It was a bad week for the Trump administration, as court filings exposed a number of legal liabilities for the President, and those liabilities have not gone unnoticed on the betting markets, where the odds have soared in favor of Trump’s impeachment.
The latest odds offered by Irish bookmaker Paddy Power give Trump’s impeachment before the end of his first term 4/5 odds or close to 56 percent. The odds offered for Trump to not be impeached are even money. The political prediction market PredictIt, meanwhile, saw the price of Trump’s first term impeachment increase to 1.48:1, according to Newsweek.
Federal prosecutors have directly linked President Trump to campaign finance felonies related to hush money payments made to women the President had affairs with prior to the 2016 election. President Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, admitted in his plea deal with prosecutors to engineering the payments on behalf of the President, and later in the week the publisher of the National Enquirer also implicated President Trump by admitting to laundering the payment money through their publication. Additionally, the plea deal of Russian spy Maria Butina has directly implicated President Trump in alleged collusion with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.
To make matters worse, the impending Democratic majority in the House of Representatives promises to create a hostile political environment for President Trump, as Democratic lawmakers are promising a Congressional investigation into a number of allegations against him.
President Trump’s Republican supporters are beginning to show cracks in the base and that President Trump has told people close to him that he is “alarmed by the prospect” of impeachment, according to NBC News.
“Am I concerned that the president might be involved in a crime? Of course,” Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana told reporters Tuesday.
“The only question is, then, whether or not this so-called hush money is a crime.”
“If someone has violated the law, the application of the law should be applied to them like it would to any other citizen in this country, and obviously if you’re in a position of great authority like the presidency that would be the case,” said Republican Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio said his decision on how Congress should respond to federal investigators’ final findings on the payments “will not be a political decision, it’ll be the fact that we are a nation of laws and no one in this country no matter who you are is above it.”
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