So Rudolph Giuliani's Upper East Side office and apartment have been raided, and cellphones and computers seized, and a grand jury subpoena served on Giuliani's executive assistant, in an FBI investigation of whether he may have violated laws against trying to influence or lobby the US government on behalf of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department. Among other things, I trust. Also a phone taken from lawyer Victoria Toensing, who has been variously involved with Giuliani's Ukraine contacts Yuriy Lutsenko and Dmytro Firtash and has employed Lev Parnas and Ihor Fruman as "translators", I believe, and is the attorney of writer John Solomon, who is in turn one of the correspondents in the communications the feds are searching for on the devices they seized.
I'm re-upping the following, from January 2020, the day after Trump's impeachment lawyers presented his "case", as a helpful guide to who all these people were and what they were likely to have been doing, and who they were doing it for (one Donald J. Trump, in his aspiration for a second presidential term)
Little Marco. Photo by Greg Nash/Getty via David Frum's impeachment piece from Wednesday in The Atlantic.
One of the things really striking me in the course of the impeachment proceedings was the appalling personal weakness of those tough-guy pro-Liberty Republican senators, which we often don't see because they have so much ability—I won't call it "power"—to make everything worse. It may sound like a paradox, but it's an ability born of failure, and impotence, and inability to rise to an occasion, and it got me ranting:
Then what the fuck is it good for. Congress should be the branch that
guarantees democracy. I don't want soft legislators like you getting
pushed around by loony dictators because oh the Constitution didn't give
me explicit permission. Jesus Christ you're pathetic.
— Chase Me Ladies I'm on the Calvary (@Yastreblyansky)
February 14, 2021
"I'd love to do something about the psychopath who drove a
murderous mob to trash my building and kill people who work here but oh my
stars I'm not sure if the Constitution wants me to so I'd better
play with my fucking phone instead."
How can you be so
little and not ashamed?
— Chase Me Ladies I'm on the Calvary (@Yastreblyansky)
February 14, 2021
And then there was Mitch McConnell, explaining how he knows Trump is guilty but doesn't think it's proper for him to do anything about it. Of course we know (I think Steve was the first to clarify this for me) what he really means, which is that his political position requires him to say both that Trump is guilty (for the suburbans) and that he's not guilty (for the rustics) and so by God he'll say both regardless of the contradiction, but the logic he used in his remarks showed what a loser he really is, and got me going:
The Senate impeachment trial was suddenly thrown into some kind of turmoil by
the surfacing of some sort of new detail on the 6 January siege, from Rep.
Jaime Lynn Herrera Beutler (R-WA and one of the ten Republicans who voted to
impeach in the House), on the story Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told her of
his call that afternoon to Trump to beg him to call off his thugs and stop the
assault.
It wasn't going to change the outcome of the trial, though it probably should
have, but it could have prolonged it beyond bearing: the House managers wanted to call
her and, I thought, McCarthy as witnesses, and Trump's lawyer Michael Van der
Veen threatened to come back with a call for 100 depositions, just for
starters—effectively, to turn the impeachment into Benghazi hearings.
In the end they made a deal: Herrera Beutler's story will be added to the
record, but suppressed from the closing statements, and won't be part of the
case on which the senators vote.
I'd like to spend some time on it all the same. The story also does offer some
important clarification for our understanding of what happened, alongside the
reporting of Tommy Tuberville's conversation with Trump of around the same
time, in which Trump had been urging him to do something to delay the
certification of the election results after Pence's announcement that they
would be certified in spite of Trump's complaints. In the call Tuberville is
said to have told Trump he had to go because the Capitol police were
evacuating the Senate chamber as the Senate's president, Mike Pence, was being
whisked out of the room.
As the tweeps were quick to note, McDaniel's Brooksian assumption that Lincoln must have been talking about "bringing our badly divided country together" is stupid. Lincoln's speech, with which he accepted the Republican Party's nomination to run against Senator Stephen Douglas in the 1858 election, was a radical which-side-are-you-on moment of reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (allowing the residents, meaning the white male residents, of each of the newly organized western territories to decide whether or not slavery would be legal) and the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that somebody who was a slave in a slave state remained a slave in a state where slavery was illegal, without a right to defend himself against the demands of his "owner".
The Republic, Lincoln maintained, was one decision away from making slavery legal in all states, regardless of the desires of the citizens:
If you're confused about the First Amendment argument, that poor Donald can't
be punished for exercising his free speech rights, don't be. Rand Paul's
argument
Paul also noted that Trump was within his First Amendment rights when he
addressed a crowd of supporters before the attack on the Capitol that led to
the deaths of five people, including a Capitol Police officer.
“People are going to have to judge for themselves … are we going to
potentially prosecute people for political speech?” Paul questioned.
He said if that becomes the case and speech is criminalized, then
Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, could be
impeached over their fiery rhetoric against Trump, his allies, as
well as the lawmakers who stirred up protesters last summer.
in addition to showing some remarkable ignorance (he's been in the Senate how
many years and he still doesn't know that impeaching a senator isn't a thing
that the Constitution allows for?), is a pure red herring, and it's starting to
smell, because in the first place
the president doesn't have free speech rights. No government employee does, if they are speaking in their official capacity:
Edmund Burke in the House of Commons. Photo12/Universal Images Group, via New York Times (and a Bret Stephens column of last August, "Why Edmund Burke Still Matters").
Why, yes. Yes, you are totally wrong.
Hastings had returned home from India in 1785, but the famous conservative thinker and MP Edmund Burke had been determined since 1786 that he should be brought to justice. pic.twitter.com/ZEyOIzOUIQ
The one thing Bolton got really angry about, as
Jennifer Szalai
notes in an enjoyably snarky Times review:
the moment he cites as the real “turning point” for him in the
administration had to do with an attack on Iran that, to Bolton’s abject
disappointment, didn’t happen.
In June 2019, Iran had shot down an unmanned American drone, and Bolton,
who has always championed what he proudly calls “disproportionate
response,” pushed Trump to approve a series of military strikes in
retaliation. You can sense Bolton’s excitement when he describes going
home “at about 5:30” for a change of clothes because he expected to be at
the White House “all night.” It’s therefore an awful shock when Trump
decided to call off the strikes at the very last minute, after learning
they would kill as many as 150 people. “Too many body bags,” Trump told
him. “Not proportionate.”
Bolton still seems incensed at this unexpected display of caution and
humanity on the part of Trump, deeming it “the most irrational thing I
ever witnessed any President do.”
Right. "I understand hesitating to say he believes the US intelligence
community because Vladimir Putin says they they gave him a bum rap, but
refusing to kill 150 beastly Persians when you have a chance? That's
irrational!"
GORGEOUS 3 BD 2 FULL BTH 2 HALF BTH COUNTRY FARM HOUSE W/HEATED AND COOLED 700 SQ FT OFFICE/STUDIO OVER 3 CAR GARAGE, IN-GRD HEATED POOL, 5 STALL BARN ON OVER 7 ACRES IN THE HEART OF BEDMINSTER. $6.,000.month as opposed to almost three times that if Secret Service is writing the check. Via Zillow.
Something I'm not hearing, as in this otherwise perfectly good NBC story—
On Wednesday night, when President Donald Trump addressed supporters from behind a Trump Hotels lectern in a room at his Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., one of his company's most faithful customers accompanied him.
The U.S. Secret Service.
The government agency charged with protecting the president has paid his businesses at least $471,000 to fulfill its congressional mandate, according to documents The Washington Post recently obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. That's money from U.S. taxpayers flowing to the Trump Organization, with a venerable 155-year-old law enforcement organization being used like one of Michael Cohen's Delaware shell companies and serving as a conduit for presidential profit. And that $471,000 figure? It's only through April 2018.
—is that it's another violation of the Constitution, just as serious as taking money from the Saudi Arabian government, when he gets money from our own government; a violation of Article II, section 1, clause 7, the Domestic Emoluments Clause,
Lon Chaney in Herbert Brenon's Laugh Clown Laugh, 1928.
If you're talking about the House of Representatives you might try to remember that for two of those years it was under the GOP speakership of famous wonk genius Paul Ryan and impeachment inquiries couldn't begin and it was Infrastructure Week all the time but nothing happened.
But maybe when you're home next you could call your congresswoman and ask her what you could do to help out with passing her universal pre-K bill https://t.co/l7XvQuJwQW
National Archives photoshopped blurring of a protest sign, via Vos Iz Neias.
I didn't even notice whether Governor Whitmer had mentioned the criminality of the White House occupant in her response to the State of the Union address of Individual no. 1, whose writers didn't of course find time to mention it at all. It turns out that she did allude to the Senate trial and Chairman Schiff's hopeful slogan at the very end:
As we witness the impeachment process in Washington, there are some things each of us, no matter our party should demand. The truth matters, facts matter, and no one should be above the law. It’s not what those senators say tomorrow, it’s about what they do that matters. Remember, listen to what people say but watch what they do. It’s time for action.
Meanwhile, the ongoing Trump administration violation of the Presidential Records Act goes way beyond the Stalinoid doctoring by the National Archives of a picture of the Women's March and the president's personal habit of tearing his own papers to pieces and throwing them out—White House staffers who tried taping them back together were fired, historian Matthew Connelly tells us in an opinion piece for The Times:
a Senate trial, with no witness—
a steaming pile of shit it is
I thought we would be saving our threatened nation
instead it looks like wasted anticipation
a Senate trial of impeaching
across the aisle they're not reaching
I haven't seen Republicans crack a smile
it's never been their style
this is a Senate trial
a Senate trial without judging
the whole defense is Matt Drudging
the prosecution can't seem to get attention
with all the parties dreaming of their convention
a Senate trial with no sentence—
we don't believe in repentance
defendant is quite happily in denial
or maybe that's his guile
this is a Senate trial
a Senate trial with no ending
the solons' fear is heart-rending
they seem to think the Emperor is bionic
too bad the rules forbid them a gin and tonic
a Senate trial with no moral
I'd better stop or we'll quarrel
I'm turning off the radio for a while
it's filling me with bile
this is a Senate trial
He wasn't really voting to block witnesses at all! It was the Democrats who had done it! Senator Graham was merely um doing um something else.
Then he enjoyed a refreshing sleep and a nourishing breakfast and toddled over to the Senate where he voted to block witnesses.
Everybody knows the origin. An anonymous whistleblower, relying on the protection of the law, made a complaint addressed to the chairs of House and Senate intelligence committees and submitted it correctly to the ICIG, who agreed that it was serious and important...
We should all be glad that the rule of law obtained against Maguire and whoever was giving him orders to block this urgent complaint. Bringing it to light saved President Zelenskyy from the need to accept President Trump's extortion attempt and got Ukraine its funding. Period.
The only relevant thing is that the complaint arrived, after some illegal stonewalling attempts, at its destination and the American people have been informed and one of President Trump's illegal dealings has been stopped. It's all good.
If the whistleblower violated some article of White House protocol to get the document to the place IG Atkinson agreed it needed, urgently, to go, that's a good thing! If he hadn't done it, Zelenskyy would have gone on CNN on schedule, humiliated himself and disheartened his voters (and the rest of the world) by announcing his imaginary investigations of an imaginary crime (and Trump might have gone on holding the aid, as I suppose Putin asked him to do in the secret 31 July phone call, but you don't have to pay any attention to that). It was a win for the rule of law!
Or is somebody claiming that IG Atkinson was wrong about whether or not the complaint was credible and urgent? I don't hear Trump and his lawyers doing that. I hear Trump and his lawyers making fitful attempts to stop us from thinking about it altogether, kicking up the identity of the whistleblower like sand in our eyes. Which is kind of their only alternative, but please don't let yourself be affected by it.
While I'm up, a weird and distasteful thread on Biden and his press problems, beginning with the great Elizabeth Drew weighing in with her opinion:
On an unrelated quest, I just ran into this letter from last November to Lindsey Graham (it was covered by Fox) in which, it seems to me, Rudy confesses:
I assure you, despite the false rumors and exaggerations of reality,
everything I did was to defend an innocent man, in this case, the President of the United States. Not only from false charges but from a deliberately planned conspiracy to prevent him from being elected, and then the insurance policy to remove him by false charges and illegal methods.
Defending your client from not getting elected isn't what a defense attorney does; it's the work of a political agent. But it's the only thing Giuliani has done (what "false charges" against Trump has he dealt with, as a lawyer, or true ones either? I haven't heard of him addressing Trump's illegal behavior in the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal payoffs, or the long list of obstruction of justice counts in the Mueller report, have you?).
In the letter, he still seems to be trying to get visas for Ukrainian informants, maybe Shokin, against the "Biden Family" (promoting Joe with that capitalization to full-scale Godfather status)
There are at least three (3) witnesses who have direct (non-hearsay) evidence of Democrat criminal conspiracy with Ukrainians to prevent Donald J. Trump from being President, with the alternative to remove him from office based on contrived charges. This has been most recently established by Mark Zaid, the discredited anonymous informant’s lawyer, who called for a coup ten days after the January 2017 inauguration. These witnesses have oral, documentary, and recorded evidence of the Biden Family’s involvement in bribery, money laundering, Hobbs Act extortion, and other possible crimes. They do not seek anonymity, like the disappearing informant. They desire a visa and it will not be granted by Ambassador Bill Taylor’s embassy in Kiev. The Ambassador, apparently, has been too busy starring on mid-day soap operas, providing us with inadmissible second and third-hand information, including guesses and surmises. Some of which I personally know is false because his information about me is largely untrue.
Last night we were looking at the assertions of Trump lawyers in the Senate trial:
“He was not on a political errand,” Raskin argued. “He was doing what good defense attorneys do. …”
So the Republicans finally did get around to mentioning Rudolph Giuliani's name after all, yesterday, for 15 minutes of their 24 hours (which seem to have reduced themselves by about half, no surprise there), in the person of counselor Jane Raskin, who explained that Rudy was simply a "colorful distraction" introduced into the story by Democrats:
“The House managers would have you believe that Mr. Giuliani is at the center of this controversy,” Raskin said. “They’ve anointed him the proxy villain of the tale, the leader of a rogue operation. Their presentations were filled with ad hominem attacks and name-calling … but I suggest to you he’s front an center in their narrative for one reason alone: to distract from the fact that the evidence does not support their claims.”
Because it wasn't the way the Democrats saw it when he and Lev and Ihor, and the hack journalist John Solomon, and the hack Ukrainian prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Kostiantyn Kulyk and Yuriy Lutsenko, and the very rich Ukrainian crook Dmytro Firtash, worked to concoct their stories of how the real thieves of the Democratic National Committee emails were an imaginary Ukrainian firm called CrowdStrike (overlapping in their alternative universe with the American company of that name in ours); and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was a secret member of the anti-Trump resistance; and Joe Biden's son Hunter had done something unspeakable and indeed undefinable, but very bad.
Raskin asserted that Giuliani’s pursuits were not about the 2020 presidential election, citing the fact that he undertook the effort before Mueller’s report on Russian interference was released and before Biden announced his presidential bid. She said he was driven by a motivation to defend his client against the Mueller probe.
“He was not on a political errand,” Raskin argued. “He was doing what good defense attorneys do. … He was gathering evidence about Ukrainian election interference to defend his client against the false allegations being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.”
Let's just take a look at that, focusing on the timing:
I will point out for no good reason except Joanie will like it if she shows up that I knew Shashi Tharoor, now for some years the Congress Party's greatest Twitter exponent, very slightly when he was UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Singapore—he used to play cricket with some friends of mine. This is a picture of John Bolton hating on him and anxious to stop him from becoming UN Secretary General, via DNAIndia.
So fired National Security Advisor Bolton apparently confirms the bribery attempt, not calling it a "drug deal" in his literary effort (man doesn't know a catchy phrase when he sees it, even when he made it up himself); Haberman and Schmidt for NYTimes inform us:
WASHINGTON — President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.
The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.
"Could undercut" LOL. Could confirm what all the evidence tends to show.
Looks like Bolton dishes on Pompeo (for knowing there was no basis to claims against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and passively allowed Trump to do what he wanted without ever backing her up) and Barr (Bolton asked Barr why Trump had included Barr in his "talk to Rudy" advice to Zelenskyy; Barr has denied having heard about that call until a month later). And Mulvaney (for lying about whether he listened to Trump-Giuliani discussions).
The White House evidently suggesting that it knew Mr. Bolton only for a very short time and maybe he was the coffee boy—and inevitably admitting what he said was true but regretting that he was naughty enough to say so and hang on to the documentation:
In recent days, some White House officials have described Mr. Bolton as a disgruntled former employee, and have said he took notes that he should have left behind when he departed the administration.
Drawing by W.S. Gilbert, from the 1864 "Bab Ballad" on which his and Arthur Sullivan's first opera was based. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will only take up of couple of hours of your time this morning sketching out the full and completely fact-based argument on behalf of my client that we will be presenting to you as soon as we've finished drafting it sometime Monday afternoon, because we don't plan to make you wait for us to start repeating ourselves the way the Democrats did, with their hysterical and deeply improper attempts to talk you into accepting witness testimony before you'd even been given a chance to hear the witness testimony summarized.
We intend, in contrast, to start the process of repeating ourselves immediately, with a kind of "coming attractions" reel of all the fine points we expect to be making next week, all of which will refer themselves exclusively to the evidentiary record that the Democrats laid out for us this week, and no reference at all to that time Trump asked somebody to "take out" Ambassador Yovanovitch at dinner in April 2018 before Rudolph Giuliani even got involved with the case*. We will not even bore you by acknowledging that Rudolph Giuliani exists, and this is a promise.
One last word on Hunter Biden. It's clear that the case is irrelevant to the question of Trump's strong-arming the Ukrainian president and should be dismissed out of hand from the impeachment trial, but there's something else that just occurred to me, starting from two fairly simple questions:
Why do they want to call him, given that if he has done anything illegal he has a constitutional right not to testify?
Why don't they call somebody else who will testify as to what they think he's done?
The answer to the second being, I suddenly realize, though it's obvious, there isn't anybody. They don't have any witnesses to wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.
There were a couple, to be precise, ex-prosecutor Kostiantyn Kulyk, who was removed from his position in late November after failing to show up for an anti-corruption interview, and ex–prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, under criminal investigation in Ukraine since the beginning of October for abuse of power (conspiracy to to "provide cover" for illegal gambling businesses in Ukraine), both of whom played roles in providing President Trump's personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani and hack journalist John Solomon with materials accusing Biden, and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, of some kind of undefined misconduct, but they're not looking very helpful to the Republican cause, since not only are they apparently criminals, but everything they said about Yovanovitch has collapsed in the face of her sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, and everything Giuliani and Solomon has said has been dismissed in the testimony of the State Department's George Kent, who told the committee
that Solomon’s reporting, “if not entirely made up in full cloth,” was filled with “non-truths and non-sequiturs.
and Lutsenko (also under fire for his collaboration with Floridian rowdies and indicted Giuliani companions Lev Parnas and Ihor Fruman) has announced that the accusations against Hunter Biden were all false as well,
There are no witnesses at all to Hunter Biden's alleged misconduct, and the closest thing there was to a witness has withdrawn his accusation and it really looks like the simplest explanation is that there wasn't any misconduct.
(It's also clear that he was qualified for the position, which didn't require an energy expert, they had enough of those already, but an international lawyer, which he was, with a Yale law degree and plenty of board experience. I won't talk about the obscenity of the pay and the way it tends to go to celebrity names, since that's in no way Biden's fault but the system's, but the man paid off his dead brother's student loans!). Why do Republicans want to call a putative criminal to testify on a crime when there's no evidence that a crime took place?
Because that's the only avenue left for them to suggest there was a crime.
Not by getting him to testify about it, but in the hope of getting him to take the 5th over some detail or other. They can't get anybody to accuse him of a crime, but maybe they can get him to not deny it. That's why they want to call him, and the aim isn't to catch him in some skullduggery, which nobody would have cared about even if he had done it, but to provide a reason for thinking that Trump's not guilty. Because reasons for that are extremely scarce.
So my considered recommendation to the Democrats is that they should agree to subpoenas of Hunter and Joe Biden if and only if Republicans can provide testimony from a respectable source to back up the idea that there's some crime one of them committed. And articles by or citing the discredited John Solomon (fabricating these stories was one of the reasons The Hill fired him) need not apply. I'm pretty sure they can't.
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
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
One of the most precious things about this piece (from Dersh's interview yesterday with Anderson Cooper) is the implication that 20 years ago, when he was a famous expert in constitutional law, he "didn't do research" whereas now that he's become a disreputable shyster who must publicly announce that he kept his underwear on during a massage and complain that he gets no dinner invitations on Martha's Vineyard, he does it all the time. But it gets better:
I Didn't Do Research Back Then
by Alan J. Dershowitz
I didn't do research
back then, I relied
on what professors said ...
because that issue
was not presented
in the Clinton impeachment
Everybody knew
that he was charged
with a crime, the issue
is whether it was
a hard crime
Now the issue is
whether a crime
or criminal-like behavior
is required. I've done
the research now --
I wasn't wrong,
I am just
far more correct
now than I was then
There's some semiotic interest in the way two legitimate arguments whimper in the corner of this poem, like captured slaves being put to unspeakable uses, the arguments that "high crimes and misdemeanors" need not be statutory crimes on the one hand—there wasn't even any Federal statute law at the time the Constitution was written, so the Founders plainly couldn't have meant that—and statutory crimes aren't necessarily impeachable on the other. Both these things are indeed true, and "a lot of people don't know that" as Trump would say, but they don't do the thing he's trying to say they do.
That is, what Dershowitz said in 1998
"It certainly doesn't have to be a crime if you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don't need a technical crime," he said on "Larry King Live" at the time.
is certainly true, period, although the use of the term "technical" is pretty annoying—I'm assuming that he means a crime defined by a particular statute, but "well, technically it was a crime" is an expression used to minimize the criminality, as in the case of Trump's blocking of congressionally mandated spending in the Ukraine shakedown (though it's a crime that has never been punished). This is directly relevant to the Clinton impeachment, when Dershowitz was speaking publicly in defense of the president. He put it more intelligently and usefully in an interview with the Washington Post during Clinton's Senate trial in January 1999:
Prof. Dershowitz, this trial has been called both a legal and political proceeding. What do you see it as. And how do you regard yourself, as a legal or political actor?
Prof. Alan M. Dershowitz: None of the above. I think this is a constitutional proceeding that should not be legalistic, nor should it be crassly political. The central point is whether the allegations, if true, constitute treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.
To answer that question, we don't need testimony about who touched who where, but rather about the intent of the framers, the nature of our constitutional system and the criteria for removal of the president. This should not be a trial in the legal or political sense. It should be a great constitutional debate about the meaning of our system of checks and balances.
Since Clinton's misbehavior (giving false testimony to a grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky) did not have any relationship to his performance of his official duties, and wasn't even related to the case he was testifying in (it was Kenneth Starr's grand jury, which was supposed to be investigating the Whitewater land deal and had ended up investigating his relationship with Paula Jones instead), it could hardly be considered a "high" crime, and arguably wasn't a crime at all, not even "technically":
I am not a strong personal supporter of President Clinton [LOL, he's still using that]. I am a strong opponent of the misuse of the impeachment and removal power against him. I do not think he committed the technical crime of perjury, but nor do I think that he has shown himself to be an honest person.
In that, I guess, perjury is supposed to be when you tell a lie that's material to the matter you're testifying about, and this wasn't.
Were President Clinton to be removed, I believe this would be the first case in Anglo-American history of impeachment and removal of anyone, ever, for trying to cover up and even lying about a consensual sexual encounter. It would legitimate sexual McCarthyism and make sex a weapon in the political wars. The closest precedent we have is the House Judiciary Committee refusing to impeach President Nixon for committing perjury in his filing of a fraudulent tax return. Nixon's actions were closer to being governmental, since they involved the tax deductibility of government papers, but a bipartisan vote ruled that it was too close to the personal side to warrant impeachment.
Well put! And these are exactly the points he is skipping over in his defense of Trump: what Trump unarguably did in regard to the Zelenskyy government—and as we keep being told, there's no dispute on the facts—may or may not be a violation of this or that criminal statute, but it certainly involved the bending of US foreign policy to gratify Trump's personal urgencies, as Hamilton put it in Federalist 65,
A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.
You can certainly argue that it's made up of statutory crimes (criminal bribery, wire fraud, obstruction of justice) anyway, as Schiff persuasively did last month, to say nothing of all kinds of plainly illegal "misdemeanors" like his retaliation against Maria Yovanovitch, for which any CEO in a US business could be fired, or the defiance of Congress in withholding Ukraine funds, recently declared illegal by the GAO, but nobody can argue that it isn't "criminal-like". It's as criminal-like as it gets.
Senior Trump administration officials in recent days threatened a presidential veto that could have led to a government shutdown if House Democrats refused to drop language requiring prompt release of [a $250-million appropriation of] future military aid for Ukraine, according to five administration and congressional officials.
The language was ultimately left out of mammoth year-end spending legislation that passed the House and Senate this week ahead of a Saturday shutdown deadline.
That's just totally normal, right?
Other than that, I really think this is the week Nancy Pelosi became prime minister (as I began expecting a couple years ago), conducting an impeachment of a president, presenting him with three huge bills to sign—the $1.4 trillion appropriations bills and the revised NAFTA treaty—and commemorating the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium (the President, though he had no public events over the weekend other than the Army-Navy football game, sent Defense Secretary Mike Esper to represent him).
