In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, in that:

On June 17, 1972, and prior thereto, agents of the Committee for the Re-election of the President committed unlawful entry of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, District of Columbia, for the purpose of securing political intelligence. Subsequent thereto, Richard M. Nixon, using the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of such illegal entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.

Nixon in the Oval Office Don Carl STEFFEN Getty Images

The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan included one or more of the following:

1. Making false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;

2. Withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;

3. Approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counselling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States and false or misleading testimony in duly instituted judicial and congressional proceedings;

4. Interfering or endeavouring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees; ...

Richard Nixon departs by helicopter after his resignation, August 9, 1974. Bill Pierce Getty Images

9. Endeavouring to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favoured treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony, or rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.

In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

—Article I, The Impeachment of Richard Nixon, Passed by The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, July 27, 1974.

Just so we're all on the same page.

By now, practically everybody is aware of the BuzzFeed News bombshell that pretty much fits the president* for some leg-irons.

Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement. The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.

If this reporting is accurate, then either this is the ballgame, or Richard Nixon was the victim of the worst miscarriage of justice in the history of western jurisprudence. There seems to be no question that Cohen was under oath when he told the lies the president* allegedly told him to tell. He lied to Congress because the president* told him to do so. Lying under oath is precisely why John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, Jeb Magruder, and Dwight Chapin all went to prison. The lying under oath, of course, was part and parcel of a conspiracy to obstruct justice, which was the reason why even more of Nixon people went up the river. If the BuzzFeed reporting is correct, this president* is as crooked as Nixon ever was.

The Washington Post Getty Images

And what was the immediate response from Rudy Giuliani, Esq., Attorney at Law?

If you believe Cohen, I can get you a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.

That's all they had. That's pathetic.

There is no reason anymore for the House Judiciary Committee to delay at least opening its own inquiry into whether or not the president* is liable to impeachment. Yoni Appelbaum made the case in compelling fashion in a story in The Atlantic that was released Thursday morning, which makes me wonder what kind of deal Appelbaum cut with the Journalism Fates.

Trump’s actions during his first two years in office clearly meet, and exceed, the criteria to trigger this fail-safe. But the United States has grown wary of impeachment. The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order.

That is precisely backwards. It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed. Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits—to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system—accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.

During the extended Watergate investigations, we had the Senate Watergate Committee, chaired by the late Sam Ervin and, later, the House Judiciary Committee investigation, led by the late John Doar, and both of these went on simultaneously with the probe being conducted by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. All three of these investigations had different missions. They occasionally rubbed each other the wrong way. They occasionally stepped on each other's toes.

John Doar sits at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on the impeachment of Richard Nixon, April 25, 1974. David Hume Kennerly Getty Images

In Not Above The Law, his superb account of his days as the public face of the Watergate Special Force, James Doyle explained how that body's purpose differed from that of the House Judiciary Committee's. Doyle writes that Doar and special-prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had replaced the fired Archibald Cox, circled each other warily. "John Doar began meeting with Jaworski, but the meetings proved unproductive," Doyle writes. "Jaworski did not want the evidence he had fought for to be squandered in a leaking match between Republican and Democratic members of the House." Nevertheless, the prosecutor's office did its job, and the committee did its job, and the nation was rid of Richard Nixon by the end of the summer of 1974.

In other words, the systems necessarily to decide whether or not to get rid of a president can work in ultimate (if uneasy) harmony, and all of them can accomplish their independent missions. Waiting For Mueller is now an unacceptable and inadequate response from the national legislature. Mueller's job is to see if the president* and his minions should go to jail. The House's job is to determine if the president* should not be the president* anymore. Jaworski sent John Mitchell to prison. John Doar sent Richard Nixon home. Both outcomes were just, even with the Gerry Ford ex machina of the Nixon pardon.

It's time.

Just so we're all on the same page.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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