repeatedly attacking the news media.
Like Green, Cohen is aware that there
is not yet a consensus in favor of im-
peachment, even among Democrats,
but he is determined to plow ahead.
“It’s a moral decision to do the right
thing, regardless of the politics,” he told
me. “Sometimes going on the record
against evil may not make you efective
at first in stopping evil, but it can still
contribute in ways you don’t know.”
Jamie Raskin, a first-term Democrat
from Maryland who was recently named
vice-chair of the Judiciary Committee,
told me, “It’s hard to think of a more
impeachable President in American his-
tory.” As the only constitutional-law
professor who is a voting member of
Congress—he teaches at the law school
of American University—Raskin has
been adding intellectual heft to the im-
peachment efort. “By firing Comey and
waging war on the special counsel,
Trump has become the master of ob-
structing justice,” he told me. “I have a
thick notebook of obstruction-of-jus-
tice episodes.” He listed, among other
things, Trump’s threats against Attor-
ney General Jef Sessions; Rod Rosen-
stein, Sessions’s deputy; and Andrew
McCabe, the former deputy director of
the F.B.I. Raskin said, “It’s only because
we’re waist-deep in the Trump era that
we forget how completely radical and
beyond the pale it is to have the Pres-
ident directly threatening the people
who are involved in a criminal investi-
gation of him.”
Raskin told me that the foreign-emol-
uments clause “doesn’t get enough play,
because it’s unfamiliar, and it’s unfamil-
iar because no other President ever came
close to violating it before. But Trump
has turned the federal government into
a money-making operation, which is just
what the Framers feared.” Raskin cited
the many foreign guests with business
interests before the Administration who
have stayed at the Trump International
Hotel, in Washington, as well as the
business deals conducted by the Presi-
dent’s sons overseas. He also pointed to
a prohibition in the domestic-emolu-
ments clause against government pay-
ments to Presidents beyond their sala-
ries. “We’ve had the Secret Service and
other agencies spend millions of dollars
at Trump hotels and resorts already,” he
said. But Raskin also injected a note of
caution. “Most of my constituents re-
gard impeachment in a very practical
way,” he told me. “They all see Trump
as eminently deserving of impeachment,
but they don’t want it to become a fe-
tish if it’s not going anywhere.”A
ny initial investigation of impeach-
ment would fall to the House Ju-
diciary Committee, and its chairman,
in a Democratic Congress, would be
Jerrold Nadler, from New York. Donald
Trump and Jerry Nadler represent con-
trasting New York archetypes—the ra-
pacious developer and the woolly-headed
liberal. Not surprisingly, the two men
have a history. They first clashed more
than three decades ago, when Trump
proposed a vast development on an old
rail yard on Manhattan’s West Side.
Nadler was born in Brooklyn in 1947
and educated at Stuyvesant, the selec-
tive public high school, where his cam-
paign for student-council president was
managed by Dick Morris, the future
Clinton-era political Svengali. After
graduating from Columbia, Nadler
thrived in the political hothouse that
was the West Side in those days. In his
twenties, he was elected to the New York
State Assembly, and he attended Ford-
ham’s law school at night. Nadler’s dis-
trict included the site of a Trump proj-
ect, which was originally called Television
City because the centerpiece would be
a hundred-and-fifty-story building that
would serve as a new headquarters for
NBC. As a courtesy, Trump invited Nad-
ler to his oice in Trump Tower to show
him the plans. “I thought it was gro-
tesque,” Nadler recalled recently. Trump
told Nadler that the tower would be res-
idential above the first forty floors, and
mentioned the Hancock Center, in Chi-
cago, which is a hundred stories tall. “He
says, ‘Do you know that the people on
the top floors of the Hancock Center,
before they go out in the morning, they
call the concierge desk to ask what the
weather is, because they’re above the
clouds, they can’t really see it?’ I’m think-
ing, What a drag, but he’s getting ex-
cited about this,” Nadler said. Nadler
asked whether Trump intended to live
on the hundred-and-fiftieth floor of the
new building, and Trump replied that
he did. “And I realized what this was all
about,” Nadler said. “He wanted to be
the highest man in the world.”The battle over Television City—
later renamed Trump City and finally
known as Riverside South—became a
multi-decade epic, even after the hun-
dred-and-fifty-story building was
scrapped. (NBC decided to keep its
headquarters at Rockefeller Center.)
Nadler helped lead the opposition, and
continued to do so after he was elected
to Congress, in 1992. He made sure that
Trump did not receive federal mortgage
guarantees for the project, costing the
developer millions, and he also stopped
the removal of an elevated highway,
which would have increased the value
of Trump’s condominiums. Riverside
South is now mostly completed, on a
much diminished scale. Trump’s inter-
est was sold in 2005. But the dynamic
of Trump and Nadler’s relationship was
set. In his book “The America We De-
serve,” published in 2000, Trump called
Nadler “one of the most egregious hacks
in contemporary politics.”
Nadler turned seventy last June, and
his political views, while emphatically
liberal, now hew closer to Pelosi’s than
to Al Green’s. This is particularly true
on the question of an impeachment in-
quiry. Pelosi told me that Nadler is “a
champion for civil liberties and civil
rights. He will have a long agenda as
chairman, and impeachment is the least
of it—despite what his constituents, and
my constituents, probably want.” Nadler
voted against both of Green’s impeach-
ment resolutions.“If you’re going to re-
move the President from oice, you are
in efect in one sense nullifying the last
election,” he told me. “What you don’t
want are recriminations for the next
twenty years—‘We won the election,’
‘You stole it.’ And to do that you have
to have a situation where some appre-
ciable fraction—not a majority, but an
appreciable fraction—of the people on
the other side will grudgingly admit by
the end of the proceedings that ‘Yeah,
they really had to do it.’” As Nadler ac-
knowledges, there is not only an absence
of an appreciable fraction of Republi-
cans in the House supporting impeach-
ment, there isn’t a single Republican who
does. He believes that any chance of
bipartisan impeachment is extremely
remote in the current political environ-
ment, at least barring the discovery of
overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing.
“The fact that someone has committed