Kadin
Member
Larry Flynt's ad in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post is hard to miss.
For one, it takes up a full page. And there are no pictures — just bold, all-caps text dominating the top third of the page:
”$10 MILLION FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO THE IMPEACHMENT AND REMOVAL FROM OFFICE OF DONALD J. TRUMP."
Flynt, best known as the publisher of the pornographic magazine Hustler, outlined numerous reasons he felt President Trump needed to be removed from office, charging him with everything from ”compromising domestic and foreign policy with his massive conflicts-of-interest global business empire" to ”telling hundreds of bald-faced lies" to ”gross nepotism and appointment of unqualified persons to high office."
That was why, Flynt wrote, he was seeking information from anyone who could provide a ”smoking gun" — perhaps buried in Trump's tax returns or in some other investment records — that would lead to his impeachment.
Washington Post
Full Page Ad
Text Form:
The attempt to impeach Donald Trump will strike many as a sour-grapes plot by Democrats to overturn a legitimate election. But there is a strong case to be made that the last election was illegitimate in many ways – and that after nine tumultuous months in office, Trump has proven he's dangerously unfit to exercise the extreme power accrued by our new ”unitary executive."
After losing the popular vote, Trump was installed only by the quirks of our antiquated Electoral College, enacted as a concession to lower-population slave states allowed to count slaves as three-fifths of a citizen, even though they couldn't vote – a real anachronism in a multicultural society still struggling for racial equality and tolerance. The Electoral College violates the ”one man, one vote" principle, valuing Wyoming voters, for instance, at 3.6 times more than California voters.
It was also designed as a firewall against an unstable demagogue. Alexander Hamilton hoped that electors would prevent a President ”with talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity," a man ”not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications," or one who allowed ”foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils" – in other words, a man exactly like Donald Trump. Ironically, the Electoral College backfired in 2016, and it's arguable that Trump did not even win that tally fairly.
After the 2010 census, Republicans went on a scorched-earth spree of gerrymandering – the ”most extreme gerrymanders in modern history," according to separate studies by the AP, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and the Princeton University Gerrymandering Project. The practice was most acute in the battleground states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida – that Trump won. Had those states not been skewed with unearned representatives and electors, Trump probably would have lost. But there was another cheat going on to ensure a virtually stolen election: Kris Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck system purged up to 1.1 million voters before the 2016 election simply because they shared the same first and last names. Conveniently, one in six Hispanics and one in nine African-Americans were on the list of 7 million ”suspects" in 28 states – voters unlikely to cast a ballot for Trump. The third cheat was the Trump team's still cryptic collusion with Russian agents to influence the election in his favor. Combined, these three shenanigans rigged the outcome against a nearly 3-million vote plurality for Clinton.
Of course, this skullduggery alone does not make the absolute moral or legal case needed for impeachment. The Constitution mandates ”Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors." So here are the charges:
1) Colluding with a hostile foreign power to rig our election, and obstruction of justice in the firing of FBI Director James Comey.
2) Inciting Civil strife with his racial dog-whistling and unconscionable defense of the KKK and neo-Nazis after the Charlottesville riots.
3) Compromising domestic and foreign policy with his massive conflicts-of-interest global business empire.
4) Telling hundreds of bald-faced lies, and complete ignorance of world affairs.
5) Gross nepotism and appointment of unqualified persons to high office.
6) Sabotaging the 195-nation Paris accords to save the planet from future climate cataclysm. If that is not at least a misdemeanor, the term is meaningless.
But most worrisome is that, long before climate-change apocalypse strikes, Trump might trigger a nuclear war. His foreign policy decisions have been marked not by sober reflection, but thin-skinned emotion and erratic, ill-advised tweets, often at odds with established policy. In a meeting with a foreign policy consultant before his election, Trump inquired three times as to why the U.S. can't use nuclear weapons. Given his impulsive blustering and megalomania (actually equating himself to Lincoln), this is truly horrifying.
Impeachment would be a messy, contentious affair, but the alternative – three more years of destabilizing dysfunction – is worse. Both good Democrats and good Republicans who put country over party did it before with Watergate. To succeed, impeachment requires unimpeachable evidence. That's why I'm making this offer: Buried in Trump's top-secret tax returns or in other records from his far-flung investments there may be a smoking gun. Did he make some financial quid pro quo with the Russians? Has the business of the United States been compromised to protect the business of the Trump empire? We need to flush everything out into the open.
This is not my first rodeo: I offered rewards for information that led to both the resignation of former Speaker of the House-Elect Bob Livingston (who spearheaded the Clinton impeachment effort) and the exposure of Senator David Vitter's prostitution scandal. For the current crisis, I have upped the anti to $10 million. I do not expect any of Trump's billionaire cronies to rat him out, but I am confident that there are many people in the know for whom $10 million is a lot of money. And just because you pay for information doesn't mean it's not good. Make no mistake, I fully intend to pay this entire sum. Sure, I could use that $10 million to buy luxuries or further my businesses, but what could would that do me in a world devastated by the most powerful moron in history?'
