Norman Solomon: Nationwide Effort to Impeach Donald Trump Launches with Petition Drive

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

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Nationwide Effort to Impeach Donald Trump Launches with Petition Drive

Posted Feb. 22, 2017

Interview with Norman Solomon, co-founder & coordinator of the online organization RootsAction.org, conducted by Scott Harris

The first month of Donald Trump’s presidency has been rocked by chaotic White House mismanagement of a series of events, including investigations into the Trump campaign’s links with Russian government officials, the sloppy and unconstitutional roll out of the so-called Muslim ban that was successfully overturned in federal court, the ouster Michael Flynn as national security adviser for lying to the vice president and a constant stream of lies and misinformation coming from both the president and his spokespersons. With the worst public approval ratings of any newly elected U.S. president in modern American history and a burgeoning protest movement that has seen the mobilization of literally millions of people in opposition to the Trump agenda, the situation looks pretty bleak for a president who is supposed to be in his “honeymoon period.”

Now two organizations, RootsAction.org and Free Speech For People, have collected and delivered over 850,000 petition signatures to Congress, calling on legislators in the House of Representatives to initiate an impeachment investigation into President Trump’s business dealings that appear to violate the U.S. Constitution’s foreign and domestic emoluments clauses, and other federal laws. Those constitutional provisions prohibit the president from personally profiting from his position beyond his government salary.

U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, has filed a resolution of inquiry to the Justice Department asking officials there to provide to Congress any information they have relating to any violation of the Constitution by Trump, which could be the first step in Congress toward impeachment. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Norman Solomon, co-founder & coordinator of the online organization RootsAction.org, who discusses the petition drive underway to initiate an impeachment investigation into President Trump’s business ethics. [Rush transcript]

NORMAN SOLOMON: Really, there's so many people who have a wide range of concerns, to put it mildly. Alarm. Anger. Willingness and eagerness to push back against the Trump presidency. And in that mix and necessarily, we have to be on defense to defend the gains that people have won over 20-30 years and more. I think it's also important for us to take the offense on the question of legality of this presidency. And there is the Constitution of the United States that has two clauses, known as the Foreign Emoluments Clause and the Domestic Emoluments Clause that require the kind of lack of conflict of interest that in fact President Trump is totally in violation of. And so that's it in a nutshell. At ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org we have 880,000 signers on a petition for the initiation of an impeachment process in the Congress.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Norman, just spell out in a little bit more detail what are the grounds upon which this petition is based to launch an impeachment effort against Donald Trump so early in his presidency. A lot of people will say, "Hey, has he really crossed the line yet?"

NORMAN SOLOMON: Well, he crossed the line the moment he became president. And that's, I think, a very important point that our news media have not really been getting into. The Minority Leader of the House Nancy Pelosi, has said publicly, well, if the president violates the law, then we will look at impeachment. But in fact, the moment he became president, because of his refusal to set up anything approximating a blind trust – I call it a 20/20 trust he has – he knows exactly what he's invested in, what the Trump Organization is invested in. He's been, from the very beginning of his presidency, in violation of these two key clauses of the Constitution. One forbids the president or a top official of the government from being financially entangled with a foreign government or entity, and the Trump Organization, you know – you can go to Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines and Turkey, where there are huge investments that Trump has, which he has refused to divest himself from whatsoever.

And then, I think probably even more important is Article 2, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution, the so-called Domestic Emoluments Clause or presidential compensation clause. It singles out the president. There's no way that the Congress can waive this requirement. That part of the Constitution names the president as somebody who absolutely cannot benefit from any policies or entities of the 50 states of the United States or the U.S. government. And yet, whether you look at Trump Towers or you look at the new Trump Hotel opened right next to the White House, you have a situation where Trump personally, and his family and his corporation are benefiting enormously from all sorts of tax breaks, waivers, leases, regulatory decisions of the states and of the federal government.

So, it's really a question, I think, Scott, of "Is the president above the law?" And if we're going to give him a pass and say, "Well for some reason or another, it doesn't matter that he has been violating the Constitution and continues to do so," then we're saying that the most powerful position in the U.S. government is held by somebody who is violating the Constitution 24/7 and that we're going to let that go. And I think that should be totally unacceptable.

BETWEEN THE LINES: There's been a recent public opinion poll asking the survey sample specifically about impeachment, and it turns out, as we all know, the country's quite polarized. And it was 46 to 46 percent for and against impeachment, with I guess about 8 percent who really didn't have an opinion yet. What does that poll say to you so early in a new president's term of office that we have the country split on the question of impeachment?

NORMAN SOLOMON: Well, for one thing, in a two-week period, the number went from 35 percent to 46 percent in support, so it says to me that the enthusiasm for impeachment is growing as people see what the Trump presidency actually means. It also says to me that there's an enormous gap whether you talk about the members of the House from Connecticut or anywhere else in the country – an enormous gap between the viewpoints of people around the United States, as you noted, 46 percent support impeachment, who are going to say so, and 0 percent of the members of the House of Representatives willing to say that they support impeachment. And this is classic. I really believe that it's true when the people lead, the leaders will follow, at least the leaders could be made to follow. And this is an enormous gap that we need to close and it doesn't mean that the grassroots needs to go along with the cowardice of people in Congress. It means people in Congress need to be compelled during their recess period, and ongoing, to be compelled by hearing from constituents to step up to the plate and get impeachment done.

For more information on the campaign to impeach President Trump, visit impeachdonaldtrumpnow.org; rootsaction.org; and freespeechforpeople.org.