Donald Trump Impeachment Proceedings Could Start Soon, Predicts Key Watergate Figure
Federal prosecutors in New York on Friday recommended that President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen serve between 51 and 63 months for four crimes, including illegal campaign contributions. The two sentencing memos against Cohen, published by Axios, have been deemed damning by a slew of legal experts.
As previously reported by the Inquisitr, in response to Donald Trump’s tweet of the Cohen filings — “Totally clears the President. Thank you!” — a number of legal scholars, lawyers, and experts took to social media to weigh in on the situation, many of them alleging that this could be the beginning of the end for President Donald Trump.
John Dean, a key Watergate figure, and former President Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel, appears to agree. In an interview broadcast today, Dean argued that the Cohen filings directly implicate Trump in campaign finance law violations, the Hill reports.
“I don’t know that this will forever disappear into some dark hole of unprosecutable presidents,” Dean said, elaborating on the significance of the findings, and then went on to claim that the House has “little choice” now, implying that impeachment proceedings could start very soon.
“I think it will resurface in the Congress. I think what this totality of today’s filings show that the House is going to have little choice the way this is going other than to start impeachment proceedings.”
The Hill notes that the start of impeachment proceedings “ultimately remains unlikely,” but given that the Democrats will officially have control of the House soon, as well as subpoena power, the impeachment of Donald Trump is starting to look more plausible.
BREAKING: Federal prosecutors say Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to commit crimes https://t.co/vPiNh7u15W
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) December 7, 2018
Efforts to impeach Donald Trump begun as soon as he stepped into office, but with the Democratic Party winning back control over the House of Representatives, the calls for the impeachment of Donald Trump have intensified. In November, as reported by the Inquisitr, top House Democrats argued that it was not the time to consider impeachment, but now that the Cohen filings are out, the calls to impeach Trump are guaranteed to further intensify.
Fortune reports that legal experts appear to be in disagreement as to whether a sitting president can be indicted for a federal crime, and some lawyers argue that the only way to hold a sitting president accountable for a federal crime would be to impeach him.
Both Donald Trump and the White House dismissed the details of Michael Cohen filings, downplaying the accusations and the implication that Trump committed crimes as well. In a statement supplied to Fox News, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the Cohen filings offer “nothing of value” and then went on to attack Donald Trump’s former lawyer.
“Mr. Cohen has repeatedly lied and as the prosecution has pointed out to the court, Mr. Cohen is no hero,” Sanders concluded.
