The U.S. House of Representatives has launched last month a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump for bribing a foreign leader.  It is Watergate revisited.

As more and more whistleblowers from Trump administration are coming forward with information, the House of Representatives is piling up evidence as to whether it is viable to seek a majority vote for impeachment.  But is Trump impeachable?

The President, the Vice-President, the Members of the Supreme Court, the Members of the Constitutional Commissions, etc. are liable to impeachment and removal from their functions if they are found culpable of high crimes.

In U.S. history, three presidents were subject to impeachment for unrelated crimes.  Based on historical facts, Andrew Johnson was charged with 11 articles of impeachment for his firing of the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in 1868 and his constant political dispute with Congressional Republicans over the Civil War Reconstruction.

Bill Clinton, meanwhile, was charged with two articles of impeachment citing obstruction of justice and perjury in 1998.

Johnson and Clinton were both charged with articles of impeachment, but they were acquitted by the Senate.

In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon was charged with obstruction of the Watergate investigation and he resigned before the House of Representatives had the opportunity to take actions.  But what about Trump?

Currently, the House of Representatives is investigating Trump for bribery, a crime that is constitutionally impeachable. 

It all started in July 2019 when Trump called his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden.  In return, Zelensky would get an invitation from Trump to visit the White House.  It’s clearly Trump’s style of quid pro quo.

The investigation of Biden would focus on his job as a board member of a Ukrainian natural gas company named Burisma Holdings that Biden joined in 2014.  The owner of that gas company was under investigation for corruption, and Biden had received a lavish salary for a job he knew not much about, his critics claim.

Trump was hoping that that solicited probe would unearth some dirt on both Bidens that he could use in the 2020 presidential elections just like he vociferously did in 2016 with Hillary Clinton’s mishandled emails, email servers and secret email servers.

Early in the campaign, Trump is maneuvering his way through his 2020 reelection strategy with the same gamble that got him elected in 2016. He is desperate. So like Nixon’s Watergate in the 1970s, Trump goes from Russiangate to Ukrainegate just three years into his troubling administration.  Damn!  He is still our president.

Impeaching a federal official is a daunting task. Trump is not yet impeached; the entire process may not even reach its culminating point. So far, Congress is investigating; next step, the House of Representatives must vote the articles of impeachment; finally, the Senate tries the accused.

At this point, Trump, the defendant, may not be removed from office thanks to the Republican majority in the Senate chamber. With a magic luck, Trump has gotten away with every lawbreaking he is allegedly guilty of. Michael Cohen who was Trump’s accomplice exclaims: “he is a racist! He is a con man! He is a cheat!”

Trump is undoubtedly guilty of a lot of impeachable acts. But why should we be vindictive and political about it? Instead, let’s impeach him at the ballot box in 2020 to correct the mistake we made in 2016.

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