Secondly -- Trump, as President, is effectively immune from civil and criminal prosecution -- the more likely path is that Trump would be impeached if a special prosecutor brought forward compelling evidence directly against the President.
Yes, but we must also admit that the law on this is complicated and the constitution leaves a lot of ambiguity.
I agree that the president is immune from criminal prosecution but at the same time I note that clinton was found guilty or entered a plea of guilty of perjury while he was a sitting president. So apparently he cannot be indicted and tried but can still enter into plea deals. Probably even using his immunity- which is only good until he leaves office- as a bargaining factor in his favor. Complicated.
And I want to agree that he is also immune civilly but I have to note that the supreme court ordered that Paula Jones' suit against clinton could proceed even while he was in office, which it did. Complicated.
The impeachment thing is always a wild card because it is 100% a political process even though it pretends not to be. ie. Congress and the Senate can do whatever it wants because there is no appeal to either the lower courts or the Supreme Court. People spend lots of time trying to define what a high crime and misdemeanor is but in the end it doesn't matter. You either have the votes to move him out or not for whatever reasons or no reason at all. Not reviewable by the courts.
That's why Pelosi and schumer are trying to tamp down all these impeachment bills that are in motion. They know Mueller doesn't have anything good on trump /yet anyway and that the dems don't have enough votes to make an impeachment happen. I say bring it on as soon and as fast as you can. You only get one shot unless you want to put the country through it a couple times so go for it. That way if anything else comes up along the way it will be ten times harder to get an impeachment process going. Go for it. Monday or Tuesday of next week would be excellent.
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