Trump's odds of staying in office: The Day 6 Impeach-O-Meter for September 14
Will the House Democrats' efforts move the needle?
When Donald Trump generates headlines, Day 6 fires up the "Impeach-O-Meter," inviting political experts to estimate the odds that Donald Trump will be impeached by the House of Representatives. These are, of course, subjective and hypothetical scores and the impeachment process is complex and dependent on many factors.
On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee voted to broaden the scope of its investigation into wrongdoing by U.S. President Donald Trump.
"With these new procedures we will begin an aggressive series of hearings investigating allegations of corruption, obstruction and abuse of power against the president," said Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler.
Nadler is leading the impeachment charge as chair of the committee, which will now begin looking at impeachment above and beyond the issue of Russian interference.
All of that has reinvigorated calls for impeachment — so we're once again firing up the Day 6 Impeach-O-Meter.
Every few weeks, we ask a political expert to weigh in on the odds that Donald Trump will be impeached by the House of Representatives, from one — meaning totally safe in the White House — to 100, meaning impeachment is imminent.
When we last checked on July 27, Salon political reporter Shira Tarlo lowered the Impeach-O-Meter to 43 per cent.
This week, we asked Elie Honig, a former prosecutor and legal analyst with CNN, to give us his reading.
Here's part of what he told Day 6:
So one thing that I do think that's happened this week that's significant is the scope of this inquiry has expanded.
For a long time, the House [Democrats] were looking at what we'll call the Mueller Report — election interference and obstruction of justice.
But just in the last week or so, there's been a lot of news stories out there about what I'll call emoluments or self-enrichment by the president; Donald Trump's use of the presidency to essentially line his own pockets.
We've seen everything from the Air Force now making this vastly increased number of stopovers, and stay-overs, at Trump's resort in Scotland.
We've seen Mike Pence booking Trump's hotel in Ireland. We've seen the Attorney General William Barr booking a $30,000 holiday party at Trump's hotel in Washington, D.C.
That's a new dimension and I think it might resonate with the American public in a different way than some of the other stuff that's been out there before.
That's one possible X factor that could change the calculus and maybe will push some more of the populace and maybe, eventually, Nancy Pelosi.
So, where does Elie Honig place the odds of a Donald Trump impeachment this week?
"30 per cent," he said.
That marks a decrease of 13 per cent over the previous reading.
We'll continue to track the numbers in the weeks to come, and you can follow along here.
Editor's note: When we started the Impeach-O-Meter, we settled on getting people who watch U.S. politics closely to estimate the odds that Donald Trump's presidency would "end in impeachment." We've come to realize that it wasn't always clear whether that meant that the U.S. House of Representatives would vote to impeach him or that additionally, the U.S. Senate would vote to remove him from office as a result of being impeached by the House of Representatives.
We've always intended that to mean being impeached by the House of Representatives, so for the sake of clarity, we've changed the language to "the odds that Donald Trump will be impeached by the House of Representatives."
To hear Elie Honig give his Impeach-O-Meter prediction, download our podcast or click the 'Listen' button at the top of this page