No evidence a crime has been committed

In a recent letter, Don Flood asked me to address Sen. McConnell’s statement that he is not an impartial juror. 

When President Clinton was being tried in the Senate, Chief Justice Rehnquist was asked to rule on whether senators were jurors, and he said no, the Senate is a court and by inference the senators are judges.  So Mr. McConnell was correct and honest.  He is not a juror at all; impartial or otherwise.  And I think the mechanics of what we see bears that out. 

The House has managers who present their case and President Trump has a defense team to defend himself.  And the senators vote on whether he should be removed from office.

Now I might be challenged that the real question was whether Mr. McConnell, as either judge or juror, is impartial. 

And I would respond that that is parsing language.  And lawyers and newspaper reporters, both professions whose livelihoods depend on parsing language, should be more careful.  Had the reporter asked, “Can you be impartial” and stopped there, he may have had Mr. McConnell over a barrel.  He asked the wrong question, which is a shame as anyone can Google the Senate’s role in impeachment and get Justice Rehnquist’s answer.  The reporter didn’t do his homework and didn’t ask the right question.  As a retired reporter, Mr. Flood should both know how to parse language and do a little homework.

But this also goes to the gist of my last letter.  The impeachment process is like no other in our legal system.  And, as Publius (otherwise known as Alexander Hamilton) wrote over 200 years ago, it is an inherently political process. 

As the Republican leader in the Senate I believe it’s obvious that Mr. McConnell is not impartial.  And, like with Nixon and Clinton, it’s up to the House to both assert a crime has been committed and provide enough evidence to convince the public, on whose votes the senators rely, that the president deserves removal.  In my own opinion, and for an action this serious, innocence must be presumed and there needs to be enough evidence to establish that a crime has been committed before the defendant is formally charged.  

With Nixon, the Democrats went to court, got the Nixon tapes and forced Nixon out.  With Clinton, the Republicans had Linda Tripp and the blue dress, and Clinton lost his law license, but that was all insufficient to change public opinion, so he stayed in office. Each was proven to have committed true crimes. With Trump, I don’t think the House met that standard.

Recall that they started quid pro quo which they then turned to bribery, a true crime.  But they backed away from these when the polls didn’t support the move and they found that many politicians would fail the same test.  They then moved to “abuse of power” which isn’t a statutory crime.  “Abuse of power” can be asserted by any party who’s not in power and sees the other party taking actions they don’t like.  It’s not a crime; it’s an opinion.  

Further, it seems that the managers want the Senate to conduct the basic fact-finding that wasn’t done in the House for expediency purposes.  They object when the defendant refuses to cooperate, saying “prove your innocence,” and that shouldn’t sit well with anyone who has faith in the American justice system. 

After all, who wants to be put in a position to have to prove they are not a criminal?  As I said in my last letter, I don’t think anyone would want to be tried under this process.

With our primary information source being a highly biased media, it’s difficult to tell what’s really going on.  But if the polls are any indication, the managers haven’t made their case.  But I will again say that to win their case, the managers need to find the smoking gun that has eluded them for the past several months.  And they shouldn’t expect the president to help them find it. 

So first a true crime and then true evidence.  Good luck with that.

One last word on the smoking gun; it won’t be found in the president’s tax returns.  He gets audited every year as it is, what does anyone expect to find?  Personally I would like to see President Obama’s college application and transcripts.  But at the same time I don’t want to provoke a constitutional crisis if we found he was born elsewhere.

Lee McCreary
Rehoboth Beach