopened the case, but the matter was never fully resolved.⁵

THE FRAUDULENT CHARITY

A decade later, Trump broke the law once again, this time with his establishment of the Trump Foundation in New York City to donate proceeds from his book The Art of the Deal. Trump contributed $5.5 million to the charity through 2008 and has not deposited a penny since. It has hauled in $9.3 million from outside donors—all of it raised without legally required registration.⁶

Under New York state law, “most organizations that hold property of any kind for charitable purposes or engage in charitable activities in New York State and/or solicit charitable contributions (including grants from foundations and government grants) in New York are required to register with the Attorney General’s Charities Bureau.” An investigation by the New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman discovered that Trump never registered his charity; it had been operating without legally required registration ever since it began trolling for donations.⁷

The failure to register a charity in New York is no minor, technical violation of law. By operating unregistered, the Trump Foundation avoided required audits that would likely have disclosed the many ways in which Trump has exploited the foundation for illegal self-dealing. Laws against self-dealing prohibit heads of nonprofit organizations from using their charity’s funds to benefit themselves, their businesses, or their family members.

In drawing upon foundation funds solicited from others to settle personal and business debts, Trump has, in effect, laundered tax-free donations for his own gain. Donations to the “charity” included some $4.5 million from Vince and Linda McMahon of World Wrestling Entertainment. Trump has since appointed Linda McMahon to head the Small Business Administration. In 2007, the town of Palm Beach, Florida, fined Trump’s Mar-a-Largo resort $120,000 for failing to take down a flagpole that soared thirty-eight feet above the legally authorized limit. When Trump proposed donating $100,000 to veterans’ organizations, the city agreed to rescind the fine. He made the donation not with his own money, but with tax-free foundation funds donated by others, and thereby escaped paying the fine.⁸

Trump further flouted the law by diverting taxable personal and business income to the tax-free foundation. An investigation by the Washington Post found that Donald Trump’s charitable foundation “has received approximately $2.3 million from companies that owed money to Trump or one of his businesses but were instructed to pay Trump’s tax-exempt foundation instead.” Because Trump has refused to release any of his tax returns, it is not possible to verify whether he paid taxes on these payments. If Trump did, indeed, fail to pay the required taxes, he could be guilty of the federal and state crimes of tax evasion—which may be just one of many reasons why he has not and will not release his tax returns.⁹

Trump’s reportedly illegal use of his foundation does not end there. In 2007, and again in 2014, Trump used $30,000 of his foundation’s funds to purchase two portraits of himself, which he reportedly displayed in his business properties. In 2012, his foundation spent $12,000 on a Tim Tebow football jersey and autographed helmet, whereabouts unknown. In 2013, the Trump Foundation made an illegal $25,000 campaign contribution to a political committee supporting Florida attorney general Pam Bondi while her office was examining allegations of fraud against Trump University. The IRS fined Trump $2,500 for this violation of law.¹⁰

In October of 2016, the New York attorney general ordered the foundation to cease soliciting donations, which it did shortly thereafter. Then, a month and a half after the presidential election, Trump announced that he was shuttering the foundation, “to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as president.” Not so fast, responded Attorney General Schneiderman. “The Trump Foundation is still under investigation by this office and cannot legally dissolve until that investigation is complete,” Schneiderman’s office confirmed.¹¹

In its 2015 tax filings, the Trump Foundation admitted to having engaged in self-serving activities, including the transfer of “income or assets to a disqualified person.” The filing did not, however, provide full details on the matter, and Trump has refused any comment. Louisiana State University law professor Philip Hackney, who formerly worked in Office of the Chief Counsel of the IRS, rightly asked, “What transactions led to the self-dealing that they’re admitting to? Why weren’t they able to recognize them in prior years?”¹²

CUBA AND CASINOS

Trump began expanding his enterprises abroad in the 1990s, and he looked to Cuba as a possible venue for casino operations, perhaps under the misguided belief that the Clinton administration might end the embargo against doing business there. According to documents found by Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek, representatives of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. spent $68,000 in Cuba in 1998 to explore investment opportunities, violating the federal government’s strict embargo against spending any money for commercial purposes in the country. Exceptions to the embargo did not cover casinos, and the company did not apply for a federal license in advance of travel. The documents further indicate that rather than directly fund the Cuban venture, Trump’s company sought to cover up their crime by funneling the cash through an American consulting firm, and then falsely attempting to link the spending to a charitable group.¹³

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that “the embargo on Cuba is the most comprehensive set of U.S. sanctions on any country, including the other countries designated by the U.S. government to be state sponsors of terrorism.” Violation of the Cuban embargo is a federal crime punishable by up to ten years in prison, $1 million in corporate fines, and $250,000 in individual fines. Trump can no longer be charged with violating the Cuban embargo only because the statute of limitations has long run its course.¹⁴

The Cuba venture was not the only time that Trump’s casino operations violated the law. State officials in New Jersey and New York repeatedly fined his enterprises in amounts ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the violations in particular showed just how little Trump had learned from the housing discrimination litigation. New Jersey regulators fined the Trump Plaza casino $200,000 for removing African American and female employees from the craps tables when a favored high roller who objected to the presence of minorities and women was playing there. “There are, or ought to be, certain things that a casino hotel cannot sell or provide to a customer in order to assure his continued patronage,” said Steven Perskie, then a casino commissioner who had helped Trump win his licenses. “These things include honor and decency and simple human courtesy and an unwavering commitment to statutory obligations, including the law against discrimination.”¹⁵

When Trump’s Atlantic City casinos collapsed, in typical fashion he passed the buck, blaming the economy. While other Atlantic City casinos thrived in the same economy, Trump’s enterprises bled red ink in the amount of $1.5 billion—not of his money, but of investor money. Yet somehow Trump managed to deduct $916 million in paper losses on his 1995 taxes, which could have enabled him to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades. In the first presidential debate, Trump said that not paying taxes “makes me smart.” If he ever builds his vanity “Trump Wall” on the Mexican border, it probably won’t be Mexico that funds it, but the many Americans who weren’t smart enough to avoid paying their taxes.¹⁶