Page:Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States — Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives.pdf/48

 public justice, which consists in any officer's unlawfully taking, by colour of his office, from any man, any money or thing of value, that is not due to him, or more than is due, or before it is due." Under this definition, both bribery and extortion occurred when an official used his public position to obtain private benefits to which he was not entitled. Conduct which qualified as bribery was therefore "routinely punished as common law extortion." To the Framers, who would have seen bribery and extortion as virtually coextensive, when a President acted in his official capacity to offer, solicit, or accept an improper personal benefit, he committed "Bribery."

Turning to the nature of the improper personal benefit: because officials can be corrupted in many ways, the benefit at issue in a bribe can be anything of subjective personal value to the President. This is not limited to money. Indeed, given their purposes, it would have made no sense for the Framers to confine "Bribery" to the offer, solicitation, or acceptance of money, and they expressed no desire to impose that restriction. To the contrary, in guarding against foreign efforts to subvert American officials, they confirmed their broad view of benefits that might cause corruption: a person who holds "any Office of Profit or Trust," such as the President, is forbidden from accepting "any present, Office or Tile, of any kind whatever, from … a foreign State." An equally pragmatic (and capacious) view applies to the impeachable offense of "Bribery." This view is further anchored in the very same 17th and 18th century common law treatises that were well known to the Framers. Those authorities used broad language in defining what qualifies as a "thing of value" in the context of bribery: "any undue reward" or any "valuable consideration."

To summarize, impeachable "Bribery" occurs when a President offers, solicits, or accepts something of personal value to influence his own official actions. Bribery is thus an especially egregious and specific example of a President abusing his power for private gain. As Blackstone explained, bribery is "the genius of despotic countries where the true principles of government are never understood"—and where "it is imagined that there is no obligation from the superior to the inferior, no relative duty owing from the governor to the governed." In our democracy, the Framers understood that there is no place for Presidents who would abuse their power and betray the public trust through bribery.

Like "Treason," the offense of "Bribery" is thus aimed at a President who is a continuing threat