1789-2019: Whether Kings and Presidents may be Tried for High Crimes

List of Allegations Summarized from Michael Cohen's Feb.27 Testimony to the United States Congress

+ Threating and intimidation of federal witnesses called upon by Congress

+ Using non-profit funds to purchase private assets and private artwork

+ Using federal campaign finance money to issue blackmail payments covering up Mr. Trump’s private extra-marital affair

+ Federal tax fraud and personal income tax fraud and tax evasion in the amount of several million dollars

+ Bank fraud in the amount of tens of millions of dollars

+ Using the Office of the President of the United States to threaten civilian institutions including schools, colleges, private media, and non-profit groups

+ Threatening legal action and physical violence against groups and individuals in order to prevent the release of personal records including school grades, college transcripts, tax returns, financial statements, and Vietnam War records

+ Censoring and redacting evidence from the United States Congress which implicated the President of the United States, including the testimony given by Michael Cohen on previous occasions

+ Interference with Congressional hearings regarding his own alleged criminal violations

+ Managing and pursuing private business interests with foreign adversaries worth hundreds of millions of dollars

+ Speaking and cooperating with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in order to hack into, weaponize, and release the records and e-mails of Democratic Party members, allegedly in collusion with Russian agents

Mr. Trump has also bragged publicly about “getting away” with various felonies, including federal income tax evasion schemes which may be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Fascism and Sovereign Immunity

Matthew R. Bishop, World Report News – March 23rd 2019
 
For my undergraduate thesis, I tried to examine one of modern history’s most relevant and compelling moments. What I decided on was the particular part of the French Revolution when a group of lawyers, citizens, clergymen, farmers, noblemen, and public officials banded together and proclaimed that the reigning King of France can and will be tried for crimes against the country while in office.

What makes this moment so critical is that these otherwise ordinary citizens decided to hold their sovereign, their chief executive, accountable to themselves, the citizens and employees. It was the moment when we decided that a king cannot be above the laws of his own country, nor above the well-being of his citizens.

That moment was two hundred and fifty years ago. Now we are having this exact discussion all over again, and right-wing pundits would like us to believe that a sitting President cannot or should not be indicted.

To suggest that any public office should be immune to charges of treason and conspiracy is an open endorsement of fascism. It is not a conversation that a free, democratic people should even have in the first place.

We cannot be afraid to speak the word fascist. We have an ethical obligation to call out fascism everywhere and anywhere we see it taking hold, and today it has already got a stranglehold on the American GOP. Republicans actually want to shield a sitting President from charges of fraud, treason, and conspiracy against the President’s own country. Fascism is already here. It has become a part of our everyday political thinking.

And make no mistake, the allegations involved here are of the highest caliber, involving foreign mafia groups, international cartels, Russian foreign agents and assets, and everything else that makes a good James Bond movie. It would be an exciting historical moment, were it not for the growing ideology of fascism that has crept over and consumed the American far-right.

We cannot afford to underestimate the number of Americans who are sympathetic to fascism. President Trump ran on a host of fascist promises, from shutting down the free press to imprisoning his political rivals. One in five Americans endorsed that platform when they voted for Donald Trump. Now his electorate is rising up to defend him against dozens of charges, many of them high crimes and felonies, and is even presenting the Ancien Regime argument that a sitting President cannot be tried for crimes against his country.

As many as 2.2 million Frenchmen lost their lives in the revolutionary fighting of 1787-1799, corresponding to roughly ten percent of the entire country. They fought and died in that revolution so that later generations would never need to ask this question: Can we put a king on trial for crimes against his own country?

Today too many American pundits are rewriting history. They are turning the pages back by three hundred years. They want us to believe that a President cannot and should not answer to the crimes he has committed against his country and against his people. They are erasing the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and all the progress of political thinking accomplished in the past three centuries since before the birth of the Modern Era.
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We cannot let them. That is why we need this report to be made public. And that is why we need to call out and stand up against fascism every single time that we see it, hear it, or read it.