The report of the House Judiciary Committee concerning the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump is taking Democrats’ accusations against him to a new level, suggesting that he has committed “treason,” and is a threat to the national security of the United States.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler was quite explicit: “The Framers [of the Constitution] worst nightmare is what we are facing in this very moment. President Trump abused his power, betrayed our national security, and corrupted our elections, all for personal gain. The Constitution details only one remedy for this misconduct: impeachment.”
Actually, the Framers were quite explicit as to what constituted treason, making it the only crime exactly defined in the Constitution. In Article III, Section 3, the Constitution states, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”
The Framers disagreed on many things, but they did agree that a charge of treason should not be made lightly. They knew their history. They knew that political disagreements had often been settled with the executioner’s axe, on trumped up charges of treason. King Henry VIII, for example, often used treason to silence his critics, even having his second wife, Anne Boleyn, executed on a treason charge connected with a flimsy accusation of adultery. Not long after the Framers adopted the Constitution in 1787, the nation of France was to experience the horror of the Reign of Terror in which the guillotine was routinely used to silence political opponents with charges of treason, leveled for disagreeing with the radical leftists who had seized control of the country.
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In the last century, socialist dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin routinely considered disagreement with them as grounds for a treason charge.
William Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts, even recently suggested the death penalty for Trump: “It’s treason pure and simple. The penalty for treason under the U.S. code is death. That’s the only penalty.”
Amazingly, the Libertarian Party nominated Weld for vice president in 2016. While he doesn’t sound very “libertarian” (he is also an ardent gun-control advocate), the presidential candidate that year for the so-called Libertarians was the former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, who called religious liberty a “dark hole.”
Certainly President Trump has not made war on the United States, so his accusers must be using the second part of the Constitution’s “treason” definition: “adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”
The Democrats (no Republicans in the House have indicated any interest in impeaching Trump, making the entire sordid affair a highly partisan effort), in order to make their case, have added to the Framers’ definition of treason, saying that Trump had committed “betrayal of the Nation through schemes with foreign powers.” They reference the phone call that Trump made with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump asked Zelensky to check out the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating, for corruption, a natural gas company — Burisma — on whose board sat Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice President Joe Biden. Interestingly, the Democrats and their allies in the media have no interest in Joe Biden’s pressuring Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company that Biden’s son was an officer of.
This, however, combined with their unfounded charge that Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election, is the basis of the Democrats’ treason accusation. Despite the Mueller report, which found no evidence of any such collusion after two years of investigations, the Democratic Party leadership is continuing to assert that there was collusion between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This accusation presumes certain things, one of which is that Russia is an “enemy” of the United States under the constitutional definition of “enemy.” But since the United States has never lodged any declaration of war against Russia, that would seem to be a difficult argument to make, even if it were true that Trump had colluded with Putin. Under that specious reasoning, did previous U.S. presidents, going back to Franklin Roosevelt also commit treason for dealing with Soviet dictators such as Stalin, Kruschev, and Gorbachev?
More specifically, in 2012, President Obama was overheard over a hot microphone telling President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia he would have “more flexibility” to negotiate with Putin after the election.
For that matter, did Biden commit treason when he pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor? After all, the Democratic reasoning is that any pressure on Ukraine is giving aid and comfort to Russia.
Actually, Obama and Clinton refused to give lethal weapons to Ukraine to help them defend themselves against an aggressive Putin-led Russia, and in contrast, it was Trump who gave such weapons to Ukraine.
But the accusation is that Trump has conspired with Russia against Ukraine and has therefore committed treason. Under this reasoning, Ukraine is, ergo, indistinguishable from the United States, since one can only commit treason by betraying his own country. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN recently, “In my view, Ukraine is very — all about Russia because withholding or granting military assistance to Ukraine was all to the benefit of Russia to hold up that aid.”
So, despite no direct evidence that any quid pro quo existed between Trump’s reasonable request to the Ukrainian president to investigate corruption involving the Bidens, the Democrats appear to be moving forward with treason charges that would fit more with a Henry VIII, an Adolf Hitler, or a Joseph Stalin than what one should expect in a constitutional republic such as the United States.
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Steve Byas is a university history and government instructor and author of History’s Greatest Libels. He may be contacted at [email protected]
