Washington (CNN)A viral tweet claims that impeaching President Donald Trump for a second time would mean he would lose the ability to run for president in 2024.
That's not true. Nor are other claims in the tweet.
The tweet was posted on Friday, two days after a Capitol insurrection by a mob of Trump supporters sparked a new impeachment push
from House Democrats. As of early Monday, it had more than 181,000
retweets and 725,000 likes. It says the following: "For those wondering
if it's worth impeaching him this time, it means he:
1) loses his 200k+ pension for the rest of his life
2) loses his 1 million dollar/year travel allowance
3) loses lifetime full secret service detail
4) loses his ability to run in 2024"
Facts First: The tweet is inaccurate in multiple ways.
1)
Trump would lose his post-presidency pension only if both the House
voted to impeach him and then the Senate voted to remove him from
office; impeachment itself, without removal, would not result in Trump
being denied any benefits.
2) The law makes clear that presidents who have lifetime Secret Service protection never get a $1 million travel allowance.
3)
It is unclear that Trump would lose lifetime Secret Service protection
even if the Senate voted to remove him and prohibit him from running.
4)
Even a Senate vote to remove Trump would not prohibit him from running
in 2024; for the Senate to ban him from the presidency, it would have to
hold an additional vote on this question.
The post-presidency pension
Trump would not lose his pension if the House impeached him for his role in inciting the insurrection -- just as he didn't lose his pension when the House impeached him in 2019 over his effort to use the US' relationship with Ukraine for his own political ends. Rather, under the Former Presidents Act, he would lose his pension only if the Senate voted to convict him and remove him from office.
Lots
of average citizens use the word "impeachment" to refer to impeachment
and removal, so we're not bashing Costiloe for this common error, but
the statement is incorrect.
Presidents who have not been impeached and removed are entitled to a lifetime pension equivalent to the annual salary of a head of an executive department. For Trump, like predecessor President Barack Obama, that would indeed amount to more than $200,000 per year.
Running in 2024
Neither
a second House impeachment nor even a Senate vote to convict Trump and
remove him from office would prevent him from running again, in 2024 or
beyond.
Rather,
after two-thirds of senators present voted to remove Trump, a simple
majority of senators present would have to approve an additional vote to
bar him from the presidency in the future.
The
Senate could not skip the conviction-and-removal vote that requires
two-thirds of senators and go straight to the simple-majority vote for
future disqualification, Ross Garber, an impeachment and political
investigations lawyer who teaches at Tulane Law School, told CNN.
There
is at least some uncertainty about the disqualification issue, since no
president has ever been removed from office by the Senate and only judges
have been disqualified from future office. The disqualification
language in the Constitution is "disqualification to hold and enjoy any
Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States"; Garber noted
that no court or Congress has ever settled the question of whether the
presidency counts as an "Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the
United States" from which the Senate is able to ban an impeached and
convicted person. (Garber said he personally thinks the presidency does
count.)
Secret Service protection
Would
Trump lose Secret Service protection if he was removed from office? It
is not clear -- to us or to two legal experts we consulted, law
professors Stephen Vladeck and Josh Blackman.
There are two relevant laws that use different language on who counts as a "former president."
One
law, the Former Presidents Act we mentioned earlier, specifically says
that a president who gets booted by the Senate does not count as a
"former president" for the purpose of certain post-presidency perks.
However, another law signed by Obama in 2013,
the Former Presidents Protection Act, simply authorizes lifetime Secret
Service protection for former presidents -- without defining "former
president" in any particular way.
It
is not clear which definition the federal government or the courts
would use when it came to deciding whether an impeached and removed
Trump should get lifetime Secret Service protection. (The Secret Service
did not respond to a request for comment.)
In summary, the tweet was too definitive on a point that is very much up in the air.
Travel expenses
Trump
was not certain to get a $1 million travel allowance in the first
place. In fact, the travel allowance -- technically, a security and
travel allowance -- is only for former presidents who are not getting lifetime Secret Service protection.
An official from the office of a former president confirmed to CNN that
the former president they work for does not have access to a $1 million
security and travel allowance.
In
other words: under normal circumstances -- if Trump finished out his
term as scheduled and then accepted the lifetime Secret Service
protection he would indisputably be entitled to in that case -- there
would be no $1 million security and travel allowance for him.
The story of the tweet
When
we called Costiloe to tell him that we were planning a fact check and
that much of the tweet was inaccurate, he said good-naturedly: "Tear it a
new one. Go for it, baby." He said he is "nobody," a man who lives with
diabetes in Texas and did the tweet because he had seen the information
pop up somewhere on his Facebook feed and "it made me feel good."
He
said he was never sure the content was correct and was amazed the tweet
went so viral. He said he had only 200 Twitter followers at the time he
posted it.
"I
don't want to mess up the world. I just wanted to make me feel good,"
he said. "It turns out it made a lot of people feel good."
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