After Michael Flynn's guilty plea, patience Remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson, and wait for Mueller's evidence: Our view

The Editorial Board | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Flynn says Trump transition team directed him As part of a plea deal, former national security adviser Michael Flynn has admitted that a senior member of the Trump transition team directed him to make contact with Russian officials in December 2016. (Dec. 1)

Michael Flynn's guilty plea does not look good for President Trump. Trump had been warned by the previous administration that the retired general was legally compromised and yet hired him anyway as his first national security adviser. That Flynn now has admitted to lying to the FBI only underscores Trump’s horrendous judgment.

But those Democrats and never-Trumpers who see this as the next step toward impeachment should cool their jets. No judgment should be made until special counsel Robert Mueller presents his full case. And even then, the American people should have a say on the matter.

Though Flynn is the fourth person publicly known to have pleaded guilty or been indicted, his case is the first to concern activities after the election, and the second directly tied to the campaign or presidential transition.

The best case for a cautious approach comes from less than two decades ago. When former president Bill Clinton was shown to have had a sexual relationship with a White House intern (after denying such a relationship in an adamant declaration to the American public), his hold on the presidency looked tenuous.

But the harder a Republican Congress pushed on impeachment, the more it helped Clinton's cause. His highest approval ratings — 73% according to Gallup — came in the middle of the impeachment process.

The Republicans of 1998 tried way too hard and failed to comprehend something that Alexander Hamilton noted in The Federalist Papers — that an impeachment is an inherently political event. Without the public behind them, their appeals to the rule of law and the sanctity of the process meant little.

In fact, the Republicans' sanctimonious approach only harmed their case. They dismissed the one thing that resonated with the public, Clinton’s abhorrent behavior, arguing that their case was not about sex but perjury and obstruction of justice, a difficult case to make after Clinton finally admitted to the relationship before a grand jury.

Likewise, support for Trump's impeachment will not stem from legal technicalities or what we know so far about lies told to the FBI. The president will lose or retain his office based on public judgment of his behavior.

The other presidential impeachment, that of Andrew Johnson in 1867, also holds importance for today. After the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, the country was left with a Democratic president (chosen as a running mate by Lincoln in a bid for national unity) and an overwhelmingly Republican Congress. The effort failed in the Senate when seven Republicans reasoned that policy differences with the president were not sufficient grounds to remove him from office. The seventh and deciding vote, Edmund Ross of Kansas, would later by lionized be John F. Kennedy in his book Profiles in Courage.

Pushing too hard can backfire. Mueller has made rapid progress but has not presented any direct evidence that Trump’s team colluded with the Russians in the 2016 election. Nor has he marshaled an argument that Trump’s actions since taking office — including allegedly asking FBI Director James Comey to go easy on Flynn, or the subsequent firing of Comey — are themselves impeachable offenses.

In a time when Trump's intemperate tweets and childish insults roil domestic politics, shatter basic standards of decency, and raise the temperature in international disputes with potential nuclear consequences, the temptation to call for impeachment grows by the day.

Patience is harder to muster than evidence that Trump's presidency has already had profoundly destructive consequences for the nation. In the end, though, patience will be just as important as Mueller's evidence — before we can return to a competent government of which we can all be proud.

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