The Case for Impeachment. Allan Lichtman J.

      

      

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

      First published in the United States by Dey Street Books in 2017

      Copyright © Allan J. Lichtman 2017

      Introduction © Allan J. Lichtman 2018

      Cover photograph © Bloomberg/Getty Images

      Cover design by Ploy Siripant

      Allan J. Lichtman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

      Source ISBN: 9780008292676

      Ebook Edition 2018 © ISBN: 9780008257415

      Version: 2018-05-23

       Praise for The Case for Impeachment:

      ‘[Lichtman’s] book is a pretty substantial case for why Donald Trump should not have been president at all … A good backdrop for conversations that will likely remain a part of [the] national dialogue for some time’ New York Journal of Books

      ‘The US system takes a long time to gather speed. Once it does, it can be hard to stop’

       Financial Times

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

      Praise for The Case for Impeachment

       Author’s Note

       Introduction

      CHAPTER 1: High Crimes and Misdemeanors

CHAPTER 2: The Resignation of Richard Nixon: A Warning to Donald Trump

       CHAPTER 3: Flouting the Law

       CHAPTER 4: Conflicts of Interest

       CHAPTER 5: Lies, Lies, and More Lies

       CHAPTER 6: Trump’s War on Women

       CHAPTER 7: A Crime Against Humanity

       CHAPTER 8: The Russian Connections

       CHAPTER 9: Abuse of Power

       CHAPTER 10: The Unrestrained Trump

      CHAPTER 11: Memo: The Way Out

      CONCLUSION: The Peaceful Remedy of Impeachment

       Notes

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Also by Allan J. Lichtman

       About the Publisher

       Author’s Note

      ____________

      Impeachment will “proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust,” and “they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

      —Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, 1788

      I began thinking about impeachment before the November 2016 election. For weeks, my students had been asking who I thought would be our next president, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Finally, on a late evening in mid-September 2016, I leaned back in my chair and peered out into the hall at the mostly darkened offices of American University in Washington, D.C. I had just finished my analysis: Donald Trump would win the presidency. My forecast ignored polls, debates, advertising, tweets, news coverage, and campaign strategies—the usual grist for the punditry mills—that count for little or nothing on Election Day. I had used the same proven method that had led me to forecast accurately the outcomes of eight previous elections, and I’d kept my eye on the big picture—the strength and performance of the party holding the White House currently. After thirty-two years of correctly forecasting election results, even I was surprised by the outcome.

      Among those who noticed my prediction was Donald J. Trump himself. Taking time out of preparing to become the world’s most powerful leader, he wrote me a personal note, saying, “Professor—Congrats—good call.” What Trump overlooked, however, was my “next big prediction:” that, after winning the presidency, he would be impeached.

      Here I did not rely on my usual model, rather I used a deep analysis of Trump’s past and proven behavior, as well as the history of politics and impeachment in our country. In the short span of time between Trump’s election and this book’s publication in April 2017, his words and deeds have strengthened the case considerably. History is not geometry and historical parallels are never exact, yet a president who seems to have learned nothing from history is abusing and violating the public trust and setting the stage for a myriad of impeachable offenses that could get him removed from office.

      America’s founders, who had so recently cast off the yoke of King George’s tyranny, granted their president awesome powers as the nation’s chief executive and commander-in-chief of its armed forces. Yet they understood the dangers of a runaway presidency. As James Madison warned during the Constitutional Convention, the president “might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression” and “betray his trust to foreign powers,” with an outcome “fatal to the Republic.” To keep a rogue president in check, delegates separated constitutional powers into three independent branches of government. But knowing that a determined president could crash through these barriers, they also put in place impeachment as the rear guard of American democracy.¹

      After exhaustive debate, the framers agreed on broad standards for impeachment and assigned this absolute power not to the judiciary, but to elected members of the U.S. House and Senate. By doing so they ensured that the fate of presidents would depend not on standards of law alone, but on the intertwined political, practical, moral,