The Details Where the Devil Is

Neoclassical balcony, Athens, via Dreamstime.

In an incredible exchange at Davos, @realdonaldtrump admits he is comfortable with the status of the impeachment trial because the White House is withholding evidence. "Honestly, we have all the material. They don't have the material." As always, he says the quiet part out loud. pic.twitter.com/Gk3h1QZyAi

— Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix) January 22, 2020

I guess so. Trump has outsmarted justice the way Putin outsmarted Obama, by locking the goods up with the understanding that there aren't any cops who are going to stop him.

Spending time watching the Senate proceedings, moved as always by the coolness and commitment and command of the material that our guys show—I missed Zoe Lofgren, but caught performances by most of the others, and they're so good at it, and doing something very ingenious, as they plead for the witnesses and documents to be released to public view one witness or source at a time, using their time to build up a rich narrative of the Ukraine matter as they do it (it's got the feel of one of those postmodern documentary novels like Brad Leithauser's A Few Corrections, 2001, which took the form of corrections to a newspaper obituary).

Not that it matters. Looking at the reporting, I find it's dedicated to the discussion of Mitch McConnell's maneuvers, with the work of the House managers getting attention only in the color commentary, like Hakeem Jeffries introducing a reference to the notorious B.I.G., or a dustup between Nadler and the Trump team's Cipollone

Mr. Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told Republican senators they showed all the signs of being ready to aid the president’s “cover up” in voting down a measure to compel Mr. Bolton to testify during the trial.

Mr. Cipollone replied with a retort of his own.

“The only one who should be embarrassed, Mr. Nadler, is you, for the way you address this body,” he said. “This is the United States Senate. You’re not in charge here.”

Mr. Nadler shot back: “The president’s counsel has no standing to talk about lying.”

which roused Chief Justice Roberts to a vigorous call for both sides to display civility, donnishly referring to a time (1905) when a House impeachment manager could be admonished on the Senate floor for using the word "pettifogging". Though it's a fact that Cipollone repeatedly told the most foolish Trumpian lies at every appearance—Schiff was assigned to come out and deliver the fact-checks, which he did with great panache—as Beth Levin is noting at Vanity Fair:

Perhaps in an homage to a man who has made 16,241 “false or misleading claims” in his first three years in office, White House counsel Pat Cipollone kicked things off with a series of outright lies, a gesture that presumably brought tears to the big guy’s eyes.

The first whopper was Cipollone’s claim that “not even [House Intelligence Committee chair and impeachment manager Adam] Schiff’s Republican colleagues were allowed into the SCIF,” the secure facility where members of Congress reviewed classified information relevant to the impeachment inquiry. This statement, of course, was not true at all. While some House Republicans tried to pull a publicity stunt at the time over colleagues who weren’t on the committees involved not being allowed in the room, those who were on the three relevant committees were granted the exact same level of access as Democrats.

This morning, Senator Mike Lee, one of the Republicans who sometimes shows some impatience with the Trump administration's congenital deceptiveness, is complaining that Roberts should have limited his criticism to Nadler, in the weirdest concern-troll framing, suggesting not that Nadler was wrong but that he was making a tactical error:

“They were rude. They were insulting. They were demeaning,” Lee said of the Democrats serving as House managers. “You don’t go in and insult your jury or your judge. Here they did both.”

I can imagine Lee is setting himself up to explain his votes against having witnesses by saying, "Well, I would have liked them, but the Democrats hurt my feelings."

It's early to say so, but I'm getting a conflict of thoughts about this confrontation between engaged intelligence and brute stupidity. On the one hand I feel as if Democrats are up to a crazy project in building this immense edifice of a criminal case which nobody is every going to see the whole of, including you and me—how can it convince anybody? While the Republicans maintain their Goebbels strategy of steady repetition of shameless falsehoods and pearl clutching when they get called out.

But there's another possibility, that people don't necessarily need the whole story. It's come to me that in 1974 hardly anybody understood the monstrosity of the Nixon conspiracy against the masses of his enemies from black militants to CBS reporters (people still think the only crime was a "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate Hotel), but everybody got Rosemary Woods and the tape with the eighteen-minute gap. "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up." Of which, of course, we have all we can handle in the Trump case, where the president retains "all the material" and laughs at us.

Or maybe not necessarily the coverup, but any of the details where the devil is, if people just get a clear sense of one of them. I'm thinking that the glimpses people get of Schiff or Nadler or Lofgren or Jeffries or Garcia or Crow working their bits of the case are like the details in classical architecture, where one angle view lets you infer the scope and grace of the whole thing, and that, the shock of it, could be enough to persuade you.