Josh Marshall: “President Trump has not only consistently abused his powers and conflated his personal interest with the national interest. He has used his vast powers of secrecy to conceal his crimes and betrayals. That should stop the day he leaves office and it can be easily done. It doesn’t rely on the courts or the Congress. The new President will inherit all those powers for his own tenure and all past Presidents. As Trump himself has so failed to understand none of these are his powers. They are the powers of the sitting President.”

“The process should be an orderly and considered one. There is no national interest in revealing every embarrassing moment. And all must be done to protect actual national security interests. But the cover ups need to end and they can. Those who are willing to come forward with pertinent evidence should be given the opportunity to petition for a more formal immunity for coming forward. The true goal is getting the complete story.”

“My point here is not to rule out prosecutions. That is simply a more complex question with more complicated equities. The winners prosecuting the losers is a dangerous if sometimes necessary tool. We also don’t know what we will find. But review and exposure is something we can and must insist on now. There is no tyranny or injustice in simply having your bad acts revealed. If Trump is driven from office, Trumpism won’t end in January 2021. We’ll still have a whole political party devoted to him and his politics. We will still have the machinery of government which it uses to govern through minority rule. But none of these obstacles to and targets of reform will be surmountable without accountability and exposure for the public catastrophe of the last four years. No standards of public service or resistance to public corruption and abuse can be restored without it.”