Time to impeach

Former Trump transition team member says it's time to impeach Trump

By Mike Moffitt

A law professor who has worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years — including Donald Trump's — is calling on Congress to impeach the president.

In a first-person article for The Atlantic, J.W. Verret of the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School said that after reading the Mueller report twice over the weekend, he concluded that "enough was enough."

Verret joined the Trump transition team in August 2016, but left two months later after it became apparent that the candidate's views on immigration, trade and financial regulation clashed with his own.

Here is the case Verret gives for impeachment:

— "Politics is a team sport, and if you actively work within a political party, there is some expectation that you will follow orders and rally behind the leader, even when you disagree. There is a point, though, at which that expectation turns from a mix of loyalty and pragmatism into something more sinister, a blind devotion that serves to enable criminal conduct. The Mueller report was that tipping point for me."

— "In the face of a Department of Justice policy that prohibited him from indicting a sitting president, Mueller drafted what any reasonable reader would see as a referral to Congress to commence impeachment hearings."

— "Depending on how you count, roughly a dozen separate instances of obstruction of justice are contained in the Mueller report. The president dangled pardons in front of witnesses to encourage them to lie to the special counsel, and directly ordered people to lie to throw the special counsel off the scent."

Verret says there's enough in the report to justify impeachment proceedings, the Constitution's version of grand jury investigation carried out by the House of Representatives.