Top Democrats in the US House of Representatives have raised the prospect of impeachment or the possibility of prison time for US President Donald Trump if it is proven that he directed illegal hush money payments to women, although the US Department of Justice has stopped short of accusing Trump of directly committing a crime.
“There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time,” said US Representative Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.
“The bigger pardon question may come down the road as the next president has to determine whether to pardon Donald Trump,” Schiff said.
Representative Jerry Nadler, the incoming chairman of the House Select Committee on the Judiciary, on Friday described the details in prosecutors’ filings in the case of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, as evidence that Trump was “at the center of a massive fraud.”
“They would be impeachable offenses,” Nadler said.
In the filings, prosecutors in New York for the first time linked Trump to a federal crime of illegal payments to buy the silence of two women during the 2016 campaign.
US Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office also laid out previously undisclosed contacts between Trump associates and Russian intermediaries, and suggested that the Kremlin aimed early on to influence Trump and his Republican campaign by playing to both his political and personal business interests.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and has said that the investigations are a “witch hunt.”
Nadler, a Democrat of New York, said that it was too early to say whether the US Congress would pursue impeachment proceedings based on the illegal payments alone, because lawmakers would need to weigh the gravity of the offense to justify “overturning” the 2016 election.
Nadler and other lawmakers on Sunday said they would await additional details from Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with the Trump campaign to determine the extent of Trump’s misconduct.
Regarding the illegal payments, “whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question, but certainly they’d be impeachable offenses because even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office,” Nadler said.
Mueller has not said when he is to complete a report of any findings, and it is not clear that any such report would be made available to Congress. That would be up to the attorney general.
Trump on Friday said that he would nominate former US attorney general William Barr to the post to succeed Jeff Sessions.
Nadler said that Democrats, who are to control the House from January, would step up their own investigations.
Congress, the Justice Department and the special counsel need to dig deeper into the allegations, which include questions about whether Trump lied about his business arrangements with Russians and about possible obstruction of justice, he said.
“The new Congress will not try to shield the president,” he said. “We will try to get to the bottom of this, in order to serve the American people and to stop this massive conspiracy — this massive fraud on the American people.”
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