Ben Bear
Ben Bear
Nov 4 · 3 min read

Hi Caleb,

First thing, thank you for your reply. I value your willingness to engage in debate and hope we can continue.

I think your characterizations of Trump as “not a Boy Scout" may be a bit disingenuous. Perhaps I am making invalid assumptions about your point of view, but I think any one of those points would have made any Fox commentator lose their freaking mind. I doubt that their reaction would have been to say that Obama or Hillary were not Boy or Girl Scouts.

Second, I am not particularly OK with relatives of politicians profiting from that connection. Nor am I OK with politicians violating the emoluments clause of the constitution. Nor am I ok with political donors profiting from their contributions. I would heartily endorse prosecuting any of that behavior that is illegal and passing laws to make illegal any aspect of that behavior which is legal now.

However, that has almost nothing to do with the current fact set. The prosecutor that Joe Biden and all the Western Democracies sought to have removed was a source of corruption, not an antagonist. The story that his dismissal was somehow corrupt is the invention of a corrupt oligarch, trying to create a political basis for withdrawl of charges in the US courts. If you want to find corruption in Ukraine, you need look no further than Manafort, Guiliani, Perry, Lev and Igor. Biden bringing the request to have the corrupt prosecutor removed was an act “against interest" his son’s company had already been cleared.

And if Trump was truly concerned with unfair profiteering from familial political connection, he has plenty to investigate with Jared, Ivanka, Don Jr., and Erik.

To your last point, about Hillary and the Steele dossier, there is no law against investigating a political opponent’s foreign dealings, or employing foreign nationals to conduct such an investigation. It was not illegal when Cruz employed Fusion GPS, it did not become illegal when Hillary paid for the research.

There are laws against accepting anything of value from a foreign national in the course of a political campaign or as an official of the US Government. Those are campaign finance laws, and the emoluments clauses and bribery laws. Violating these laws doesn’t mean you are not a Boy Scout; it means you are acting as an agent of a foreign power. And if that foreign power is a hostile authoritarian kleptocracy like Russia, we are getting close to treason territory. Withholding the military assistance that the Congress and US foreign policy dictated was not in the US national interest, but it certainly was in Putin’s, helping to weaken Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression.

So, if you want a better analogy, how about Trump giving the green light to Turkey attacking our Kurdish allies, freeing Isis prisoners, because he has a hotel in Istanbul and they were absent from the fight in Normandy like he was absent from Vietnam?

I don’t think the Ukraine call is even in my top 10 reasons why Trump is unfit to be president. It may be like arresting Al Capone for tax evasion. But I’ll take it. Particularly as we have a full confession on the record, and unless he is held to account, he will certainly repeat the crime.

But my biggest concern is if you and other Americans think the process is fundamentally illegitimate or if Trump is voted out and refuse to accept the results. I take the Trump’s threats to declare himself above the law and to call his supporters to violence seriously.

And so, that is why I am so interested in persuading you. Impeachment is a political process, not a judicial one. So my next question for you is this, even if you disagree with the grounds, do you see the process as illegitimate and unconstitutional such that you think an armed insurrection is the appropriate response? Why or why not?

Thanks for the dialog.

Ben

    Ben Bear

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    Ben Bear