The Case for Impeaching Trump by Elizabeth Holtzman

Author:Elizabeth Holtzman [Holtzman, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510744776
Amazon: 1510744770
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2019-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

5

Bribery and Emoluments

President Donald Trump is a rich man who wants to get richer. He is a businessman who is always looking for more business. He is a self-described dealmaker who always wants to make a new deal.

Yet we know very little about his businesses. He was the first president in forty years not to release his tax returns. We do know that he runs a business enterprise that uses more than five hundred independent legal entities, or limited liability companies, to receive and spend money on his behalf. His enterprise does business throughout the United States—in New York, Miami, Chicago, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, Virginia, and elsewhere. He has international business operations in more than twenty foreign countries, many of their dealings hidden by the use of corporate camouflages. The voting American public can see few details of the foreign assets he owns—where they are, or what he earns overseas. And it cannot know what foreign bank accounts he might control.

President Trump occupies the most famous office in the world and has an almost unfathomable amount of power: military, financial, legal, bully pulpit. His comments can (and have) crashed corporate stock prices. He can (and did) implement sanctions that would threaten the existence of a company, or he can reverse those sanctions and spare it. He can (and did) approve or deny arms sales abroad. He can launch missiles at foreign countries (and has) without anyone’s approval. Companies, individuals, and nations thus have strong incentives to try to influence the president of the United States.

The combination of so much governmental power in the hands of one person with such an extensive, secretive, profit-driven group of companies is a recipe for influence peddling or far worse. Rather than scrupulously or faithfully observing the Constitution, President Trump has rolled out what appears to be a red carpet for those who believe money talks, including foreign governments.

This is something our Constitution’s framers feared and tried to prevent. They gave us prohibitions and the powerful remedy of impeachment if nothing else worked.

Bribery

Bribery strikes at the heart of democracy and seriously endangers the country. It is one of the constitutionally specified grounds for impeachment for good reason, because a president who is swayed by bribes is no longer acting in the best interests of the country and its people. It was no theoretical concern when the Constitution was being written: the framers knew that King Charles II had secretly been bribed by Louis XIV to ally with France in a war against Holland; Louis XIV also bribed Charles’s successor, James II.

Nor is it a theoretical concern today. In 2018 alone, the former New York State assembly speaker and New York senate majority leader were convicted of bribery. One, a Democrat, took nearly $4 million to help researchers at a major university and real estate developers. The other, a Republican, took more than $300,000 to get his son a no-show job from businesses that were dependent on his goodwill and threatened by his official power.

There

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