We Now Have the Leading Charge in Trump’s Next Impeachment

Why is the president willing to withdraw Todd Blanche’s nomination? The answer constitutes a blatant high crime and misdemeanor.

The Todd Blanche nomination mess in the Senate is truly one of those pass-the-popcorn moments for Democrats and liberals. One can sense that John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, the two outgoing Republican senators who have suddenly developed the backbone to maybe vote against the attorney general nominee now that they’re not facing their voters again, represent a far more broadly (if privately) held view in the Senate GOP that the man is manifestly unqualified.

But this fracas is more than mere entertainment. It’s a full-blown scandal, as President Trump’s real interests here have become clearer, notably via a Truth Social message he posted late Thursday morning. It’s raw sewage even by his standards, and if the Democrats retake the House, this matter has now jumped to the top of my list of grounds for impeachment. It should provide the basis for the first article Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and his Judiciary Committee draw up.

It all has to do with the slush fund. The fund, you’ll recall, was the result of a settlement in a mind-bending legal proceeding in which Trump sued himself: That is, the president of the United States sued the Internal Revenue Service, seeking $10 billion for the (admittedly illegal) leak of some of his tax returns back in 2019. In May, Trump’s Justice Department, led at the time by Blanche as the acting attorney general, settled the suit between Trump the president and Trump’s IRS by establishing a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, whose moneys were to go to parties Trump deemed to have been wronged by the deep state—starting of course with Trump himself. It also included a shocking clause granting Trump, his family members, and his companies immunity from prosecution for any tax-related crimes they may have committed before the date of deal.

In other words: Blanche created a nearly $2 billion slush fund for Trump to steer money to anyone he wants—and granted him and his kids broad immunity from potential federal prosecution. One observer called it “a breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system.” Raskin put out a 10-point memo on why the deal is “unconstitutional, illegal, and a fraud on the court.” In June, a federal judge blocked the fund’s creation, so it’s on hold for now and probably headed, one supposes, to the Supreme Court.

Around that time, amid the public outcry, Blanche said that the fund would not go forward. He told Congress that the department would put that in writing. But it never has. That’s the holdup with Cornyn and Tillis. If they get it in writing, presumably they would still vote for Blanche.

So that’s when Trump stepped in Thursday morning, when it looked like Blanche’s nomination might be dead, and “truthed” (and boy, it was the truth for once, all right): “Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it! He has the potential to go down as one of the Greatest Attorney Generals of All Time. However, John Cornyn, of Texas, and Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, both of whom I refused to Endorse, and whose political careers have been ended by my action, are refusing to vote for this Great Nominee, who will remain, in any event, as Acting. Remember, both Cornyn and Tillis voted for Merrick Garland, and others, too numerous to mention. I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”

What Trump is saying here is obvious. The slush fund and probably especially the immunity are far more important to him than Blanche is. And anyway, Blanche, whose servile lickspittleism makes predecessor Pam Bondi look like a paragon of independence, can stay in the job more or less indefinitely as acting A.G.

This morning, around 7 a.m., Trump “truthed” again. The fund isn’t for me, he insisted. Rather, it’s for the people who raided the Capitol and banged cops’ heads in; it’s for “the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration.… Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history.” He’s almost surely lying about himself. But even if he’s not, sending $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars, received in the corrupt manner this money was received, to convicted January 6 insurrectionists is without question a high crime in and of itself.

Once again, as with so many other things Trump has done, it’s inconceivable to imagine any other modern American president even thinking this up, let alone doing it. Suing himself; then installing a spineless yes-man—his former personal lawyer, no less—as acting attorney general, who then agrees to a settlement including nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money plus an immunity grant; then being willing to sacrifice said A.G.’s confirmation in order to preserve the fund and the immunity claim. It defies belief.

It’s hard to say how many articles of impeachment the Democratic House might come up with. Indeed, Raskin and his committee’s biggest challenge will be deciding which high crimes and misdemeanors not to pursue. There’ve been dozens, hundreds, and they just can’t plausibly bring an indictment of 100-plus counts. They’re going to have to keep it to some number that the public can digest and buy into.

But the slush fund and immunity grant sure look like count number one to me. Unless of course five members of the you-know-what decide it’s all legal. If that happens, the House Judiciary Committee might look at impeaching them, too.

Trump Just Gave Us a Horrible New Reason to Worry About the Iran War

The president is getting frustrated that U.S. military strikes are accomplishing nothing—and he’s starting to lash out.

Donny is frustrated. The Wall Street Journal reports that at a recent White House meeting, President Trump “launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.” He is worried that the war is “consuming his presidency.” He doesn’t understand why those silly mullahs don’t understand that he’s Mr. Art of the Deal.

One administration official told the paper that Trump sees few good options besides continuing these daily strikes. But these strikes apparently aren’t having much impact, either militarily or psychologically. The Journal also reported this week that satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding the damage done by U.S. strikes and is doing so fast. And after all, if Iran were afraid of the U.S., it wouldn’t have broken the ceasefire earlier this month by striking commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Some wars start big. World War I is the paradigmatic example. Europe was more or less at peace, the Balkans excepted, all those inbred cousins lolling in their palaces as various ethnic and proletarian resentments built among their people. Then, boom, one event—the assassination of a Hapsburg potentate—exploded the powder keg, and within weeks, millions were mobilized into a war that said cousins blithely thought would last a few weeks but ended up leaving an entire generation of young European men physically and psychologically strafed.

But most wars start small. They’re incremental. Even the most destructive war in human history started this way. Of course, Adolf Hitler was lying to the world about his ultimate aims, when he kept saying—after the Alsace, after Austria, after the Sudetenland—that he had no further territorial claims on Europe. But chronologically, the war proceeded in small, incremental steps, and even if Neville Chamberlain has gone down in historical shame, it’s also true that the broader public could have been forgiven for thinking, even after Munich, that world war was hardly inevitable.

In the current case, I’m sure Donald Trump no more anticipated that this war would prove problematic than Lyndon Johnson did with respect to Vietnam or George W. Bush did vis à vis Iraq. These things are always supposed to be easy for........

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