I read with great alarm this morning the remarks of Rudy Giuliani given to the Huffington Post.
www.huffingtonpost.com/...
“In no case can (Trump) be subpoenaed or indicted,” Rudy Giuliani told HuffPost Sunday, claiming a president’s constitutional powers are that broad. “I don’t know how you can indict while he’s in office. No matter what it is.”
“Giuliani said impeachment was the initial remedy for a president’s illegal behavior ― even in the extreme hypothetical case of Trump having shot former FBI Director James Comey to end the Russia investigation rather than just firing him.
“If he shot James Comey, he’d be impeached the next day,” Giuliani said. “Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him.”
These comments are so unbelievable that I struggled for a way to put them in context.
As a thought experiment, I wrote an analogous lede from our closest analogous era to frame Giuliani’s remarks:
Washington D.C., April 16, 1972 — John W. Dean, counsel to President Nixon, has just given an interview suggesting the president would have the legal authority to shoot FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on Fifth Ave. in New York City and suffer no legal consequence in the absence of his impeachment.
This unprecedented comment from the White House counsel follows up Nixon’s own remark on the campaign stump, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Originally taken as a boast, Nixon’s comment now has the legal imprimatur of his attorney and implicitly threatens the life of the FBI director, whose bureau is investigating Soviet sabotage of the Democratic Party on instructions from the Nixon campaign.
Had this been printed or broadcast as fact in the elite media of 1972, the country would be completely stopped dead in its tracks. Frankly, the military would have waited only hours or days for the political process and public opprobrium to evict Nixon before perpetrating a coup.
We as Americans are so saturated with political criminality on this 500th day of the Trump administration that we have lost our sense of danger and perspective. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for every citizen, every journalist, every public official to defend our judicial system, our founding documents and our principles.
We must all recalibrate our lives to the task of terminating this presidency as soon as possible before coup or catastrophe strikes.
— Before the 2018 election,
— Before we hear from Mueller,
— Before any pretentions of impeachment,
we must demand the immediate removal of this president, this vice president, and numerous members of this Cabinet for compound, ongoing crimes and foreign conspiracy. We must coordinate, organize beyond what we’ve done, multitask, upend our habits, and persist until we succeed. Any stability we perceive in our current federal governance is a mirage. We are on the political cusp of a Bear Stearns moment, in which the compromise of single legal check (which is what Giuliani is theorizing) will have a rippling effect resulting in the political equivalent of depression — dictatorship. Our democratic experiment is staring into the abyss.