Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt has purchased a full-page advertisement running in The Washington Post this weekend offering $10 million for information leading to President Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.
“The attempt to impeach Donald Trump will strike many as a sour-grapes plot by Democrats to overturn a legitimate election,” Mr. Flynt, 74, wrote in an ad appearing in Sunday’s paper, Fox Business Network first reported. “But there is a strong case to be made that the last election was illegitimate in many ways —and that after nine tumultuous months in office, Trump has proven he’s dangerously unfit to exercise the extreme power accrued by our new ’unitary executive.’”
The ad goes on to cite an array of potentially impeachable offenses related to Mr. Trump’s conduct since entering the White House in January, including his firing of former FBI director James Comey (“obstruction of justice,” Mr. Flynt suggested), his response to the deadly riots in Charlottesville, Virginia (“inciting violent civil strife,” according to the publisher) and generally telling “hundreds of bald-faced lies,” among other behavior.
“Impeachment would be a messy, contentious affair, but the alternative — three more years of destabilizing dysfunction — is worse. Both good Democrats and good Republicans who put country over party did it before with Watergate. To succeed, impeachment requires unimpeachable evidence. That’s why I’m making this offer,” Mr. Flynt continued. “Buried in Trump’s top-secret tax returns or in other records from his far-flung investments there may be a smoking gun. Did he make some financial quid pro quo with the Russians? Has the business of the United States been compromised to protect the business of the Trump empire? We need to flush everything out in the open.”
“I do not expect any of Trump’s billionaire cronies to rat him out, but I am confident that there are many people in the now for whom $10 million is a lot of money,” he added. “Sure I could use that $10 million to buy luxuries or further my businesses, but what good would that do me in a world devastated by the most powerful moron in history?”
The White House did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
The Washington Post gives advertising customers “wide latitude to have their say,” Fox Business reported Friday.
“Generally, if the ads are not illegal or advocating illegal actions, we try not to place limits on speech or content,” The Post said.
Mr. Flynt published the first issue of Hustler, a hardcore pornography magazine, in 1974. The Los Angeles Times listed his net worth in 2015 as approximately $500 million.
He’s announced similar bounties in the past for salacious evidence of politicians dating back to at least 1998 when he offered $1 million for “evidence of illicit sexual relations” involving members of Congress. Last October he offered $1 million for audio or video recordings of Mr. Trump “engaging in illegal activity or acting in a sexually demeaning or derogatory manner,” and he’s frequently critiqued the president since his election one month later.
“I don’t think he’ll be around long. But even if they are able to impeach him, we’ll still be stuck with (Mike) Pence, and Pence is worse than he is,” Mr. Flynt said in an January interview with respect to the president.
“Call 20 psychiatrists and see if you can get any one of them to say he’s sane. He’s nuts. He’s a narcissist. He’s constantly repeating himself. He tells one lie after another. I don’t think he even realizes how much he’s lying.”
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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