OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: Crime? Maybe, but ...

Is it a crime to conspire to pay a woman with whom you've had sexual relations to get her to stay quiet as you run for president?

Is that effectively a campaign contribution, illegal in size, assuming that the amount exceeds legal campaign contribution limits?

Does conspiring to execute such a transaction amount to defrauding the American voters?

To answer, in order: It depends. It depends. And maybe, but so what?

Defrauding the American voters is called a modern campaign.


Last week federal prosecutors working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York filed documents that stirred to salivation those desperate for Donald Trump's impeachment.

As one preferring that Trump get his richly deserved comeuppance from the voters, and that Mike Pence never become president, and as one believing that mainstream news is never fake but can sometimes get a tad over-excited, I remain unimpressed in the criminal context.

The latest formally filed prosecutorial information is that Trump's longtime bagman, Michael Cohen, endeavored to protect Trump's presidential campaign by conspiring--with Trump--to route tens of thousands of hush-money dollars to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy bunny Karen McDougal to keep them quiet about rolls in the hay years ago.

Cohen, trying to cut a deal for himself on broader misdealing, has pleaded guilty to several charges including one of illegal campaign contributions in the quiet-the-women conspiracy.

He wasn't tried for it. He wasn't convicted by a jury. He copped pre-emptively to it. Sentencing is pending.

So, yes, it is accurate to report that Trump's personal fixer has pleaded guilty to committing a crime that he executed in a conspiracy with the president of the United States. You can run justifiably to breathless headlines with that, though that doesn't mean you should.

John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate who was at least as personally despicable as Trump, went to trial on multiple federal charges of illegal use of campaign funds--a million dollars--to keep quiet a woman whose child he'd fathered, and about whom he routinely lied. He got acquitted on one count and a hung jury on the others, and the federal government cut its losses and went away. Edwards is back practicing malpractice law.

It seems overdone in that context--impeaching a president for less hush money to sex partners than a failed presidential candidate routed without legal consequence to a woman whose baby was his.

Impeachment is serious, or ought to be. It's not properly a partisan resistance exercise for use against sinners in the opposite party.

You don't easily boot a guy from the presidency for a roll in the hay years ago and some improperly paid money, especially if the voters put him in office knowing that he'd bragged about grabbing women in their private regions.

And you don't impeach a president over receiving oral sex and lying about it and having a buddy find a job for the performer thereof. Or, yes, actually, Republicans did, leading to Bill Clinton's acquittal and skyrocket in the polls.

I'm ever-reminded of Maureen Dowd's line on the impeachment of Bill Clinton: "These are not grounds for impeachment. These are grounds for divorce."

Impeaching Trump on something similar could bear the same result as with Clinton--galvanizing his base and dismaying or disgusting swing voters, whose pox-on-all attitude seems to accrue to the benefit of the disrupter-in-chief now tragically in office.

To call the Trump-Cohen conspiracy a criminal defrauding of the American voters is to pick and choose among the rampant and usual frauds on the American voters.

For French Hill to run locally for congressional re-election saying he supported coverage of pre-existing health conditions when he in fact voted to throw out federally mandated coverage, and for Tom Cotton to put together a PAC that accused Democratic congressional candidate Clarke Tucker of supporting immigrant gang crime--you could argue those are perhaps as egregious frauds on American democracy as a guy's covering up sexual episodes from years ago.

The conventional wisdom is that the noose is tightening on Trump on this sex-hush-money front and two others--Russian collusion and obstruction of justice.

Mueller may eventually produce a Russian quid pro quo. If he does, then we must consider the goods. But, as yet, there is no Trump Tower in Moscow and all Trump has done clearly for Russia is kowtow rhetorically and pitifully to his apparent hero, Vladimir Putin.

And justice is proceeding apparently apace, unobstructed, even despite James Comey's firing and Jeff Sessions', and even after Trump's breathtakingly stupid attempt to get Comey to back off Michael Flynn.

Yes, attempting to obstruct justice is itself a crime. We could go there if we wanted. I don't.

Breathtaking presidential stupidity would more appropriately be dealt with in an election than a trial.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 12/11/2018

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