Read Chris Whipple’s new Vanity Fair profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and by the end you’ll have found cause to (simultaneously) impeach Donald Trump, remove him under the terms of the 25th amendment, and run Wiles, JD Vance, plus several cabinet members out of federal office and into federal prison.

Don’t have the time or a subscription to Vanity Fair? Fear not, I’ve done the work for you.

Below you’ll find the most damning revelations, interspersed with my own comments. They are ordered as they appear in the story. The article bounces back and forth in time, so these aren’t strictly chronological, but they do trace the arc of the second Trump presidency pretty neatly.

As you read, bear in mind that the Democratic Party leadership holds the view that House Democrats should not support privileged resolutions of impeachment.

PARDON WHOM?

On Trump’s first day in office… Trump issued pardons to almost everyone convicted in the bloody January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, in which nine people ultimately died and 150 were injured. Even rioters who’d beaten cops within an inch of their lives were set free. (Fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted.)

Did she ever ask the president, “ ‘Wait a minute, do you really want to pardon all 1,500 January 6 convicts, or should we be more selective?’ ”

“I did exactly that,” Wiles replied. “I said, ‘I am on board with the people that were happenstancers or didn’t do anything violent. And we certainly know what everybody did because the FBI has done such an incredible job.’ ” (Trump has said his FBI investigators were “corrupt” and part of a “deep state.”) But Trump argued that even the violent offenders had been unfairly treated. Wiles explained: “In every case, of the ones he was looking at, in every case, they had already served more time than the sentencing guidelines would have suggested. So given that, I sort of got on board.” (According to court records, many of the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump had received sentences that were lighter than the guidelines.)

As Politico’s Kyle Cheney notes, Whipple’s final corrective here significantly understates the truth, and thus provides Wiles with a false alibi. Basically nobody who tried to overthrow the government was sentenced to serve more time than the guidelines recommended. Her claim is thus factually impossible, and inconsistent with Trump’s decision to pardon all of the rioters.

A generous interpretation is that Trump was confused (or that he had been manipulated) and Wiles never double checked his claims. It’s more likely that Trump was unconcerned with the truth from the getgo, and Wiles is lying now to downplay the significance of that enormous jailbreak. In either case, the pardons were an impeachable offense, and Wiles’s cover story discredits her. Trump’s inattention to detail and comfort telling lies aren’t really the kinds of ailments the 25th amendment was ratified to address—but if I were in Trump’s cabinet, I’d be disturbed enough to start surveying my colleagues.

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WAYS AND KETAMINES

Musk triggered the first true crisis of the Trump presidency and an early test for Wiles. Trump’s chief was shocked when the SpaceX founder eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”

In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”

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