It is pretty well established that the House Democrats are pressing forward to build a colorable case for impeachment. On ABC’s This Week, Fat Jerry Nadler announced that President Trump had obstructed justice.

NADLER: Well, we’ll see. I mean, that’s — that’s — we’ll see about that.

But we’re far from making decisions on that, because we have to look into — our core job is to protect the rule of law, and there have been no investigations. We’ve seen real threats to the rule of law from this White House, whether personal enrichment — the White House seems to have used its power for personal enrichment in violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, we’ve seen abuses of power, obstruction of justice, threats to the Mueller investigation, threats to witnesses, all of these have to be an abuse of — all of these have to be investigated and laid out to the American people.

(As an aside, Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway roasted National Review’s pompous scold, David French, over the pretty clear double standard he is showing over this versus how he treated Devin Nunes. Well worth the read.)

To that end, Michael Cohen has testified and the House has sent out a wide ranging series of demand letters:

The House Judiciary Committee sent more than 80 letters demanding all communications from a host of controversies surrounding Trump, as the panel probes whether the president and his administration have engaged in obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power.

Running in parallel to that is an effort to paint as improper the actual execution of presidential authority. This is part of what Nadler was referring to when he said, “Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen.”

A hearing is being ginned up on how Jared Kushner received a security clearance, despite it being perfectly legal.

It is anticipated that the prospective veto by Trump of a joint resolution setting aside his emergency declaration on the border will be used as evidence of abuse of power despite both the declaration and veto being legitimate exercises of power.

The most clever and most blatantly bullsh** action in this regard concerns President Trump’s meetings with Vladimir Putin.

Three key House chairmen on Monday formally asked the White House and the State Department for documents and witness interviews related to President Donald Trump’s communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The leaders of the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight Committees are giving White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo until March 15 to turn over “all documents and communications, regardless of form and classification, that refer or relate to any communications between President Trump and President Putin, including in-person meetings and telephone calls.”

They are also demanding that the White House and the State Department make employees with knowledge of the Trump-Putin talks available for interviews with the committees.

The joint request from Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel and Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings comes as Democrats continue to flex their investigative muscles under their new House majority, with a focus on Trump’s posture toward the Kremlin.

This demand is unprecedented. The Congress had no legal right to have access to any presidential communication with anyone. It definitely doesn’t have a right to demand access to conversations held with foreign leaders. It also shows that Trump was either prescient, or well-advised, to not create any record of those conversations because if he had partial and out-of-context quotes would have been released for the purpose of embarrassing or damaging him. Schiff is probably pissed because he hasn’t been able to leak the transcripts to CNN.

Of course, the Democrats know this. They know the White House will refuse to comply. And they will, like with the emergency declaration and the Kushner clearance, have more stuff to throw against the wall in hopes that the public sees “abuse of power” somewhere in the mess.

Despite what Nadler says about having to convince the people, including a lot of Trump supporters, that impeachment isn’t simply payback for sending Hillary stumbling off, blind drunk, into the Chappaqua wilderness, he’s lying. He will hold impeachment hearings and the House will vote to impeach. They’ll do that because they have to. As I posted in President Trump Is Going To Be Impeached The Question Is How Much Damage It Does.

President Trump will be impeached.

The odds of him being removed from office is very low but the odds of him being impeached by the House of Representatives approaches 100%. Despite the noises you are hearing from the Democrat party and its Congressional caucus, the House Democrats can’t not impeach Trump for several reasons.

First, they have to even the score for Clinton. Clinton’s impeachment is still believed to be a wildly radical and improper step taken by a highly partisan special prosecutor and getting their own back will be just too great a temptation to resist.

Second, they want to put an asterisk by Trump’s election. The whole Russia-collusion narrative is being exposed for the utter bullsh** rational people always knew it to be. In its place they are going to use President Trump’s payments to two mistresses as a way of locking in their narrative that Trump won by cheating. As Nadler says, “they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.”

Third, their base demands it and will punish them if they don’t.

Fourth, impeachment will take place as the 2020 primary season gets underway and they undoubtedly feel the best campaign advertisement for the Democrats will be lengthy House Judiciary Committee hearings, covered gavel-to-gavel by CNN and MSNBC as well as extensive play in the New York Times and Washington Post, where Trump can be attacked and where there will be virtually no significant coverage of his defenders. If the Senate drags its feet, that will be a further point of attack. It the Senate votes to acquit, yet another vulnerable flank is revealed.

The long term damage done by this is not going to be trivial. If Trump is re-elected, then he would, and should, be expected to try to exact vengeance on these people using the full force of federal law enforcement. It is difficult to believe that the FBI doesn’t know about Schiff’s history of leaking and you can’t look at Nadler and not imagine him driving a windowless van with a teddy bear stenciled on it (NTTAWWT). The final result is going to be scorched earth that will, I think, inevitably cut against the Democrats. And, unfortunately, it is going to cut against the nation also.

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