"The president also committed impeachable offenses. ...The president... seven days after taking office, demanded loyalty from his FBI director. Shortly thereafter, he isolated Comey in order to ask that he drop a sensitive FBI investigation in which Trump had a personal interest. The president then leaned on Comey to make public statements about his own status in the investigation. And when he couldn’t get Comey to do so, he recruited the deputy attorney general to create a pretext for Comey’s removal. ...[T]here simply is no plausible way to understand this fact pattern as a good-faith exercise of presidential power. It describes a frank abuse of power... this was impeachable conduct at the time. The Mueller report reinforces that belief. ...Ditto the effort to get Sessions to investigate Hillary Clinton. ...Even as he was trying to get Sessions to protect him from the FBI, Trump was also trying to induce Sessions to investigate his political opponents. This is... the initiation of injustice. ...molten-core impeachment territory. ...trying to induce the attorney general ...to initiate a criminal investigation based on no known criminal predicate against a private citizen whom he happened to dislike. ...The president hinted that Manafort should not “flip” and that he would take care of him—and Manafort acted in a fashion consistent with his relying on those assurances. ...[T]his activity ...is criminal. It is also a grotesque abuse of power for impeachment purposes. ...[R]epeatedly urging witnesses not to cooperate with federal law enforcement and entertaining the notion of using his Article II powers to relieve them of criminal jeopardy or consequences ...This is ...the sort of conduct the impeachment clauses were written to address."
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