Yes, Trump will be impeached again – and he’ll deserve it

Roll up, roll up, for the great Trump corruption hearings. The 120th Congress is set to be a three-ring circus of banging gavels, evasive witnesses and furious denials as some two dozen overlapping hearings get under way, right after new members of Congress are sworn in on 3 January. And despite public caution by senior Democrats, the most likely outcome is that Donald Trump will be impeached a third time. A reckoning may await the whole “Trump crime family”, a phrase that comes from Robert Garcia, in line to take over the House Oversight Committee. Garcia promises to be a star of this Congress. On election night, he posted two words of advice for the Trumps: “Lawyer up.” Garcia says he has four investigations ready: into the Trump family’s various businesses, the conduct of ICE and Homeland Security, corporate corruption and Jeffrey Epstein. His committee – and several other congressional inquiries – will pay particular attention to Trump’s crypto schemes. Reuters puts the family’s take from four crypto ventures at $2.3bn, despite the value of the meme coins they’ve issued crashing, losing many investors money. Crypto has become a way to pay money to Trump and his family in plain sight. An investment fund belonging to an Emirati royal, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is putting $500m into World Liberty Financial, the family’s crypto firm. A Chinese crypto billionaire, Justin Sun, secured a place at a dinner with the President after buying around $20m of Trump’s memecoin.And it’s not just crypto. Jamie Raskin, expected to chair the Judiciary Committee, told the New Yorker that the executive branch had become “a money-making operation for what’s essentially a Mob boss, and they’ve given us a gangster state”. There’s a lot of ground for Congressional subpoenas to cover. The $400m jet from Qatar, the White House ballroom (paid for by corporate donors that have received billions in federal contracts), the no-bid contracts awarded to restore the Reflecting Pool in Washington, which became a Trump fixation. Donald Trump speaking to reporters at the site of the White House ballroom the day after the midterms (Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) Then there’s the family. Garcia’s Oversight Committee will likely look at why Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, got $2bn from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Raskin has called Kushner “a billion-dollar bagman, essentially”. There will also be an inquiry into a $620m government loan to a company that counts Donald Trump Jr’s firm, 1789 Capital, as a major investor. Don Jr will, meanwhile, have questions to answer about why he let a Russian oligarch pay for his expensive wedding party in the Bahamas (after the news broke, the President said his son had paid the money back). And it’s not just the family that are likely to be under the spotlight. Tom Homan, Trump’s border tsar, allegedly took $50,000 passed to him in a restaurant take-out bag by undercover FBI agents running a corruption sting. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager and later at Homeland Security, is accused of asking for money to help with visa applications from Middle Eastern countries. All have denied any wrongdoing. But Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat who will run the Senate’s investigations subcommittee, said: “The tentacles of corruption reach deep in this administration.” Richard Blumenthal during a forum on Donald Trump’s crypto dealings on 27 July (Photo: Finn Gomez/Getty Images) Congressional inquiries into Jeffrey Epstein hold peculiar danger for Trump. While he’s not the direct target of the renewed focus, he could easily get caught up in its fallout. Last year, Congress forced the release of the Epstein files after Trump’s Department of Justice sat on them, with Democrats and Republicans coming together to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. A Maga base that spent years believing in a cover-up could now be persuaded to question why Trump delayed releasing the files. Trump – always ready to go on the attack about almost any subject or person – has largely ignored corruption allegations. When questioned directly by The New York Times, he said he “found out that nobody cared” about conflicts of interest during his first term. But back then the questions were about a few million dollars in bookings by foreign governments at Trump hotels – now it’s about billions in crypto payments. About half of voters told the AP’s exit poll that the issue of government corruption had been “crucial” to their voting decision in the midterm elections, which resulted in humiliating losses for Trump’s Republican Party. So far, Democratic Party leaders in the House are being careful. Pete Aguilar, the caucus chairman, said there are “literally no meetings that we walk into as Democrats where people are talking about impeaching Donald Trump”. Hakeem Jeffries, the presumptive next Speaker of the House, said he had yet to make up his mind, but that the “American people clearly don’t want us to try and get even”. A New York Times front page showing the acquittal of Donald Trump in February 2021, with the Senate voting 57-43 to convict him of inciting a riot on January 6, 2021, which fell short of the required two-thirds majority needed to convict him (Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images) Don’t believe the denials, however. The Democrats know they cannot look too eager to bring charges against Trump and those around him – especially if they are to carry any Republicans with them. The House votes to impeach by simple majority, the Senate convicts only by two-thirds of those present. The Democrats will have 54 senators, maybe 56, and will need around 67 votes. But once the investigations start, impeachment will start to feel all but inevitable. After the committees publish their evidence, the political cost of retreating would be too high for most Democrats. Trump has said this would be “impeachment for no reason”. Asked if he was worried, he replied: “Not even a little bit.” Nevertheless, the question of impeachment will dominate the political conversation in the US – and could overshadow what’s left of his final term in office.