A President Cannot-- Not Even An Illegitimate One-- Be Impeached For Character-- No Matter How Bad It Is

I don't think anyone in the House thinks they're going to get 20 Republicans to vote to remove Trump from office. They'll be lucky if they can keep Joe Manchin, Doug Jones and Kyrsten Sinema on the reservation and get even one Republican, presumably Collins or Murkowski. Instead, I think what the Democrats are trying to do is create a record for posterity and make a case against Trump's reelection. And they're been very successful in doing just that. Attacking Trump's character is certainly an indictment for voters to consider, both when they decide for whom to vote in the presidential election and for how to look at Republicans how chose to back Trump in the impeachment and subsequent trial.

Yesterday, Washington Post reporters Elise Viebeck, Karoun Demirjian and Mike DeBonis wrote that the Democrats argued that Trump's behavior towards Ukraine "reflected a dangerous reflex toward political expediency and a lack of character that will backfire on Republicans if they do not help remove him from office. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-CA) and his colleagues attempted to drive this argument home Friday.

The trio of reporters wrote that the purpose was "to sway a handful of Republican senators whose position on gathering further evidence will determine the arc and scope of the trial." In other words, will the Democrats be allowed to call witnesses this week. Mitt Romney said he would probably vote to allow witnesses. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins may have found the excuse they wanted-- Adam Schiff's aggressiveness-- to vote against calling witnesses. As our trio of Post reporters asserted, "there were few signs that any Republican was persuaded, leaving open the matter of possible witness testimony and further dampening Democrats’ already meager hopes of a conviction in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Schiff’s pointed and increasingly personal approach was an attempt to go beyond the specifics of House Democrats’ case to make the broader argument that Trump is an untrustworthy president who is likely to repeatedly flout the Constitution if allowed to stay in office.

“It goes to character,” Schiff said. “You don’t realize how ­important character is in the highest office in the land until you don’t have it.”

The Democrats’ closing statements were their final appeal to senators before the next phase of the trial: an aggressive rebuttal from Trump’s lawyers that will kick off Saturday and continue in earnest on Monday.

Speaking Friday on the Senate floor-- hours after new evidence emerged of Trump’s campaign to oust the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine starting in 2018-- Schiff predicted that Trump’s future behavior would vindicate Democrats’ claim that he abused his power, and he warned Republicans the president, now their ally, could ultimately turn on them.

“Do you think for a moment that any of you-- no matter what your relationship with this president, no matter how close you are to this president-- do you think for a moment that if he felt it was in his interest, he wouldn’t ask you to be investigated?” he asked.

...Democrats need four Republicans to join them in any attempt to secure new testimony or evidence, and the senators being targeted have been careful to say that they have made no decision-- while giving no indication they are moving closer to supporting any subpoenas.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), one of the most closely watched Republican senators, said Friday that the House managers had “presented us with a mountain of overwhelming evidence,” though it was unclear which way he was leaning on the question of hearing more.

Alexander told reporters that he will make his decision on admitting witnesses and other new evidence only after the White House defense team makes its case.

“I think that question can only be answered then,” he said. “We’ve been polite to the House managers, listened to them carefully, and now we’re going to do the same with the president’s lawyers. I think the House managers have done a good job of making their arguments. But that doesn’t mean I will agree with them.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) raised the prospect that a Senate trial could drag on for months if Trump administration witnesses are called, arguing that the issue of executive privilege would have to be litigated in the courts.

“This could tie up the Senate through the election and even beyond as the courts litigate these claims,” Cornyn said during an appearance on conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt’s syndicated radio show. “We’ll wait and see, but right now, I’m not for extending this for months and months while claims of privilege and the like are litigated in the courts.”

The question of whether the Senate will seek more evidence was heightened Friday by a new Washington Post-ABC News poll revealing that a majority of American adults, 66 percent, support the Senate calling new witnesses to testify, as opposed to 27 percent who don’t.

ABC News also reported Friday that it reviewed a recording of Trump at a private dinner telling associates that he wanted then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gone, a reminder of the evidence yet to be uncovered about Trump’s actions.

“Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it,” Trump is heard saying, according to ABC News.

Schiff challenged the Senate to call the administration’s bluff on whether witnesses would be limited from testifying by executive privilege and let Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is presiding over the trial, make those calls.

Calling executive privilege “the last refuge of the president’s team to conceal the evidence from the American people,” Schiff argued that Roberts should “decide issues of evidence and privilege” whenever witnesses or the president claim it, but that the assumption Trump will try to silence certain witnesses by claiming executive privilege should not keep the Senate from calling them to testify.

“The Senate will always have the opportunity to overrule the justice,” Schiff said to reporters, adding that “you cannot use executive privilege to hide wrongdoing or criminality or impeachable misconduct, and that is exactly the purpose for which they seek to use it.”

After Roberts scolded both sides for overheated rhetoric late Tuesday night, Democrats took pains to tone down their accusations against Trump and his supporters in the Senate.

Yet Schiff also sharpened his case on Friday, arguing that Republicans trust Trump at their own peril.

He invoked the late senator John McCain (R-AZ) in arguing about the strategic importance of Ukraine as a U.S. ally and quoted him as saying, “We are all Ukrainians.”

And he made a lengthy case that Trump’s skepticism about the conclusions of U.S. intelligence services-- particularly about Russian interference in the 2016 election-- represents a “coup” for Russia.

“Has there ever been such a coup? I would submit to you that in the entire length of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had no such success. No such success,” Schiff said. “I hope it was worth it. I hope it was worth it for the president. Because it certainly wasn’t worth it for the United States.”

...Schiff concluded his remarks Friday night with a different message as he urged senators to support hearing more evidence.

“I ask you. I implore you: Give America a fair trial,” he told senators. “Give America a fair trial. She’s worth it.”

This morning, Philip Bump did an insightful analysis of the Trump tape that the Senate will never subpoena and that Fox isn't likely to broadcast. "Parnas, wrote Bump, "would become tightly integrated into Trump’s circle, though the distance at which he was kept varies depending on who you ask. Trump insists that Parnas, an eventual business associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, was only given access to the president because he’d contributed to Trump’s campaign or to America First. Parnas, the argument goes, was simply one of hundreds of such people who take photos with the president. To hear Parnas tell it, though, his work for Giuliani in late 2018 and in 2019 was well-known by Trump and was integral to the effort to get Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a possible opponent of Trump’s in the upcoming election... [A]t one point, Parnas tells Trump that then-Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch had disparaged the president, prompting Trump to say that she should be removed from her position. It’s a response that seems to conflict with the idea that Trump was simply interacting with a random donor, seemingly bolstering Parnas’s insinuations that his relationship with Trump was substantial.

It comes down to a question with no good answer: Is the president lying about his relationship with Parnas or is he prone to endorsing rash personnel changes based on unfounded assertions from strangers?

It’s oddly easy to believe that either might be the case. Trump’s predilection for seeking out the opinions of random nearby individuals is well-documented. This is a president who held a discussion with a foreign leader about an international crisis in the middle of the dining room at one of his properties. This is also a president who has made more than 16,000 false or misleading statements during three years in office. Frankly, it’s easy to see a way in which both could be true: Parnas was just a donor then but eventually made his way into Trump’s inner team.

Bear in mind, this dinner, where one attendee recorded the entire discussion, was not organized by the Republican Party. It was instead for a pro-Trump super PAC, a group to which Parnas allegedly made contributions illegally. Once in the room, he got the president to endorse his opinion of the ambassador to Ukraine.

That exchange has been known for a while; the Washington Post first reported it in November. Given what we know about where Parnas wound up and the extent to which he was involved in the successful effort to oust Yovanovitch that picked up steam in early 2019, it’s worth asking: How does Parnas’s request fit into what we know about Yovanovitch’s firing?

Parnas was not yet working for Giuliani during that April 30 event; Giuliani had himself only begun working for Trump two weeks prior.

A few weeks after the dinner, though, Parnas and a colleague met with then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), at which point the two advocated for Yovanovitch’s ouster and, according to the later indictment of Parnas, agreed to raise money for Sessions. The day they met, Sessions wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling for Yovanovitch to be removed. This, again, appears to have occurred before Parnas and Giuliani were connected.

That effort expanded in early 2019, in part at the encouragement of Yuri Lutsenko, then Ukraine’s prosecutor general and someone who viewed Yovanovitch with hostility. By then, Parnas and Giuliani were connected, with Parnas joining Giuliani’s interviews of Lutsenko in January of that year. While Giuliani clearly embraced the idea of firing Yovanovitch (which took place in late April 2019), it’s still not clear what spurred the idea. Parnas, enacting a long-standing desire? Lutsenko, recognizing an opportunity? Something else entirely?

Photos provided to the House Intelligence Committee complicates the matter of Parnas’s role and relationship to Trump. One image shows a copy of the Sessions letter. Two others show someone, presumably Parnas, holding an envelope addressed to the president and identified as coming from Sessions’s office. The flap is sealed, with Sessions’s signature written across it. A later photo, apparently taken during an America First event in June 2018 shows Trump near Parnas as the president puts something in his pocket that appears to match the shape of the envelope.

What Trump is putting in his pocket may not be Sessions’s letter. But Parnas appears to have had control of the letter at some point. Why? Was it a function of his relationship with Trump? Did it relate to his conversation with Trump in April?

At another point in that April conversation, the group is discussing military aid to Ukraine. One comment from Trump raises a question: How familiar was he with the aid being given to Ukraine?

The same day of the event, then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko confirmed the delivery of American antitank missiles to his country. This is an act of enormous significance to Trump at the moment, since his attorneys have made his support of arming Ukraine a central part of their defense in the impeachment trial underway in the Senate.

“While it’s true that the United States has stood by Ukraine since the invasion of 2014,” Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow said during the trial on Saturday, hours before the release of the recording, “only one president since then took a very concrete step. Some of you supported it. And that step included actually providing Ukraine with lethal weapons, including Javelin missiles. That’s President Trump.”

On the recording, one of the attendees-- perhaps Donald Trump Jr.-- mentions the Javelin missiles.

“I guess there’s supposed to be an order of Javelin missiles over there, right?” he says. “They’re the antitank missiles. I saw that go through today.”

“Today?” Trump responds.

“I saw-- I read about it today,” the person replies. “I don’t know when it happened. It must have happened in the last couple of days.”

This does not suggest that Trump is intimately familiar with the transmission of the weapons. Reporting the prior year suggested that Trump was wavering on authorizing lethal arms sales to Ukraine, something that he eventually approved.

We do know what happened when military aid to Ukraine was announced in mid-June 2019. When Trump saw news coverage of a Defense Department announcement that it would provide $250 million in aid to that country, Trump intervened with questions. A few weeks later, the aid was placed on hold, an act that is at the center of the impeachment inquiry.

Trump’s team has argued that the hold was an outgrowth of his skepticism about foreign aid while claiming that his support for Ukraine was steadfast. In that meeting in April 2018, in conversation with a donor he’d met a few times before, Trump seemed unclear on the timing of a major component of his administration’s policy about Ukraine.

No question, though, is more significant than this, at least for Republican senators: What other tapes might exist? The release of this recording spawns new questions related to Ukraine and the actors involved in Trump’s efforts there. Parnas’s attorney told The Post that Parnas had turned other recordings over to House investigators.

If you want to feel how tough this is-- electorally speaking--for a handful of Republican senators who could conceivably vote against Trump's interests-- and, for example, agree to subpoena witnesses and documents-- let's take a look at Alaska, where a more independent-minded Lisa Murkowski is not up for reelection but where 100% Trump puppet Dan Sullivan is. Alaska Survey Research polled the state on both senators and how their votes on impeachment are likely to impact their careers. "Murkowski," they concluded, "has more to lose politically from what decision she makes in the trial because of her diverse base of support... [A]round 20% of people who view Murkowski positively are Democrats and another 20% who view her positively are Republicans. The remainder identified as another party or no party at all. Overall, she has a 51% positive rating and a 35% negative rating according to this poll. That same poll shows that Senator Dan Sullivan (R) has an easier decision to make, since his supporters widely support the president as explained by pollster Ivan Moore."

Moore said at the end of this impeachment trial, Murkowski will be hard pressed to not upset at least some of the people who voted for her.

“She has a 51% positive, but they’re not 50% Republican at all,” he said, “They’re kind of balanced. Much more non-partisan, and they’re 20 plus points in favor of removing the President right? So if she acquits, there’s a lot of political risk.”

Moore said once it comes down to decision making time, he believes that Murkowski will vote in favor of Trump. However, it can’t be completely ruled out since she’s broken rank before.

...From a strictly political strategy view, Moore expects that Murkowski will end up supporting the President in the impeachment trial in a Senate with a Republican majority.

“At the end of the day, if what you’re thinking about is the end result of this thing, it’s not significant at all,” he said, “because the Senate is not going to vote to convict right? So whatever Murkowski votes, whatever she does with her vote is irrelevant to the end result. Where it is relevant is to the people who support her, and to her, and to her election chances.”

Imagine how much tougher that is for Susan Collins who, is up for reelection in November and who has seen her popularity in the state collapsing in the state to the point that she is now the least liked senator in her own state than anyone else in the country-- including Moscow Mitch!





And you almost feel sorry-- almost-- for desperate Colorado sad sack Cory Gardner-- "weak, frightened, impotent... a small man terrified of a political bully." And that's what conservative Republicans are saying about him, not Democrats, who wouldn't dare be that blunt. This is just an internet ad today. Can you imagine the Lincoln Project putting it on television!