Dear President Trump,

I’ve pulled back from the “no further indictments” ledge I was on yesterday having seen commentary from quite a number of more levelheaded people who are reminding everyone that there’ve already been indictments of and guilty pleas from many people in your inner circle regarding Russia and that it’s not always possible to bring criminal charges even in the face of patently unethical and immoral behavior. Maybe because it is sort of self-soothing the impeachment oriented phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” has been pinging around my mind off an on all day. My sense is that it focuses on behavior that is ethically and/or morally questionable and we clearly already have plenty of evidence of such. According to Wikipedia the following are covered by the phrase: perjury of oath, abuse of authority, bribery, intimidation, misuse of assets, failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, unbecoming conduct, refusal to obey a lawful order, chronic intoxication, and tax evasion. The italicized ones are those that I think we already know you’ve done.

I know it’s a leap to start talking about impeachment at this point, but more than one pundit has speculated that there’s a road map in the Mueller report for Congress to follow in investigating your wrong-doings, similar to the one in the Watergate report that led to Nixon’s early exit. And like I said in my letter yesterday, even grasping at what may end up being straws is a reasonable thing to do while we wait to learn how much of the report the American people are going to get to see and what the report says.

Whatever the report does or doesn’t say and whatever is or isn’t released, we are clearly in for a rocky time as everyone projects their angst onto both what we do and do not get to see. I’m afraid tempers are going to be more frayed then usual and unfortunately, I think there’s even more risk than usual for extreme, even violent, reactions when someone doesn’t like the bumper sticker on the car they perceive cut them off. I hope I’m wrong. I hope that we’ll not take our fears and frustrations out on one another, but we’ve not exactly been doing a stellar job so far (witness, the awful increase in hate crimes since you took office) and this current situation is just the sort to set people more on edge. We also have a POTUS who as recently as a week ago was condoning right-wing violence. Scary times.

May we be safe.
May we be willing to take three breaths before we respond.
May we take care of our entire nation’s health.
May you not start a war (civil or otherwise).

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson