I’ve seen it said a lot that the President isn’t technically guilty of bribery. I’ve said as much myself, arguing that his behavior looks more like extortion than bribery. However, watching Cass Sunstein on All In with Chris Hayes last night, I realized that I have been thinking about the charge pretty sloppily.
Upon further review, it actually looks to me like the House Intelligence committee has gathered evidence sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president has committed bribery. When you lay out carefully the definition of bribery under federal criminal law and the conduct of the president that has been powerfully and clearly established, the fact that he committed the criminal act of bribery becomes plain.
18 USC Section 201(b)(2) defines bribery as follows:
(2)being a public official or person selected to be a public official, directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for:
Emphasis added.
The reason what the President was doing didn’t look like bribery to me was that I was looking at it from only one direction. The President appears to have been withholding legitimate support from the Ukraine in order to induce the President of the Ukraine to do him a personal political favor. That is very corrupt and problematic in many ways, but it is not exactly bribery, it looks more like extortion.
But when viewed as soliciting rather than offering a bribe, it becomes clear that Donald Trump was, in fact, guilty of bribery as defined under federal law.
Trump demanded something that would benefit him personally before he would perform the official acts of releasing military aid and extending an invitation to the White House — clear cut bribery.
Trump’s actions are so clearly wrong on so many levels that it might seem trivial that what he did meets the statutory definition of bribery, but it’s significant because the impeachment clause enumerates “Treason, Bribery, and other High Crimes and Misdemeanors” as the grounds for impeachment. If bribery can be proven against him, then the House and Senate don’t have to deal with quibbling over the meaning of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which steals an opportunity from the President’s defenders to cloud the issue.