Yes - There Was A Crime

Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker:

(there's a full audio at the link above, but I couldn't figure out how to embed it)

For now, Sekulow and Cobb are sticking to their original strategy. They have advertised their willingness to coöperate with Mueller as a sign that Trump has nothing to hide, and their reaction to Flynn’s guilty plea reflects this view. “Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr. Flynn,” Cobb said. With regard to Mueller’s broader investigation, the White House lawyers’ position continues to be that President Trump didn’t commit a crime because no one did—or could—because there is no federal crime called “collusion,” and Rosenstein’s order did not refer to any criminal statutes that may have been violated. In several conversations with me, Sekulow emphasized that collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, even if it did take place, wouldn’t be illegal. “For something to be a crime, there has to be a statute that you claim is being violated,” Sekulow told me. “There is not a statute that refers to criminal collusion. There is no crime of collusion.”

The Mueller investigation appears to consist, roughly, of three areas of inquiry. The first focusses on illegal lobbying by people affiliated with the Trump campaign; the second relates to the hacking of e-mail accounts associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee; and the third involves possible obstruction of justice by Trump and others after he was inaugurated. (Mueller’s office declined to comment.)
- and -

The broad outlines of the grounds for impeachment are more or less settled. Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, who recently published “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, “The Framers wanted some kind of check on the executive, but they didn’t want to see impeachments for routine disagreements between Congress and the White House. They wanted to preserve the separation of powers, so they tried to set out criteria which would not compromise the executive branch.” One rule that’s clear is that an impeachable offense doesn’t have to be an actual crime. For example, a President who joined a religious order and took a vow of silence would surely be impeached without having committed a crime. At the same time, not all criminal offenses are supposed to be impeachable. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, impeachable offenses must involve “abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

It seems clear, too, that a President can be impeached for conduct that took place before he took office, especially if the misdeeds led to his electoral victory. George Mason, one of the most eloquent of the Framers, asked rhetorically during the Constitutional Convention, “Shall the man who has practiced corruption & by that means procured his appointment in the first instance, be suffered to escape punishment, by repeating his guilt?” As Sunstein told me, “If you procure your office by corrupt means, that would be an impeachable offense.”

The unusual facts of the Russia investigation may implicate another, lesser-known part of the impeachment provision in the Constitution. Article I states that a President can also be impeached and removed for treason and bribery. Treason is defined in the Constitution as “levying war” against the United States, which seems inapplicable to Trump’s conduct, but his business dealings with Russian interests may yet produce evidence of bribery. Trump’s financial affairs, especially with regard to Russia, remain opaque, but it’s possible to imagine how they might give rise to an impeachable offense. A straight payoff to Trump—cash in return for, say, a relaxation of the sanctions imposed by President Obama on the Putin regime—would certainly be impeachable even if it were not technically a crime under American law. Trump’s known business dealings suggest the possibility of a quid pro quo with Russian interests. In 2015, for example, Trump signed a “letter of intent” to build a tower in Moscow. Felix Sater, a Russian associate of Trump’s, wrote of the project, in an e-mail to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. . . . I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” That deal never came to fruition, but the intent expressed on both sides is deeply troubling.