In 1999, then Congressman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) explained under what conditions a President of the United States should be impeached. Graham was one of the prosecutors in the House during the Clinton impeachment proceedings.
In a speech on the House floor, Graham said, “You don’t have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this Constitutional Republic. Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”
Looking back at Graham’s remarks from 1999, it begs the question, “Does Graham still maintain that impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to public office?”
Yesterday, Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of eight counts of financial crimes tied to his consulting work for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Separately, Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations for paying two women to cover up alleged affairs with Trump.
In court Cohen acknowledges that Trump not only directed him to help him lie to the American people, but also that Trump directed him to violate campaign finance laws. According to Cohen, "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office," he concealed information that would have possibly harmed Trump from becoming public during the 2016 election campaign.
Trump was elevated to the highest office in the land in no small part due to the assistance of convicted criminals Manafort and Cohen. Now that Trump’s former campaign chairman and Trump’s former personal attorney have both either pleaded guilty to, or have been found guilty of serious crimes, it is time for Congressional Republicans to step up and demand that there be a cleansing of the Oval Office. Even if Trump is never convicted of a crime, clearly honor and integrity have been lost by President Trump. Americans, by and large, do not want an unindicted co-conspirator to be President of the United States.
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