On Friday, federal prosecutors, by inference, identified President Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to illegally influence the 2016 election. That’s extraordinary. Mr. Trump stands accused of breaking the law in order to secure his installation to the highest office in the land.
While Mr. Trump’s supporters dismiss these allegations as mere “process crimes,” they are, in fact, felonies for which you or I would be immediately indicted. But the president has not been indicted – not because of increasingly preposterous presumptions of innocence, but because the Constitution is silent on the procedural question of whether a sitting president can be indicted.
The Department of Justice’s policy is clear: A sitting president cannot be indicted, only impeached. Impeachment, we are told, is a political process, not a criminal one. The “high crimes and misdemeanors” that warrant impeachment are whatever Congress says they are.
My question to Congress: If actual felonies do not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, what does?
It’s time to impeach.
Jason Brown
Portland
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