Impeachment: Keeping Our Heads While Others Are Losing Theirs

by Mike Huckabee: I hear from more people every day who are so sick of the vicious, impeachment-minded news coverage of Trump that they have simply turned off the TV and done whatever they could to get away from it, just for their own mental health.

Honestly, it’s hard to blame anyone for that. And the coverage from mainstream media is only going to get worse as Democrats take control of the House and probably start "trumped-up" impeachment proceedings on Day 1. So repeat as needed: “This is a complete farce.” We are being lied to, and with the 24-hour news cycle, that’s a lot of lying. So trust your instincts and protect your brain cells. If you hear someone say that Trump has broken the law and should be indicted, that alone tells you that the person is either pig-ignorant or deliberately lying to you.

Alan Dershowitz had a particularly strong appearance with Tucker Carlson on Monday evening to talk about how twisted this all is. (If you recall, he wrote a book quite a while back called THE CASE AGAINST IMPEACHING TRUMP, which since that time has kept him from being invited to any cocktail parties held by any of his former friends.) He presented what he calls the “shoe on the other foot” test, which I’ll paraphrase.

Imagine a scenario in which, during Bill Clinton’s run for President, Paula Jones comes up to him and demands money to keep quiet about what he did. Bill and Hillary pay her out of their own funds --- doing exactly what has been alleged about Trump and Cohen with Stormy Daniels and Karen McPherson. Because Bill is running for President, he and Hillary are accused of breaking campaign finance law and threatened with prosecution. “I guarantee you,” Dershowitz said, that the New York Times, NBC, MSNBC, all the rest, would be screaming about any attempt to expand the criteria for impeachment and/or prosecute this non-crime as a violation of campaign finance law. “Everybody would be on the other side of this issue,” he said. Republicans would be calling for his impeachment, to be sure, as both parties can be guilty of overreach, and every Democrat would be calling it a witch hunt. WE NEED A SINGLE STANDARD. And we need to stop using hypotheticals and maybe’s.

Dershowitz called Democrats “fair-weather civil libertarians,” noting that they don’t care one bit about constitutional protections that impede them from going after Trump. “That’s the most important consideration –- get him by any means possible.”

“This is such a danger to our constitutional system,” he said, “that I would hope that true civil libertarians would rebel against it as I am.” (I would add that true civil libertarians still in the Democratic Party could have their strategy meetings in a phone booth, with room to spare.)

Dershowitz made it clear that demands for money to keep quiet absolutely are extortion and that there should be a prosecution of any person, male or female, who approaches anyone (candidate or not) demanding money under those circumstances. He called this “absolute, classic extortion” and added that it’s “shocking” the special counsel isn’t looking into it. (It does seem like the kind of “related matter” that Mueller has a mandate to investigate.) He also noted that Trump had other reasons besides the election for wanting to keep them quiet: to protect his family, to guard his “brand,” etc. According to the law, this is why the payments are not considered campaign contributions.

Dershowitz also went into detail about the timing of reporting the payments –- which would have been after the election –-- and said, “So the absurd notion that he won the presidency by fraud and should be stripped of the presidency reflects incredible ignorance of the timing here and how these statues operate.”

This is all going to boil down to pure politics. Trump didn’t break laws, but the Democrats don’t care. They’re already saying he did, and will say it over and over again until this lie is “true” in people’s minds. They’ll say or do ANYTHING to get him out of office (Plan A), or, failing that, to keep him from winning re-election in 2020 (Plan B). James Comey, in a public appearance shortly after his closed-door hearing with House committees on Friday, actually said that “Democrats HAVE to win in 2020.” He meant by any means necessary.

So, this is going to a fight. Take care of yourself and keep a clear head, and if that means getting away from the news and other sources of shrill anti-Trump vitriol, by all means, follow your intuition on that. But try to stay informed; turn to reasoned and trusted sources. The next couple of years are going to be difficult, politically speaking, but critically important, so pray for our constitution and our justice system, which are under siege, and for the Senate, where the real fact-finding will take place in the coming year. We’ll get through this together.
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Mike Huckabee was a former governor of Arkansas and a signatory to the Right on Crime Statement of Principles. He is a popular commentator and entertainer. You can reach Governor Huckabee through MikeHuckabee.com

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