Day 1,097: GOP’s impeachment strategy: don’t defend Trump, just rig the trial
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Republicans have no real defense for Donald Trump’s Ukrainian extortion scheme that led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives.
So they’ll rig the trial instead.
Their ground rules: no witness and no new documents.
Senate Republicans are poised to jam through the ground rules for President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, preparing to vote on party lines and reject Democratic efforts to subpoena witnesses and documents in the trial’s organizing resolution.
The resolution from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is expected to pass late Tuesday or early Wednesday and punt the decision on whether witnesses will testify until next week. It potentially puts Trump on track to be acquitted before his Feb. 4 State of the Union address. But it won’t come easy. Democrats are making the process as uncomfortable as possible by forcing hours of debate and several votes on subpoenaing witnesses and documents.
While McConnell had to yield slightly on some of his most extreme rules, the entire process has been designed to speed up the trial while limiting all potential damaging — read: truthful — information from coming out. First-hand witnesses like former National Security Advisor John Bolton, chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry and others that can shed light on Trump’s actions have been previously blocked by Trump. Now they’ll be blocked by Republicans.
The most pertinent of evidence will also remain hidden, potentially from public view forever.
Republicans also rejected asking for White House documents related to meetings and calls between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as documents from the State Department, Defense Department and Office of Management and Budget. All failed along party lines.
Trump keeps claiming everything about his asking of Ukraine for a “favor” to investigate the Biden family was perfect. However, he is simultaneously hiding the very things that would exculpate him if he was being truthful.
Similarly, his team isn’t even bothering to offer a defense in the Senate, choosing to simply attack Democrats and let McConnell do the rest.
The other half of Trump’s squad, his legal team, chose not to defend his actions with a cogent explanation for them. Rather than rebutting hours of evidence presented by House Democratic impeachment managers, White House lawyers opted to repeat Trump’s attacks on the process and the disjointed set of rejoinders he’s delivered to Democrats in public.
Trump’s legal team couldn’t even stay consistent in their arguments on Tuesday.
[White House counsel Pat] Cipollone accused Democrats of initiating concerns about Trump withholding appropriated aid to Ukraine while seeking the announcement of an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. But Jay Sekulow, another one of the president’s lawyers, later said it was an intelligence community whistleblower who brought attention to the matter.
What’s happening in the Senate isn’t a legitimate trial. It’s a Republican-designed and Republican-led farce designed to protect Trump, not the Constitution and not the republic.
1,097 days in, 365 to go
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