About Trump, the Investigations, and Impeachment

I have been deliberately holding back on writing about the investigations going on surrounding Donald Trump and his associates, past and present.  The main reason is that I would be writing largely out of ignorance.  I happen to dislike this president on a scale far beyond any previous holder of that office, and I imagine I'm not the only one who feels this way.  But I resisted the impulse to demand his impeachment...as some have even to the point of calling for it before he was sworn into office.  As long as the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, is not obstructed by Trump, I am content to sit back and let the process unfold.  But now I think a couple of comments are in order...

My overriding concern about Trump and the 2016 campaign is whether or not he conspired with the Russian regime under Vladimir Putin...either because of blackmail, business, or other reasons...to illegally sabotage the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's campaign through the hacking and theft of e-mails and other activities.  That's something that Mueller has been working on and which, after he's finished, I'd like to see before making any open judgments about Donald Trump (although I have some strong suspicions in that regard).  Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, is in the spotlight for his role in paying off his client's former extramarital girlfriends, one a stripper and the other a Playboy playmate.  The tactic that prosecutors are taking in this case is that the payoffs represented campaign contributions in that they came just before the 2016 election.  But I argue, that's the reason these two women came forward at that time demanding money: their affairs with Trump had occurred many years earlier!  To me this smacks, not of illegally unreported campaign contributions with Trump as the perpetrator, but rather of criminal extortion with Trump as the victim...I heard a conservative talk show host the other night affirm these very thoughts.  So why isn't somebody investigating that?  And, ultimately, what does any of this have to do with Russia, anyway...other than that Cohen may be an important link in that investigation?

The other comment I'd like to make is about impeachment.  When Richard Nixon was undergoing the impeachment process the Democrats controlled the Senate, which is the body of Congress that holds impeachment trials, 57-43.  And many Republicans in that body, unlike today's Senate, were liberal...some of them more so than many Democrats.  When the "Smoking Gun" tape came out in 1974, Nixon weighed his prospects and resigned from office before an impeachment trial could commence.  When Bill Clinton was tried by the Senate 25 years later, the opposition Republicans controlled that body but could not convict...after all, they would have needed 67 out of the 100 senators to remove him from office.  Now we see an incoming Senate that is 53-47 in favor of the president's party, and the Republicans here are much more conservative and docile to their own party leadership than either during the Nixon or Clinton crises.  Should the incoming Democrat-controlled House of Representatives at some time vote for impeachment, I strongly doubt that the Senate under Mitch McConnell would lift as much as a finger to proceed with a trial.  No, if you want Trump out you're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: get off your butts and VOTE, for a change!