House Judiciary Committee Report Invents a Brand New Legal Standard for Determining Guilt

Elizabeth Vaughn reporting for RedState

On Saturday, the House Judiciary Committee released its impeachment report which contains several attempts at deception, but in one instance, the committee members invent a whole new standard for what defines an impeachable offense. The report says that even though a president may not have committed an illegal act, if his motives are corrupt, “the ones in his mind at the time,” as they insinuate Trump’s motives must have been, he has committed an impeachable offense.

Page 6 of the report states:

Fourth, we address whether the House must accept at face value President Trump’s claim that his motives were not corrupt. In short, no. When the House probes a President’s state of mind, its mandate is to find the facts. That means evaluating the President’s account of his motives to see if it rings true. The question is not whether the President’s conduct could have resulted from permissible motives. It is whether the President’s real reasons, the ones in his mind at the time, were legitimate. Where the House discovers persuasive evidence of corrupt wrongdoing, it is entitled to rely upon that evidence to impeach.

So they want to get into President Trump’s mind a little bit here. It is okay for Trump to have delayed the aid for a “permissible” reason. If, for example, President Trump delayed the disbursement of U.S. aid to Ukraine because their government is one of the most corrupt on the planet, that would be okay.

However, if the real reason for the delay is one or more of the following:

1. There is evidence that Ukrainian officials went all in for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

2. The President resents the fact that Ukraine’s then-chief of NABU (their anti-corruption bureau), Artem Sytnyk, and then-acting Prosecutor General, Serhiy Leshchenko, conspired to leak a document to the press (the black ledger) which forced your campaign manager (Paul Manafort) to resign in disgrace and immediately cast a shadow of unwarranted suspicion over his candidacy, which lasted for three years and crippled his presidency.

3. He wanted their government to look into the possible wrongdoing of a man who has openly boasted he forced a former Ukrainian President to fire a prosecutor who was about to investigate his son by saying he would otherwise withhold $1 billion U.S.aid; especially if he did that because he thought, ‘Gee, I might be running against him for reelection next year’.

Then the President has committed an impeachable offense. None of these would be permissible motives.

So, even though an action is legal, it may still be considered an impeachable offense if the motive was illegitimate.

The Democrats have no evidence that President Trump has committed a crime, nor can they point to a constitutional basis which supports his impeachment. So they have manufactured one.

Intent, what was the President’s intent? The House is on a very slippery slope.

Sundance, at The Conservative Treehouse weighed in on this topic. He attributes the idea of gaging a criminal’s intent to the Obama crowd.

Defining statutory violations by the intent of the violator is specifically attributable to how President Obama, AG Eric Holder and AG Loretta Lynch changed the entire enterprise of lawful application to make outcomes arbitrary, variable, changeable to the situation.

The IRS targeting wasn’t unlawful because it wasn’t intentional. The death of four Americans due to sketchy CIA and State Dept. operations in Benghazi was not unlawful because the risky situation wasn’t created intentionally. Hillary Clinton’s private email server with classified information wasn’t “intentional”, etcetera – etcetera, the list is long.

The nice thing about switching to definitions of lawbreaking by “intent” is the ease in arbitrary application. Republican targets ‘intended’ to violate laws… Democrat targets, well, not-so-much. Fluidity is a necessary oil amid a two-tiered administrative state.

Trying to gage “intent”, I suppose, is the “woke” way of dealing with criminals. Funny how the U.S. legal system continues to look for a little evidence. Imagine if judges and juries had access to the contents of a defendant’s mind. Until Mark Zuckerberg’s team comes out with their “mind-reading” cap, there is no way to prove what was in the President’s mind, one way or the other.

Moreover, a president is entitled to delay U.S. aid to a foreign country. The President sets foreign policy. Democrats may disagree with that policy, but until a Democratic President sits in the Oval Office who agrees with them, they must accept it.

The House Democrats know they have no evidence upon which they can reasonably impeach the President. So they’ve invented a new legal standard they believe voters might buy. They hope that, with all of their smoke and mirrors, they can hoodwink the American people into thinking they just don’t understand. More simply, they are lying. Again.