National Interest
"Think back to the last time a president was impeached for obstruction of justice. Did Richard Nixon come to mind? If so, think again. Nixon was never impeached. The president you should imagine as you read about Trump’s troubles with the FBI is Bill Clinton. President Clinton obstructed justice in an absolutely clear and classic sense of the term: he lied under oath to pervert the outcome of a trial. But how many of the people clamoring for Trump’s impeachment today would defend the impeachment of Bill Clinton nearly twenty years ago?
"Democrats and a certain segment of thought leaders who deem themselves the custodians of political decency have been musing about impeaching Trump since the day of his inauguration—or even before. It’s become an idee fixe. Now their hopes fly high on the revelation that fired FBI director James Comey wrote a memo recording that the president asked him to drop the bureau’s investigation of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Right after Flynn’s resignation in February, according to reports of the memo, the president told Comey, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”
"The president should not meddle in FBI investigations like this. Whether such meddling constitutes obstruction of justice in a legal sense, however, is a separate question. Trump did not order Comey to shut down the investigation of Flynn, which is still ongoing. And Comey did not react the way an FBI director might be expected to act when given an unconscionable or illegal order: Comey did not resign, and he does not appear to have contacted Congress to claim the president was acting illegally. He merely shared the memo with a handful of associates and then filed it away, to be brought to light months later, only after his career setback." . . .
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