When your president is a national security threat

Presidents have, of course, acted inappropriately in the past, and our constitutional system has a framework in place for addressing misconduct by the chief executive. But it’s designed to deal with straightforward criminal activity, not national security threats. The special counsel regulations, for example, were created to deal with a Watergate-like situation as a worst-case scenario. So they take into account the need for an investigation insulated from political influence and give special counsels the ability to make prosecutorial decisions independently of the rest of the Justice Department or the attorney general. The rules even envision a report that might be made public.

This approach is appropriate when an investigation involves collecting evidence that can hold up in a court of law. But it is inadequate to address potentially noncriminal conduct that may nevertheless endanger the national security of the United States.

This split was evident in the report on the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, submitted by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Although Mueller’s mandate was broad, and potentially encompassed a counterintelligence investigation, he narrowed the scope of his inquiry to criminal matters. The final report lays out only the decisions to charge or not charge individuals based on the evidence collected, noting only briefly that counterintelligence information was shared with the FBI for use in its (presumably ongoing) classified investigation. As a result, the public remains in the dark on whether Trump may be wittingly or unwittingly compromised in his dealings with Russia, or if the FBI and the intelligence community have information to explain his oddly submissive behavior with world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin.

  WaPo

I think it's pretty obvious.

Very few people seem to know what’s going on with the counterintelligence investigation: Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee chairman, has said that his panel doesn’t know the status of the probe, or even if it’s still going on, even though the law requires the administration to keep the lawmakers up to date.

But counterintelligence investigations are stymied if they involve the president.

That's why the framers gave Congress the power to impeach.

Counterintelligence investigations [...] seek to monitor and neutralize national security threats behind the scenes, which means the public has no way of tracking their progress. And the normal ways of resolving counterintelligence threats — like blocking a compromised subject’s access to classified information — don’t work with the president, who controls what is and isn’t classified and is the ultimate consumer of the intelligence the government collects.

[...]

In a normal case not involving the president, the inspector general’s conclusion that a complaint was credible and urgent would make it to Congress, with commentary from the director of national intelligence if he chose to add it. Congress would review the complaint and decide whether to take action: Lawmakers could hold hearings, request additional information from the agency involved in the complaint, and ensure that any misconduct is addressed or corrected within the agency.

[...]

If a call is about official foreign policy positions of the executive branch, for example, the president might have strong grounds to keep the content confidential — part of the president’s job is negotiating with foreign leaders, and to do that he must be able to assure his counterparts that their discussions won’t be made public. Even George Washington refused to turn over diplomatic communications to Congress.

And because the procedure for handling whistleblower complaints related to intelligence doesn’t address — or really even contemplate — what might happen if the president is endangering national security, there’s plenty of room for the chief executive to cloak unlawful actions in presidential authority, making them harder to detect.

[...]

Without oversight or accountability, neither Congress nor the public has a way to know, for example, if the president is using his powers as leverage for a country to confer a benefit to him personally or to undermine the integrity of our democratic processes in his favor.

Rudy Giuliani has made it abundantly clear in this case.

And if Trump wins any litigation, that might mean that even the ultimate check on presidential abuse — impeachment — would be nearly impossible on national security grounds: Congress isn’t likely to bring articles of impeachment if it is prevented from obtaining the evidence that would form the basis for them.

The framers of the Constitution did foresee the possibility of a presidential candidate who might be compromised or beholden to a foreign power: The electoral college was intended to act as a second fail-safe in the event of poor voter judgment, if a truly dangerous candidate came along.

Yea, how'd that work out for us?

Like the breach of multiple hulls in the Titanic, the mechanisms designed to keep our democracy afloat are giving way one by one.

A GOP wet dream, never mind Putin.

Are we now in a full-blown Constitutional crisis?