Abuse of Power: Inside The Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump

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An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-64293-582-0

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-583-7

Abuse of Power:

Inside The Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump

© 2020 by Fred V. Lucas

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Cody Corcoran

Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Joe Biden and Maxine Waters cover photo attributed to Gage Skidmore

AOC cover photo attributed to nrkbeta

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

To my wife Basia,

for always inspiring me to believe bigger.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword

Introduction: Narrative of Illegitimacy

Chapter One: Tears in Brooklyn

Chapter Two: #Resistance Before Day One

Chapter Three: Haystacks in Search of a Needle

Chapter Four: James Comey and a New Milestone

Chapter Five: We Cannot Wait Four Years

Chapter Six: I Want to See Him in Prison

Chapter Seven: Does Not Exonerate Him

Chapter Eight: Direct Parallel with Impeachment and the Power of The Squad

Chapter Nine: The Trigger

Chapter Ten: What Do You Want from Ukraine?

Chapter Eleven: Part in Parody

Chapter Twelve: A Do-Over of Sorts

Chapter Thirteen: Focus Groups and Latin Words

Chapter Fourteen: Let the Election Decide

Chapter Fifteen: Eaten by Her Own Machine

Chapter Sixteen: Cannot Be Decided at the Ballot Box

Chapter Seventeen: Defending the Bidens

Chapter Eighteen: Closing Arguments: Trump Could Offer Alaska to the Russians

Conclusion: The Worst

About the Author

Endnotes

F o r e w o r d

By Craig Shirley,

New York Times bestselling author

and presidential historian

One of my favorite writers and my favorite wit, Dorothy Parker, once said, "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest is to shoot them now, while they’re happy."

Who can’t help but love a woman and writer who once quipped, You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think?

Much of Parker’s life was spent hanging around with the sodden Lost Generation at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City after World War I. Parker and company had looked at the world and were disappointed to find out that life on this planet was not perfect. She was drinking too much with the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald but once said, I am not a writer with a drinking problem. I am a drinker with a writing problem.

Fortunately for us, Fred Lucas doesn’t hang around scruffy hotels or drink too much, both very much to our benefit. What Fred does do is write appreciably and think even more, but not sullenly like members of the Lost Generation.

Fred Lucas is fast becoming one of the most important political writers in America today, as he’s proven after a number of years reporting on the White House and national politics for the Daily Signal, Newsmax, Fox News, and other outlets. His writing style is brisk, bracing, and with a freshness of perspective, looking at politics and life in a different way than others of his generation.

Now, this talented journalist has produced Abuse of Power: Inside the Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump, an insightful and incisive look at the rationale and reasons behind the impeachment of Donald J. Trump.

Trump is only the third president to have such grave charges brought against him.

The first, Andrew Johnson, the successor to Abraham Lincoln, was essentially impeached for neither being Lincoln nor pursuing all of the Great Emancipator’s programs. In other words, Johnson was impeached for political reasons.

One hundred and thirty years later, Bill Clinton was impeached for, again, political reasons. Clinton wasn’t called Slick Willie for nothing. Calamity after calamity—dodging the draft, women, cronyism, Whitewater, and others—that would have taken down other politicians did not stop Clinton. It only slowed him, and that was not enough for the Republicans. They impeached Clinton for lying about extramarital sex with a young girl, but, again, political reasons. The GOP suffered as a consequence.

Then came Trump. The elites of the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment, from Hollywood to academia to the newsroom of the Washington Post, despised Donald Trump and despise him even more today. Trump never paid his dues, they believe; never bowed down to them, they complain; and never respected them. On that score, they are right.

The Democratic Party nominated its worst presidential candidate since George McGovern in 2016. Hillary Clinton spent much of her campaign insulting huge segments of the American people. It was music to the ears of the liberal elites but discordant to Republicans.

Hillary Clinton simply reminded many men in America of their first wives. No wonder she lost.

American liberals like power and are very comfortable wielding it. They really don’t like it when Republicans have power, and they view such a world as illegitimate. But The elite who created the government of the United States believed that they could speak legitimately only in the name of a people each individual of whom was putatively equal, said the landmark book, Populism and Elitism. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s fitness for office, that fitness is best determined at the ballot box.

Having lost in the Electoral College—that great instrument of genius created by our Founders, a bunch of old, white, privileged males—and fearing that Lincoln, on the other hand, once referred to the Founding as the mystical chords of memory.

Trump just might successfully do the things he promised on the campaign (and he did do many of these things), the Democrats fell back on impeachment.

And the political impeachment of Donald Trump failed, and, bitterly, Nancy Pelosi was left with only a fig leaf of impeachment.

The liberal media rightly focus on Trump’s childish name-calling, but even so, they overlook all of the insults heaped on Trump and his family. Media commentators and too often news people jumped aboard the narrative that Trump the person was simply unacceptable—somewhat blind to the fact that elections matter in a republic.

Say what you will about Donald Trump, but the Democrats didn’t want to wait four years for the next national plebiscite. They wanted to jump ahead of the will of the American people and impeach Trump, and here, in Fred’s book, is the story behind the story of the reasons for and why illegitimate impeachment was sought. Fred takes the reader through the corridors of power, through the seething hotbeds of hate of the professional hate-Trump industry, through the extreme radicalization of the now dark Democrats, from Elizabeth Warren and Nancy Pelosi to The Squad (the hate-America mongers in the House), and to the first and reliable sources of the powers defending Trump.

Still, this is no paean to Trump. Lucas acknowledges Trump’s obvious character flaws, as do many thinking conservatives. This is a work of recent history, succinctly captured while memories are fresh and sharp. But it is not a slavering tribute.

Years from now, rational historians will look back and wonder how a president could be impeached over a simple phone call to Ukraine. They will turn to Fred Lucas’s Abuse of Power for the explanation why. As Dorothy Parker once quipped in turning a phrase, Writing well is the best revenge. Fred’s book, Abuse of Power, is not only written well, it is written well for the final judgment of honest history.

I n t r o d u c t i o n

Narrative of Illegitimacy

Donald Trump ran an unconventional campaign. He had no national organization, no position papers. As a primary candidate, he played havoc with the GOP field and somehow managed to drive both the moderate Republican establishment on one end and the Reaganite-Buckley conservatives on the other end up the wall—which is rare. Trump had never voted in a Republican primary and was on record supporting numerous left-leaning policies in the past. As a presidential candidate, he wasn’t exactly in line with the conservative worldview, was anti–free trade, and once seemingly favorable toward Planned Parenthood, among other matters. The big left-leaning media outlets loved it and gave him gobs of free airtime. For a time, during the primary season, he was MSNBC’s favorite Republican as he feuded with Fox News. Yet, every network covered his rallies from beginning to end, fearing their network would be the lone one not to report that next unpredictable comment.

And then, upon becoming the Republican presidential nominee, he was public enemy number one. Sure, Democrats and much of the mainstream media’s default position is to demonize every Republican presidential nominee. In 2008, Democrats accused John McCain of being George Wallace and a warmonger.¹ In 2012, Joe Biden accused Mitt Romney of wanting to put African Americans back in chains.² Most other Democrats accused Romney of waging a war on women. McCain and Romney presumed voters wouldn’t believe such ridiculous smears and refused to punch back.

For so many Republican voters, the above-the-fray strategy of the GOP’s 2008 and 2012 standard bearers meant surrender when the other side played full-contact sport. Democrats brought rocks to snowball fights and guns to knife fights. It’s in this context that Republican voters didn’t mind trying a candidate that would throw boulders in a rock fight and fire bazookas in a gun fight at Democrats as Trump did, even if the candidate wasn’t a doctrinaire conservative.

It really didn’t matter since he was trailing Hillary Clinton, who had spent her adult life preparing for the presidency. An actual election seemed merely a curious academic exercise to answer such questions as: How early would the networks call the race for Clinton? How many red states would Clinton flip to blue? What constitutes a landslide?

And then something unthinkable and unacceptable happened.

Trump managed to do what past political outsiders such as Steve Forbes, Herman Cain, and Ross Perot couldn’t. The political stars aligned in the 2016 election cycle. He was helped first by a crowded Republican field, then by facing possibly the worst presidential nominee in American history, Hillary Clinton.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, among the co-anchors on election night, informed the audience, You’re awake by the way. You’re not having a terrible, terrible dream. Also, you’re not dead, and you haven’t gone to hell. This is your life now.

This would set the tone for how Democrat politicians and many pundits would view the election victory. The immediate reaction was they were in a nightmare. It couldn’t be true. Denial is the first stage of grief. The other stages include pain and guilt, then anger and depression before an upturn and working through, and, finally, acceptance. The Left is still intermingling pain, anger, and depression. For a philosophy that has no capacity for introspection, guilt wasn’t going to happen. They still haven’t and perhaps never will reach acceptance.

Rather than accept, the solution was to create a new article of faith, to be held with extreme religious zealotry, that Trump was not legitimately elected.

First blame external forces, Russia, James Comey, maybe mass voter suppression, or something else we’ll find out about. If none of those are true and by some chance, Trump was legitimately elected, it’s only because the system itself is rigged. He lost the popular vote, which means the Electoral College itself is inherently bad. Never mind that before 2016, the consensus was the Electoral College overwhelmingly favored Democrats. If you look at 270toWin.com, it still does. Finally, even if he won in a legitimate system, those who voted for him must have been racists in a fundamentally racist country. That’s despite the fact that 206 counties across thirty-two states that had voted twice for Barack Obama now voted to elect Trump.³

In his first two years as president, Trump slashed regulations and cut taxes, which boosted the economy. He won major victories over terrorists. He appointed two Supreme Court justices and reshaped the appellate courts. Yet, he continues to be his own worst enemy. Considering the number of enemies he has, maybe that’s an achievement in itself. Because he thinks out loud too often, engages in name-calling, and doesn’t always process information correctly before blurting or tweeting, he never managed to get above 50 percent in polling.

As tends to happen for the opposition party in a president’s first midterm, the Democrats eked out a majority in Congress, promising another era of divided government. And what was the Democratic Party with its new House majority to do? Oversight of the executive is a perfectly reasonable response. Congress is supposed to act as a check on the executive branch. But Trump was not a person to the Left. He was, instead, a symbol. Much of the mainstream media coverage of the Trump presidency became about building a narrative and reinforcing existing views that Trump was a dangerous criminal on the verge of becoming a despot.

To settle for oversight and not insist on impeachment would betray the narrative or imply doubt of the narrative. The narrative itself demanded impeachment, and the narrative had become king, too paramount to check against reality. Trump was not legitimately elected, they insisted. He couldn’t have been. They believed he was mentally, morally, practically, and in every other way unfit to be the president. The cognitive dissonance of his having actually been elected meant that there must be some nefarious explanation. As with the JFK assassination, the mind’s refusal to accept the official version leads to conspiratorial thinking.

Moreover, Trump wasn’t an ordinary politician—they talked themselves into believing he was an existential threat. A racist, a fascist, a madman with his finger on the nuclear trigger. The Trump presidency represented an emergency that required drastic measures. In pursuit of this goal, caution and restraint were thrown to the wind along with, far too often, ethical restraints on journalism and the performance of official government duties.

The goal was clear: remove the elected president without holding another election. They only needed a reason, any reason. And while it never quite seemed Nancy Pelosi was on board with impeachment, she lost control of her caucus. That’s not to say Trump doesn’t indulge in his own narratives or imply that he sticks wholeheartedly with facts. However, mere petulance and uncouthness don’t rise to the level of impeachment. Elections either mean something or they don’t. And elections are also the venue to determine someone’s fitness for office in lieu of an actual crime.

As someone skeptical of the Russia conspiracy theories, I often argued to others that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should be free to finish his investigation so we can know the truth. He did and we do. But it came after what seemed like a really long time for both Trump lovers and Trump haters. A grand conspiracy with Russia would have been a crime against America, and impeachable. But Mueller didn’t find such a crime. An improper phone call and the delaying of appropriated funds warrants congressional oversight and little else.

Impeachment has always been a balance of politics and law.

In 1998, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives impeached President Bill Clinton. After an early 1999 trial in a Republican-controlled Senate, neither the impeachment charge of perjury to a federal grand jury nor the charge of obstruction of justice gained even a majority vote. The crimes were related to covering up his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky but came after a string of Clinton scandals that includes the shady Whitewater land deal, campaign donations from China, and obtaining FBI files of political enemies, among others. He seemed to get away with those.

Similarly, Democrats might well have felt that Mueller dropped the ball and that Trump got away with something in the Russia scandal. Then there were a host of other things non-Mueller-related that Democrats were eager to impeach over. To fully understand the context of the Trump impeachment, you must understand that the two articles of impeachment that finally passed the House was the fourth vote taken. Bring that many impeachment resolutions to the House floor against any president, and the law of averages will eventually be on your side.

Rep. Al Green is counting on the law of averages working in a Senate trial as well. He even declared that Democrats would keep trying if Trump reelected declaring, There is no limit on the number of the times the Senate can vote to convict or not a president. No limit to the number of times a House can vote to impeach, or not, a president.⁴

While Democrats tried to say Trump was involved in bribery, this came after a focus group test determined that was the more effective word to incite emotion. Once coalescing around the term, they couldn’t figure out if Trump was bribing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or if Zelensky was bribing Trump. There’s at least a slightly more logical case that Trump was extorting something, but extortion performed poorly in the Democrat focus group as well. So, bribery was the rage until it didn’t make any sense.

The House majority, along party lines, finally settled on two articles of impeachment: Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress. The Abuse of Power article was designed to be easy to understand but broad enough to not have to define. The second is because the White House didn’t cooperate with the impeachment investigation. However, the dispute was never litigated.

If a Republican House had been inclined, it could have impeached President Barack Obama for Abuse of Power for taking unilateral executive action on immigration and even boasting about having a pen and a phone in lieu of congressional action. The House could have impeached him for Obstruction of Congress for declaring executive privilege to shield records from Congress during the investigation of the Justice Department’s botched Fast and Furious gun-running operation. That’s not what-about-ism. It’s simply stating what the new House standard would mean if retroactively applied.

During the impeachment hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., asked if any president short of William Henry Harrison—who died thirty-two days into his term—would escape the broad definition of abuses of power Democrats were trying to apply to Trump. He noted that Abraham Lincoln took extraordinary measures during the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt directed the IRS to conduct audits of his political enemies, including Huey Long, William Randolph Hearst, Hamilton Fish, and Father Charles Coughlin. John F. Kennedy directed his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to deport one of his mistresses by claiming she was an East German spy. JFK further directed the FBI to use wiretaps on congressional staffers who opposed him politically, Buck added. Then, JFK’s successor Lyndon Johnson directed the CIA to place a spy in Republican opponent Barry Goldwater’s campaign, get advanced copies of speeches that were delivered to the Goldwater campaign, and wiretap the Goldwater’s campaign plane.

Buck also addressed the Supreme Court’s 9–0 ruling that Obama bypassed the Senate by recess-appointing members to the National Labor Relations Board when the Senate was still in session. While the NLRB matter seems less than scandalous, it’s a solid parallel to the Trump impeachment article for obstruction of Congress, but only if Congress had decided to impeach before the courts had a chance to rule.

What these weak and vague impeachment articles against Trump say about past presidents is far less important than what it says about future presidents. Despite being disposed of in the Senate, the House set a new broad and vague precedent that will likely turn impeachment into a regular political football game every time the House and the presidency are controlled by different parties.

And while the Trump impeachment, and much of the coverage of it, seems to have been through certain blinders, Republicans should check their own blinders by asking what if Barack Obama had done the exact same thing under similar circumstances? The scenario was disingenuously presented in the Senate trial, but here is a parallel. What if, say, in 2011, Obama had asked a leader of a country reliant on U.S. assistance to investigate whether Mitt Romney used his clout as Massachusetts governor to shield a shady company his son worked for from potential prosecution? Would impeachment be justifiable? Interestingly, Romney apparently thinks it would be.

For Obama, such an action likely would have been a controversy prompting congressional hearings. But impeachment almost certainly wouldn’t have been part of the public conversation, except for maybe a handful of House GOP firebrands and a maybe a few conservative talk show hosts.

At the same time, those Republicans who would want oversight of Obama’s conversation should also feel uneasy in this alternative scenario about knowing one of Mitt Romney’s sons worked for a corrupt foreign company—regardless of how improper it would have been for Obama to bring it up—and knowing that Mitt Romney potentially pulled strings to shield his son’s company from an investigation.

We all darn well know that in such a world, CNN and the New York Times would indignantly cover the House Republican oversight hearings into Obama’s phone call with the foreign leader as a shameful political ploy to distract from shady dealings of the younger Romney by going after Obama.

To be clear, neither Obama nor Romney (or any of Romney’s sons) were involved in such a parallel situation.

Legacy of Impeachments

The impeachment inquiry to model was that of Richard Nixon, mainly because it was successful, but also because it was bipartisan. Tapes showed that, at a minimum, Nixon was aware of a vast criminal cover-up by White House officials to interfere with an FBI investigation of the Watergate burglary. It was enough that Barry Goldwater and other Republican senators told him he wouldn’t have their support in a Senate trial. Nixon resigned after the House Judiciary Committee passed articles of impeachment but before the full House voted. What Nixon had going for him was that his conduct wasn’t so different from what we later learned of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Franklin Roosevelt. But being the guy who got caught shouldn’t be an excuse from accountability.

Nevertheless, the Trump impeachment most closely resembles the impeachment of Andrew Johnson—largely because it’s based heavily on policy disagreements. Post–Civil War, Republicans held a two-thirds majority in Congress. Republican President Lincoln tapped Tennessee Democrat and union loyalist Johnson to be his vice president in the 1864 election—Lincoln’s worst decision. Johnson was a horrible president and a racist, even by the standards of those days.

He was showing leniency to the defeated South, which Lincoln would have done had he lived. But he also blocked civil rights and voting rights measures for freed slaves, which Lincoln wouldn’t have done. Republicans wanted to impeach him but needed a pretext. So, they overrode Johnson’s veto to pass the Tenure of Office Act to require Senate approval to fire any Senate-confirmed federal official. It was an impeachment trap, and Johnson willingly walked into by firing War Secretary Edwin Stanton. The Republicans impeached him. But Johnson survived in the Senate trial one vote short of the required two-thirds to remove.

Today, most historians view the Johnson impeachment as a discredited affair since the Supreme Court later found the Tenure of Office Act to be unconstitutional in the 1926 case of Myers v. United States. That said, the Johnson impeachment might better stand up to historical scrutiny than our last undefined impeachment. The Johnson impeachment was tied to an actual duly enacted federal law that, even if later found unconstitutional, was in place at the time.

Arguably, both the Clinton and Trump impeachments had more to do with a desire to punish a president than to protect the country from wrongdoing. A major difference is that the Clinton offense was an identifiable felony, and the forty-second president paid a price beyond the legacy of impeachment. He was found in civil contempt of a federal court, paid a $90,000 fine, and was made to surrender his law license as part of a deal with Independent Counsel Robert Ray in which he admitted to making misleading statements under oath.

Also, in light of the #MeToo movement, several commentators and left-leaning media outlets began to reconsider the Clinton impeachment, as the power disparity between a president and an intern was vast even if consensual.

Each impeachment took place in the midst of a culture war of sorts. The Johnson impeachment was post–Civil War reconstruction. The Nixon impeachment process came during the anti-war movement, and the new Left had emerged. Clinton was the first baby-boomer president who came from that anti-war generation. Just as today, where Trump critics see him as too indecent and unsophisticated to be president, many on the Right could not believe Clinton, this person they viewed as a draft-dodging, pot-smoking, womanizing, scandal-plagued reprobate had beaten a president with impeccable character and war hero status, George H. W. Bush.

Another notable impeachment attempt came when House Republican Leader Gerald Ford pushed to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, also someone widely disliked for a detestable personal character and financial dealings. Ford’s famous words from that effort were repeated during the Trump process: An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history. Conviction results from whatever offense or offenses two-thirds of the other body considers to be sufficiently serious to require removal of the accused from office.

Ford, the future president and a man of great decency and moral character, was simply wrong on this account. Such words taken literally would mean that if a House could muster a majority, it could impeach a president over not just political differences but for a president’s religious beliefs or race. That would be totally outside the spirit of their constitutional oath.

There is a reason the previous three presidential impeachment inquiries were all based on actual violations of the law. Further, all eight federal judges removed by the U.S. Senate were impeached for allegedly breaking the law. The single Supreme Court justice impeached, Samuel Chase in 1804, was entirely a political matter. But the country was still in its infancy then.

Political polarization isn’t new. It’s when polarization creates an alternate reality of your-truth-my-truth that it becomes a problem. But, as the book explains, the Trump impeachment was the first built entirely around a sacred, pre-conceived narrative that grew more important in the eyes of some than elections.

C h a p t e r  O n e

Tears in Brooklyn

Nancy Pelosi, like most politicians, typically ignores shouted questions from reporters after a press conference officially wraps up. Nevertheless, in early December 2019, the seventy-nine-year-old veteran California lawmaker clearly demonstrated how much the pressures of the last year had gotten under her skin.

Do you hate the president? a reporter asked the Speaker after she had stepped away from the podium.

She could have kept walking. She could have simply said no. Instead, she turned around and began hysterically shouting and pointing—standing beside the podium rather than behind it—suggesting that she had turned around more to argue than to answer a question.

I don’t hate anybody. Not anybody in the world. Do not accuse me, Pelosi said, still almost two weeks away from the floor vote on articles of impeachment.

The reporter, James Rosen of Sinclair Broadcast Group, responded, I did not accuse you.

Pelosi shot back, You did.

Rosen said, I asked a question, noting that a Republican lawmaker had said the day before that the impeachment drive against Donald Trump was based on the Democrats’ personal loathing of the president.

Pelosi returned to the podium to engage in rambling points unrelated to the impeachment crisis brought about by her collapse in leadership. She talked about how Trump is a coward for not supporting gun control, how Trump is cruel to illegal immigrants, and is in denial about global warming. She perhaps realized that attacking Trump over policy in such personal terms only reinforced the questioner’s point. However, that’s about the election, Pelosi continued. Take it up in the election. This is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office. And as a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone…. I pray for the president all the time. So, don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.

Trump and a chorus of pundits were skeptical about whether Pelosi was praying for the president. Only she and God know that for certain. Though, she was perhaps honest about not hating Trump—at least not hating him as much as the hardliners in her caucus that had forced her hand. While it’s true that impeachment will be an asterisk on Trump’s legacy, what the entire mess meant with regard to contemporary politics is that barely a year after she helped lead her party back to a majority, Pelosi had lost.

Speaker in Name Only?

Pelosi was dragged to this moment almost entirely by members in safe districts, egged on by Twitter Democrats to demand impeachment at all cost. She probably didn’t hate these members either, but it sure seems likely she snapped under the pressure and frustration of knowing she was about to drive her party over a cliff, and probably didn’t even feel it was her fault. Speeding toward the cliff, she was nominally in the driver’s seat. But the hardliners were holding the wheel. She had lost all control of her