Trump enters the stage

Letter from Trump’s Washington

Spoiler Alert: There Will Be No Impartial Justice for Donald Trump

Susan B. Glasser

January 16, 2020

The House delivered the articles of impeachment against President Trump to the Senate in a self-consciously anachronistic enactment of a process dreamed up by the Founders.

Shortly after 2 p.m. on Thursday, ninety-nine of the hundred members of the United States Senate raised their hands and swore en masse to do “impartial justice” in the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump. That, of course, is an impossibility in the political world they inhabit. Neither impartiality nor justice is on offer in this proceeding. Three years into Trump’s tenure, there is precisely no one in the U.S. Capitol who is undecided about the President, on the subject of his impeachment or any other. And yet there is real suspense, in the way that the Trump Presidency has conditioned us to expect: Will there be wild new revelations? (There already have been in the past twenty-four hours.) Will there be inappropriate tweeting by the defendant in the White House? (A given.) Will even a single senator break from the calcified partisan battle lines? (Who knows?)

This Senate trial is only the third such proceeding in American history, and, despite what appears to be its preordained acquittal of the President by his fellow-Republicans, it is starting out with such great uncertainty that it’s still not even clear if there will be witnesses called and evidence submitted. How can it be a trial without them? The Democrat-controlled House voted to impeach Trump in a party-line vote in December, and yet key facts about the President’s aborted scheme to pressure Ukraine for his personal political benefit remain unknown (although they are very much knowable), owing to an executive-branch information blockade ordered by Trump. Will those facts come out before the Chief Justice of the United States bangs down the gavel on the trial’s seemingly inevitable outcome?

In today’s brutally dysfunctional capital—in which institutions of government are controlled by feuding clans that communicate with each other almost exclusively via hostile tweets and cable-news sound bites—anything can turn into an exercise in raw power politics. Even the ministerial matter of transmitting the articles of impeachment from the House to the Senate and beginning the Senate trial became the subject of an entire holiday season of made-for-TV drama. For weeks, Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to turn over the articles until she’d received assurances from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about what kind of trial he planned to run. No such assurances were forthcoming, although Pelosi arguably succeeded in one respect—turning the debate away from her side’s forthcoming defeat in the Senate to the matter of what would constitute a fair trial. Democrats have redefined victory to mean not necessarily winning the case but merely getting a proper hearing for it. For now, at least.

On Wednesday, after Pelosi finally ended her hold on the articles of impeachment, she named seven members of the House as managers who will prosecute the case in the Senate. On Thursday, at the stroke of noon, the House managers marched across the Capitol and physically presented the articles to the Senate in a self-consciously anachronistic twenty-first-century enactment of a process dreamed up by our eighteenth-century founders. There was gravitas, solemnity, talk of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” There were “wherefore”s and “hear ye, hear ye”s. Chief Justice John Roberts was summoned over from the Supreme Court to administer the senatorial oath and take up his duties as the trial’s presiding officer. The Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, later said that, as Roberts entered the chamber, “I saw members on both sides of the aisle visibly gulp.” “The weight of history,” as Schumer put it, was visibly upon the Senate. “God bless you,” Senator Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, who was sitting in the chair, told Roberts after he swore him in.

But even now that the constitutional formalities have been dispensed with, McConnell has not revealed whether and how there will even be votes on requiring the testimony of new witnesses and the submission of documents that the White House refused to provide to the House, a stonewall more complete than any Administration’s in history. If such votes do happen, they are not likely to be until a week or more into the proceedings. Meanwhile, new revelations continue to spill out about Trump’s Ukraine machinations, including a series of sensational interviews this week by the indicted Trump contributor Lev Parnas, who said that Trump knew of Parnas’s efforts with Rudy Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into investigating former Vice-President Joe Biden. The suspense surrounding the trial mixes the dread certainty that today’s Senate is ill-equipped to handle its constitutionally dictated obligation with a lingering curiosity about whether a handful of Republican senators will force McConnell to hold a proceeding that is something other than a sham.

“The Senate is on trial as well as the President,” Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said at the press conference where Pelosi introduced him and six others as the impeachment managers. It was a seemingly self-evident observation that nonetheless bears much repeating. The Senate trial could take between three and six weeks, according to one estimate, though Trump’s advisers are pushing Republicans for a much more abbreviated proceeding. However long it lasts, the trial will essentially consist of a hundred senators sitting silently at their desks, stripped of their cell phones and laptops and all the other accoutrements of modern political life, listening to the presentation of evidence in a case about which they have presumably already made up their minds. We listeners will have plenty of time to contemplate the Senate itself and what it has become in the Trump era.

“I understand that the politics of impeachment are difficult for many Senators,” Val Demings, one of the House managers, from Florida, tweeted soon after Pelosi appointed her to the job. “But I have not written off the Senate. Each Senator still has the power to do the right thing.” But this Senate is no closer to a real jury than the proceeding is to being a real trial. On Wednesday, Politico counted twenty-six Republican senators who had already put out statements or otherwise publicly indicated that they would vote against conviction and twenty-four more who probably would; Democrats were equally united around planned votes to convict. Republican sources have said that they don’t expect a single Republican defection on the final trial verdict, just as there was not a single Republican defection in the House on the impeachment itself.

For the past three years, the Senate has been one of the main arenas in which it has become clear just how totally and completely Trump has taken over the Republican Party. He has not only vanquished doubters; he has dominated them. Skeptics have been purged. Senators have abased themselves again and again. Those who stood up to Trump inside his own party have been exiled, silenced, or flipped. The President is on trial for holding hundreds of millions of dollars in congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine hostage for his own personal political ends, and, indeed, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan government watchdog, announced on Thursday, as the trial began, that the aid holdup was an illegal abuse of executive power. But Republican senators who claim an interest in national security have been loath even to acknowledge that there might be anything wrong with Trump’s behavior, even as an abstract matter of principle.

The suspense surrounding the trial, then, is not about the possibility that Republicans might suddenly change their minds about Donald Trump and his misdeeds. Lindsey Graham is not going to revert to his 2016 Trump-bashing self. Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are not miraculously going to start talking and produce a plan for the trial that everyone can get behind. The Senate that voted 100–0 on the rules governing the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, twenty-one years ago, is a thing of the distant past. Today’s uncertainty is about the nature, shape, and contours of the trial that will result from this more intemperate political moment. Mitt Romney, of Utah, and a few other so-called moderates—Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee; Susan Collins, of Maine; Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska—may yet force their colleagues to vote on bringing in Administration witnesses, such as Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, whom the White House does not want to testify. But it is doubtful that even a single one of them will ultimately vote to convict. This is why the real uncertainty remains what it has been since the day Pelosi and the House embarked upon this impeachment course, last September: it is an uncertainty about what comes after the trial—after Democrats have taken their shot at Trump and, in all likelihood, failed.

Soon after the day’s ceremonial start to the Senate trial had wrapped up, Trump appeared before the cameras to call the case against him a “big hoax,” “a witch-hunt hoax,” “a complete hoax,” and “a phony hoax.” What will he talk about when the trial is over and he is completely and totally vindicated in the greatest acquittal of all time? How will he govern then?

© Condé Nast 2020

The New York Times

How Trump Is Spreading a Conspiracy Theory About Pelosi, Biden and Sanders

President Trump claims Nancy Pelosi has intentionally undermined Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign by delaying the impeachment trial. Mr. Sanders denounced that theory on Friday.

President Trump claimed without evidence that Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, was “rigging” the Democratic primary.

WASHINGTON — The first version of the conspiracy theory was hatched on Twitter last Friday, Jan. 10.

“Don’t rule out that the reason Pelosi hasn’t sent impeachment to the Senate is to hurt Warren and Sanders, and to help Biden,” Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, tapped out on his iPad. “By timing the trial so it takes place during the Iowa lead-up, she has leverage over the liberals.”

Mr. Fleischer’s message was retweeted 1,400 times.

Seven days later, Mr. Fleischer’s theory that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was attempting to influence the Democratic primary — for which there is no evidence — was being promulgated by President Trump.

“They are rigging the election again against Bernie Sanders, just like last time, only even more obviously,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Friday, claiming his Senate trial was designed to keep Mr. Sanders, the Vermont senator, grounded in Washington instead of campaigning in Des Moines ahead of the Feb. 3 caucuses.

“Crazy Nancy thereby gives the strong edge to Sleepy Joe Biden, and Bernie is shut out again,” the president added.

BAD TIMING FOR JURY DUTY

The senators running for president will largely be kept off the campaign trail during the impeachment trial.

An idea that caught fire on Twitter and became grist for Mr. Trump demonstrates how the same echo chamber of right-wing media that boosted him in 2016 is exerting its power again just before the first primary votes are cast in 2020.

There was nothing new in terms of the process that got the idea in front of Mr. Trump. But the evolution from online conspiracy theory to Fox News fodder to presidential talking point demonstrated how a world of conservative influencers, Republican lawmakers and online media outlets can drive disinformation through repetition and amplification.

Two days after Mr. Fleischer’s tweet, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox News and repeated it. “This is the dirty little secret nobody is talking about: why the Speaker held these papers,” Mr. McCarthy said on Sunday. “This benefits Joe Biden. This harms Senator Sanders, who is in first place and could become their nominee.”

In fact, Mr. Sanders is not the national front-runner for the nomination and never has been, although he had a narrow lead in a recent poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers. But Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign in recent weeks has been seeking to elevate Mr. Sanders, viewing the self-described democratic socialist as the president’s ideal Democratic opponent in November.

The Trump camp, in turn, is worried about Mr. Biden’s competitiveness against the president in Midwestern battleground states, and would like to do anything possible to trip up the moderate former vice president in his tight primary race against the liberal Mr. Sanders.

Mr. McCarthy has continued to repeat the theory and profess support for Mr. Sanders, repeating the talking points in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News. His television commentary was then written up by Breitbart News, the right-wing news and opinion site.

On Thursday, The Federalist, a conservative website, ran an article with the headline: “Is Impeachment Delay How Democrats Are Rigging Iowa Against Bernie Again?” It said Ms. Pelosi’s decision to delay impeachment “provokes the question whether she is deliberately helping Joe Biden.”

One day later, the message had reached the White House, where Mr. Trump, a frequent purveyor of conspiracy theories, presented the idea as a fact.

“It’s easy to see why Bernie and his supporters would think the establishment is screwing them again,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, noting that the campaign often looks to Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed for its daily message.

Conspiracies surrounding Mr. Sanders’s political fortunes have been a particular fixation for Mr. Trump, dating back four years. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump circulated the false and unsourced claim that an “analysis” — he did not say who wrote it or where it was published — concluded that Mr. Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination if not for superdelegates, the party leaders and officials who were not bound to vote for the winner of their states’ primaries or caucuses.

At the time, Mr. Trump and his advisers realized the potential political benefit in lobbing these kinds of accusations. Their campaign, which relied heavily on depressing Democratic turnout as a way to win battleground states like Florida and Michigan, stood to gain by fanning the flames of the rivalry between Mr. Sanders and Hillary Clinton and dredging up the bitterness that many Sanders supporters felt over their loss.

Even after winning the election, Mr. Trump continued to claim that Mrs. Clinton had somehow robbed Mr. Sanders of victory. When Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman, released a memoir in 2017, Mr. Trump inaccurately said the book showed that Mrs. Clinton “bought the DNC & then stole the Democratic Primary” from Mr. Sanders.

In an interview, Mr. Fleischer said he had not seen the idea about the timing of the impeachment trial anywhere else and had not consulted with anyone when he first pitched it on Twitter. “I just do my best to realistically assess what’s happening in Washington,” he said. Mr. Fleischer said he believed that Ms. Pelosi does not think Mr. Sanders can beat Mr. Trump in November, and that “she has one big thing on her mind: that’s winning the White House.”

He said his tweet took off because “if it has merit, it starts to gather momentum.”

“If it has no merit, it’s just another tweet,” he added.

Republican staff members on Capitol Hill said the theory gained traction because of a broader narrative — pushed by Mr. Sanders’s own supporters — that Mr. Sanders was generally getting a raw deal from the mainstream news media and other candidates in the race.

In a statement on Friday, in response to a question from The New York Times about the president’s conspiracy tweet, Mr. Sanders denounced the theories. “Let’s be clear about who is rigging what: It is Donald Trump’s action to use the power of the federal government for his own political benefit that is the cause of the impeachment trial,” he said. “His transparent attempts to divide Democrats will not work, and we are going to unite to sweep him out of the White House in November.”

Ms. Pelosi’s team has also made it clear she was not trying to meddle in the nominating process.

“Impeachment has nothing to do with politics or the presidential race,” a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi, Drew Hamill, wrote on Twitter this week, responding to Mr. McCarthy’s accusation. “As usual, the Minority Leader has no idea what he’s talking about.”

Jan. 17, 2020

{As odd this sounds, his base, still rock solid, is still buying it. My opinion is that his wild theories are becoming real, not because they have validity, but because the Democracy is crumbling under the weight of no sufficient leadership, meaningful policy , and the furtherance of the growth of sustainable equal wealth destribution across the board.

POLITICS

President shifts message on proceeding after weeks of using it to raise money and rev up the base

President Trump’s latest view on the impeachment trial is that he wants it over and done with quickly.

Gerald F. Seib

Jan. 18, 2020 12:01 am ET

For weeks, President Trump and his campaign have heaped scorn on the impeachment process, while using it to raise a lot of money and energize the president’s base.

Now that the Senate has formally opened its trial phase of the process, the president’s approach has shifted. His message: Let’s get this over with, fast.

In both his public remarks and private comments, advisers say, Mr. Trump is ramping up pressure on Republican allies in the Senate to push the trial to a rapid close. They expect that pressure campaign to increase in the next few days, especially on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).

There was a time when it appeared Mr. Trump actually wanted a full-bore trial in the Senate, thinking such a process would vindicate his actions in pressuring Ukraine and delaying the delivery of military aid there. Now, though, Mr. Trump’s anger at the indignity of being impeached—one associate described him this week as “livid”—and the fear that a Senate trial with witnesses could bring unpleasant surprises has ended that line of thinking.

Still, impeachment has had its silver linings for the president’s re-election effort. Both Mr. Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have used the impeachment effort to raise millions of dollars and rally supporters. Online ads have pressed the president’s case, and some have targeted the 30 House Democrats who hail from districts Mr. Trump carried in 2016.

On the other side of the divide, the impeachment trial now is directly affecting the Democratic presidential campaign, by pulling off the trail a handful of senators seeking the party’s nomination. Still, the candidates don’t seem eager to focus on impeachment when out campaigning; it was barely mentioned when six of them debated in Iowa this week.

Do you expect the impeachment trial to go quickly? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.

One Democrat who is directly countering the Trump advertising blast is former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who already has spent $217 million on television and digital ads, many directly attacking the president. Like the president, Mr. Bloomberg is effectively running the kind of national campaign usually seen much later in a general-election year.

The Bloomberg effort is emerging as the Democrats’ wild card in the run-up to the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses, which kick off voting for the party’s nomination. Mr. Bloomberg is skipping Iowa, as well as the early primaries in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, to focus on the big blocs of states that follow.

Legal PoliciesDownload WSJ Apps

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Opinion, Analysis, Essays

David Mark The GOP’s Senate impeachment trial strategy got blown up by Trump’s legal team — for good reason

The political grenade Trump threw by announcing his defense counsel star power might not be the approach Republicans wanted. But it just might be the winning one.

Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr is sworn in on Capitol Hill prior to testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing on Nov. 19, 1998.Doug Mills / AP file

Jan. 18, 2020, 2:51 PM EST / Updated Jan. 18, 2020, 3:59 PM EST

By David Mark

This isn’t what Mitch McConnell wanted.

The Republican Senate majority leader from Kentucky has, since the House impeached President Donald Trump on Dec. 18, made clear his preference that a Senate trial over removing the president be of the shortest possible duration and the narrowest scope. After the trial opened Thursday amid solemn pomp and ceremony, McConnell and fellow Senate Republicans are now discussing speeding up proceedings to limit the time allowed for opening arguments.

Stacking his legal team with superstar figures gives Trump more control of the theatrics and narrative of the trial.

It’s part of the GOP’s broader approach to limit the attention paid to the trial, in which the president, 73, faces counts of abuse of power and obstruction of justice related to the Ukraine military aid affair. For Republican senators that means no witnesses and breaching established practice by limiting reporters’ access to lawmakers in the halls of the Capitol.

But the Senate Republicans’ scaffolding for a quiet-as-possible Trump impeachment trial collapsed Friday when the White House announced the president’s made-for-TV defense team. The mega-watt lineup includes the independent counsel who prosecuted President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1999 — Ken Starr — and successor Robert Ray; lightning-rod cable TV talking head (and former O.J. Simpson defense attorney) Alan Dershowitz; and longtime Trump legal allies Jay Sekulow, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

The political grenade Trump threw with Friday’s announcement might not be the approach GOP lawmakers wanted. But it just might be the winning strategy.

The Senate impeachment trial was always going to draw attention whether McConnell liked it or not. Stacking his legal team with superstar figures gives Trump more control of the theatrics and narrative of the trial. And if nothing else, the president is a master of using the media to change the storyline to promote his ends.

Moreover, Trump knows much better than Republican senators what works politically with the party’s base: to always be a fighter, as he learned under the tutelage of McCarthy-era lawyer Roy Cohn; to fight no-holds-barred, go for the jugular in opponents, home in on their weaknesses and never relent. That style, of course, won him the presidency and led so many established party leaders to the exits.

And while GOP elders like McConnnell and several senators facing tough reelection fights might think he needs to cut down on the tweeting and provocative behavior to have a hope of winning over swing voters in November, there’s little sign that they’re right. Given his strong, consistent negative ratings and the implied futility of his trying to win crossover voters, Trump’s best hope is to gin up his base as aggressively as possible while shaving down turnout of Democratic groups even slightly — as worked for him in 2016.

Polling in some key states seems to confirm the merits of this calculation, though Democrats have plenty of time to change the dynamics before Election Day. The president has held steady, and even slightly ticked up, in the crucial purple state of Wisconsin running solely on the base strategy. A poll released this week found the highest job-approval rating for Trump in Wisconsin since he took office.

And In parts of rural Pennsylvania, there are signs his base strategy is working. In November 2019 the GOP flipped local government control in six counties, mostly in the southwest part of the state where Democrats have long been competitive but Trump ran especially well in 2016.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates why the Trump go-for-broke strategy is the best one than the example set by the Democrats. They put their chips on a figure of dignified seriousness and purpose, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, to find impeachable evidence against Trump when he was tasked by the Justice Department to probe Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

But their bet on Mueller didn’t pay off. His July testimony about his findings before a House committee left Democrats “disappointed they did not get the made-for-TV accusatory moment they wanted,” as The New York Times described it at the time. It was an entirely separate case of Trump pressuring the Ukrainian president to dig up political dirt on a potential 2020 opponent that created sufficient public outrage to get the impeachment process off the ground.

What Democrats really needed in the original Russia probe was a Ken Starr-like figure. Somebody with sterling legal credentials who nonetheless was a rabid partisan willing to keep open an investigation until finding a clear violation, which Clinton provided in spades once his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky and his dodgy legal responses about it were discovered by the Starr team.

Starr, after all, was originally installed to investigate the Whitewater scandal, involving a land investment by the Clintons in rural Arkansas shortly before Bill Clinton won the governorship in 1978. But Starr’s team would rework the same ground repeatedly to turn up a crumb or two of new information in order to justify keeping the investigation going.

In fact, Starr is the ideal lawyer for Trump’s ambitions, because his presence also ensures that the Clintons will be a major undercurrent of the Trump trial, a diversionary tactic to focus attention on alleged Clinton offenses rather than his own. This has been a recurring — and successful strategy — for Trump since he entered the 2016 presidential race.

Related

OPINIONThe Electoral College could be tied in 2020. That helps Trump and hurts democracy.

In just one episode while the Republican presidential nominee, Trump took an unusual step shortly before the second presidential debate in October 2016 against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton of meeting with three women who had previously accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault or harassment.

It’s also worth noting that Starr and the other members of the defense team are no legal slouches. Bill Clinton’s impeachment on charges of lying and obstruction of justice, both of which he was acquitted on in his own Senate trial, almost certainly wouldn’t have been possible without Starr’s tireless, years-long investigation and strategic leaking to the media.

Dershowitz, meanwhile, has long been a controversial figure but an effective advocate. The Harvard Law School professor emeritus helped win acquittal of O.J. Simpson in 1995. In another famous victory,less than a decade earlier, he won an appeal of socialite Claus von Bulow’s conviction on charges that he tried to kill his wealthy wife.

Trump’s Senate impeachment trial figures to be as much a public spectacle as a solemn dispensing of duty. Any time that’s the case, it works to Trump’s advantage.

It’s true that as Trump’s impeachment trial gets underway in earnest, this play-to-the-cameras strategy is a huge gamble. Even at this late date, Democratic House members are producing new evidence (such as.a batch of documents released Friday night raising allegations of surveillance by Trump-associated thugs against the ousted U.S. ambassador to Ukraine).

There’s also the wildcard of Chief Justice John Roberts, sworn in Thursday to preside over the proceedings. According to prevailing interpretations of Senate impeachment rules, even by Democratic-leaning scholars, Roberts’ role will be rather passive. Still, Roberts could seek a more assertive role that could shake things up, such as ruling that witnesses be called.

Whether it’s what the Founders intended when they considered how to deal with a rogue president, Trump’s Senate impeachment trial figures to be as much a public spectacle as a solemn dispensing of duty. Any time that’s the case, it works to Trump’s advantage.

David Mark is an editor, author and lecturer based in Washington, D.C.

House Democrats file formal argument urging Trump’s removal
Graham, Dershowitz say effort to dismiss articles of impeachment ‘dead’ as they prepare for trial
WILLIAM CUMMINGS | USA TODAY | 4 hours ago

The Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump has officially begun, with Chief Justice John Roberts presiding, and much yet to decide.

Two of President Donald Trump’s leading defenders said Sunday that the Senate will not vote to dismiss the articles of impeachment against him, though both argued the president committed no impeachable offense, outlining what is likely to be the heart of Trump’s defense in his trial.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is one of Trump’s leading political backers on Capitol Hill, had said he wanted the impeachment process to “die quickly” when it reached the Senate. On “Fox News Sunday” he called the process a “partisan railroad job” but he said the effort to have the articles of impeachment dismissed before the trial is “dead for practical purposes.”

“The idea of dismissing the case early on is not going to happen. We don’t have the votes for that,” Graham said, adding that the Senate impeachment trial will likely follow the format of the one for President Bill Clinton in 1999.

High-profile criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has been named to Trump’s legal team, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “a motion is not going to made” in the Senate to dismiss the case against the president as it was in the Clinton trial. But he made it clear he believes such a move would be warranted.

Trump is accused of leveraging military aid to pressure Ukraine into announcing a pair of investigations that stood to benefit the president ahead of his 2020 reelection bid. The House impeached Trump last month on two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Much of how the trial will proceed, including whether additional witness testimony or evidence will be allowed, has yet to be determined.

Impartial justice?: Can senators be unbiased in Trump impeachment trial?

Dershowitz plans to argue on the Senate floor that “even if everything that is alleged by the House managers is proven or taken as true, they would not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.”

“If my argument succeeds, there’s no need for witnesses. Indeed, there’s no need for even arguments, any further arguments. If the House charges do not include impeachable offenses, that’s really the end of the matter, and the Senate should vote to acquit, or even to dismiss,” Dershowitz said.

Dershowitz said he “will be presenting a very strong argument” based on that made in 1868 by former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis in the impeachment trial against President Andrew Johnson.

Curtis’ argument, according to Dershowitz, was “that the framers intended for impeachable conduct only to be criminal-like conduct or conduct that is prohibited by the criminal law.” Dershowitz asserted that neither of the two articles of impeachment against Trump are charges of criminal behavior.

More: Who are the 7 impeachment managers selected for the Senate trial of President Donald Trump?

On Saturday, the Democratic House impeachment managers who will prosecute the case filed a lengthy brief that outlined their allegations against Trump, which said the president “used his official powers to pressure a foreign government to interfere in a United States election for his personal political gain, and then attempted to cover up his scheme by obstructing Congress’s investigation into his misconduct.”

Trump’s legal team responded with a brief that called the impeachment a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere in the 2020 election.” Like Dershowitz, the brief said articles “fail to allege any crime or violation of law whatsoever.” But it also said that the president had done nothing wrong and that Trump’s actions on Ukraine were “constitutional, perfectly legal, completely appropriate, and taken in furtherance of our national interest.”

“I didn’t sign that brief. I didn’t even see the brief until after it was filed,” Dershowitz said on ABC News “This Week” when asked if he agreed the president had done nothing wrong. He said it didn’t matter whether he thought what Trump did was acceptable, only if it was impeachable.

“My mandate is to determine what is a constitutionally authorized criteria for impeachment,” he said. And abuse of power did not meet the criteria, he argued, because it “is so open-ended.”

“Half of American presidents in history, from Adams to Jefferson to Lincoln to Roosevelt, have been accused by their political enemies of abusing their power,” he said. “The framers didn’t want to have that kind of criteria in the Constitution because it weaponizes impeachment for partisan purposes.”

It should be up to the voters to determine if Trump abused his power or acted inappropriately, Dershowitz said.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the lead impeachment manager, called Dershowitz’s argument that abuse of power is not impeachable “absurdist.”

“That’s the argument I suppose you have to make if the facts are so dead set against you,” Schiff said on “This Week.”

“You have to rely on an argument that even if he abused his office in this horrendous way, that it’s not impeachable,” Schiff said. “You had to go so far out of the mainstream to find someone to make that argument, you had to leave the realm of constitutional law scholars and go to criminal defense lawyers.”

Schiff said “the mere idea” of Dershowitz’s argument would have “appalled the founders,” who were very concerned about foreign election interference. He argued that such action goes to “the very heart of what the framers intended to be impeachable.”

“The logic of that absurdist position that’s being now adopted by the president is he could give away the state of Alaska,” Schiff said. “He could withhold execution of sanctions on Russia for interfering in the last election, to induce or coerce Russia to interfere in the next one.”

As to the charge of obstruction of Congress, Graham said it was an attempt to “put Trump below the law” by impeaching him for attempting to claim his right to executive privilege. He said rushing the process and not giving the court’s time to rule on what is protected by privilege posed a threat to the power of the executive branch of government.

“You impeach a president. You don’t let him to exert executive privilege in the House. You deny him or her their day in court,” Graham said. “You’ve destroyed executive privilege through the impeachment process. That would really make the presidency far less effective and would hurt the constitutional balance of power.”

Democrats have argued that waiting for the courts to force every witness to testify would effectively take the teeth out of Congress’ power to remove the president.

“If you argue that, well, the House needed to go through endless months or even years of litigation before bringing about an impeachment, you effectively nullify the impeachment clause,” Schiff said. "The framers gave the House the sole power of impeachment. It didn’t say that was given to judges who at their leisure may or may not decide cases and allow the House to proceed.

“The reality is, because what the president is threatening to do is cheat in the next election, you cannot wait months and years to be able to remove that threat from office.”

© Copyright Gannett 2020

Fox News

TRUMP IMPEACHMENT

Tim Scott on Dems’ impeachment focus: ‘They’re pretty concerned’ because Americans ‘now solidly behind’ Trump

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said Sunday that Democrats have been focused on impeachment because “they’re pretty concerned” due to the fact that “they believe the American people are now solidly behind President Donald Trump.”

Scott appeared on “Fox & Friends Weekend” one day after House impeachment managers filed their brief to the Senate, claiming the evidence against Trump “overwhelmingly” established abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Scott added that “the most important statement made about this entire impeachment process was made by [Texas] Congressman Al Green when he said if we don’t impeach him, he might win.”

The South Carolina senator also pointed out, “[House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi held the impeachment documents for nearly a month, which means there is no existential threat. There is no national-security threat.”

NADLER SAYS DEMS UNWILLING TO NEGOTIATE HUNTER BIDEN TESTIMONY IN EXCHANGE FOR OTHER WITNESSES

Democrats pushed bribery, quid pro quo and extortion against President Trump in case for impeachment
Video
Democrats pushed bribery, quid pro quo and extortion against President Trump in case for impeachment
Former Florida attorney general, President Trump’s legal team member Pam Bondi on what to expect from the Senate impeachment trial.

Scott explained, “I believe the Democrat strategy is not to bring more illumination to the case, but to put a bull’s eye on the back of [Colorado Republican Sen.] Cory Gardner, [Iowa Republican Sen.] Joni Ernst, [Arizona Republican Sen.] Martha McSally, [North Carolina Republican Sen.] Thom Tillis. That is the strategy they’re using to try to win back the Senate,” Scott said, referring to Republican senators facing tough reelection campaigns.

“This is actually not about removing the president, this is about removing enough senators in the Republican Party in order to take control of the Senate and to rebuke the president for the next four years because they’re pretty concerned.”

In Saturday’s 111-page brief, the impeachment managers wrote, “President Trump’s conduct is the Framers’ worst nightmare.”

The brief was the Democrats’ opening salvo in the historic impeachment trial, with House managers arguing Trump used his official powers to pressure Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election for personal political gain, then tried to cover it up by obstructing Congress’s investigation into his alleged misconduct.

“The evidence overwhelmingly establishes that he is guilty. … The Senate must use that [impeachment] remedy now to safeguard the 2020 U.S. election, … protect our constitutional form of government and eliminate the threat that the President poses to America’s national security,” the brief stated.

Scott said Sunday that Democrats were reacting in such a way because their “greatest fears are coming true” due to Trump’s success.

TRUMP LAWYERS RESPOND TO ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT: ‘CONSTITUTIONALLY INVALID’

“The fact is that this president has focused on bringing opportunities to the poorest communities in the nation,” Scott said. “This president has helped bring the minority unemployment rate to record lows for Asians, for African-Americans, for Hispanics.”

Scott noted the country’s 3.5-percent unemployment rate. “Our stock market is going through the ceiling. They are trembling in their boots, so the only thing they have focused on their minds today is not President Trump, it is removing senators from office so that they can have control of the United States Senate.”

He went on to say, “There’s no question that President Trump’s economic agenda has brought more prosperity into the African-American community than we’ve seen in my lifetime.”

“This president is producing the type of results that only say one thing to the African-American community,” Scott continued. “We believe that there is high-potential, incredible people who only needed opportunity and access to those opportunities. President Trump has brought so many of those to the community that I believe that we’re going to have a record turnout on behalf of the president [in November].”

©2020 FOX News Network, LLC.

{Everything is neatly packaged, are there any surprises left in this jack in the box?}

POLITICO

IMPEACHMENT

Battle over impeachment witnesses escalates
Key players in President Donald Trump’s impending trial amplified their arguments on the Sunday news shows.

By JOHN BRESNAHAN

01/19/2020 01:19 PM EST

With President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial just two days away, the battle over whether to call witnesses during the proceedings, including former national security adviser John Bolton, continues to heat up.

Several of the House managers for the impeachment trial, including Reps. Adam Schiff of California, Jerry Nadler and Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and Jason Crow of Colorado, appeared on Sunday news shows to urge the Senate to allow new witnesses and evidence during the process as they seek to oust Trump from office. These Democrats repeatedly pushed the line that the only way to get a “fair trial” is through additional testimony and documents.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Republicans intend to offer an organizing resolution for the trial that postpones the question of calling witnesses until the House has presented its case and the president’s legal team responds. Then, following a period in which senators are allowed to ask questions of both sides, the Senate will hold a vote on whether to call more witnesses. If no witnesses are called, the trial can move to its final stages, possibly by the time Trump gives his State of the Union address on Feb. 4.

“If the Senate decides, if Senator McConnell prevails and there are no witnesses, it will be the first impeachment trial in history that goes to conclusion without witnesses,” Schiff, the lead House manager for the trial, said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”

“The threshold issue here is, will there be a fair trial? Will the senators allow the House to call witnesses to introduce documents? That is the foundational issue on which everything else rests. And one thing that the public is overwhelmingly in support of, and that is a fair trial.”

Jeffries added on “Fox News Sunday”: “The most important thing is that the American people deserve a fair trial. The Constitution deserves a fair trial. Our democracy deserves a fair trial. And we believe that a fair trial involves witnesses. It involves evidence. It involves documents.”

But Senate Republicans, led by Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and David Perdue of Georgia, countered that the House managers should proceed with the evidence they used to impeach Trump in the House.

And Republicans echoed the White House line that the House impeachment hearings violated Trump’s right to due process, despite the fact that the president refused to allow his lawyers to participate in those sessions.

“I find it curious that Chairman Nadler of the Judiciary Committee called this a ‘rock-solid’ case,” Cornyn said on CBS’ “Face The Nation. “But if the House isn’t prepared to go forward with the evidence that they produced in the impeachment inquiry, maybe they ought to withdraw the articles of impeachment and start over again. This isn’t the Senate’s responsibility to make the case.”

“This, to me, seems to undermine or indicate that they’re getting cold feet or have a lack of confidence in what they’ve done so far,” Cornyn added.

Perdue said on NBC’s “Meet The Press”: “Remember, this week is going to be the first time America gets to hear President Trump’s defense. He hasn’t had an opportunity to do that yet. It’s clear the president did not have due process in the House. Now, for the first time, we’ll have due process in the Senate.”

A number of Senate Republicans, including Cornyn, have called for former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter to be deposed if Bolton testifies in the case. Trump allies are calling this “witness reciprocity,” and McConnell appears open to their demand, according to GOP aides familiar with these discussions.

Yet Nadler, Schiff and the other House managers maintain that Hunter Biden is not germane to the case, since he cannot speak to the underlying issue of whether Trump improperly withheld U.S. aid to Ukraine contingent on officials there announcing an investigation into the Bidens.

“And this whole controversy about whether there should be witnesses is just really a question of, does the Senate want to have a fair trial … or are they part of the cover-up of the president?” Nadler said on “Face The Nation.“ “Any Republican senator who says there should be no witnesses or even that witnesses should be negotiated is part of the cover-up.”

So far, only three Senate Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah — have publicly declared that they’re open to hearing from additional witnesses, including Bolton. But in order for that to occur, at least one more Senate Republican would have to withstand Trump’s pressure and cross the aisle to vote with the 47 Senate Democrats.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been appealing to Republicans for weeks to support Democrats on this issue, pointing to new evidence that has emerged since the House voted on Dec. 18 to impeach Trump. This additional evidence includes Bolton’s public offer to testify before the Senate; the Government Accountability Office analysis that the White House violated federal law by withholding the Ukraine funds after Congress had appropriated the money; and new documents turned over to the House Intelligence Committee by Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, on the role Giuliani played in the Ukraine scandal.

Schumer highlighted Parnas’ newly released documents as well as the GAO report at a news conference Sunday evening.

“Not Chuck Schumer, not a House Democrat but the impartial GAO said the president broke the law,” Schumer said. “That GAO report undid everything the president’s letter said and everything Mitch McConnell has been saying.”

In addition, Schumer lambasted the president’s lawyers for their first formal response to the House’s efforts to remove him from office. In a six-page letter filed Saturday, the president’s read lawyers described the impeachment inquiry as a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election.”

“It read more like a transcript of one of his campaign rallies, or six pages of @realDonaldTrump tweets rather than a legal defense,” Schumer said. “I hope for the president’s sake when their brief is released tomorrow, it’s better than that. It’s not just screaming and jumping up and down and pounding the table but it actually answers some questions.”

The Senate Minority Leader also criticized McConnell for not yet releasing his organizing resolution for the impeachment trial, calling it “unheard of.” Senate Republicans are weighing an aggressive impeachment trial schedule, whereby the House impeachment managers and the president’s defense would be allocated 24 hours each for opening arguments. Each side could have as few as two days to present their case.

“Whether it’s because McConnell knows the trial is a cover up and wants to whip through it as quickly as possible or because he’s afraid even more evidence will come out, he’s trying to rush it through,” Schumer said. “That is wrong. And it is so wrong that no one even knows what his plan is a day and a half before one of the most momentous decisions any senator will ever make.”

How Trump fused his business empire to the presidency

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

{And it goes on and on, with the usual vitriolic rhetoric of hate, but it appears we are approaching more elev a red drama, as a requirement to introject the rapidly loosing public support.

There will certainly begin a show of casualties, and it will be a thrill to watch as it is to try to guess. Who needs the apprentice now, that we have the veritable showman?}

IDEAS

Trump’s Impeachment Brief Is a Howl of Rage

The document released by the president’s lawyers reads more like the scream of a wounded animal than a traditional legal filing.

QUINTA JURECICBENJAMIN WITTES11:55 AM ET

KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS

Over the weekend, as the Senate prepared for the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the newly appointed House impeachment managers and the president’s newly appointed legal team both filed their initial legal briefs.

At least, one of them was a legal brief. The other read more like the scream of a wounded animal.

The House managers’ brief is an organized legal document. It starts with the law, the nature and purposes of Congress’s impeachment power, then walks through the evidence regarding the first article of impeachment, which alleges abuse of power, and seeks to show how the evidence establishes the House’s claim that President Trump is guilty of this offense. It then proceeds to argue that the offense requires his removal from office.

The brief then rinses and repeats the exercise with respect to the second article of impeachment, which deals with alleged obstruction of Congress. It concludes: “President Trump has betrayed the American people and the ideals on which the Nation was founded. Unless he is removed from office, he will continue to endanger our national security, jeopardize the integrity of our elections, and undermine our core constitutional principles.”

By contrast, the White House’s “Answer of President Donald J. Trump” to the articles of impeachment, filed by the president’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow and the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, does not read like a traditional legal argument at all. It begins with a series of rhetorical flourishes—all of them, to one degree or another, false. The articles of impeachment are “a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their President,” the president’s lawyers write—as though the impeachment power were not a constitutional reality every bit as enshrined in the founding document as the quadrennial election of the president. The articles are “a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election,” and are “constitutionally invalid on their face,” they write, as though the president’s right to extort foreign leaders for political services were so beyond reasonable question, it is outrageous that anyone might object to it.

This document reads like one of the president’s speeches at his campaign rallies. The language is a little more lawyerly, if only a little. In Sekulow and Cipollone’s hands, Trump’s cries of “Witch hunt!” have turned into “lawless process that violated basic due process and fundamental fairness.” His allegations that Democrats are a “disgrace” have turned into “an affront to the Constitution.” And Trump’s insistence that there’s a plot to destroy his presidency has become a “highly partisan and reckless obsession with impeaching the president [that] began the day he was inaugurated and continues to this day.”

MORE BY QUINTA JURECIC

The Senate Trial Will Be Totally Predictable—With One Potential for Surprise

QUINTA JURECICBENJAMIN WITTES

Pelosi and McConnell Are Playing High-Stakes Poker

BENJAMIN WITTESQUINTA JURECIC

The Serious Silliness of Impeachment

BENJAMIN WITTESQUINTA JURECIC

The Remedy for Mitch McConnell

QUINTA JURECICBENJAMIN WITTES

But the message is unchanged. It’s not a legal argument. It’s a howl of rage.

There is, to be sure, a lack of parallelism between the purposes of the two documents. The House managers’ document is an opening brief that lays out the prosecutors’ case at some length, while the president’s response is an initial six-page reply to the articles. The White House’s first full brief is due this afternoon, so it’s possible that the lawyers will sound, well, a little more like lawyers in that document. But don’t hold your breath.

In fact, this is not the first time Cipollone has signed his name to a screed along these lines. In October, shortly after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment inquiry, Cipollone sent the House a rambling eight-page letter that read almost as if it had been dictated by the president—down to the obsessive focus on the moral failings of the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Adam Schiff, which would be familiar to anyone reading the president’s Twitter feed. The former White House counsel Bob Bauer decried it as offering “arguments hopelessly weak in substance, political in both content and tone, and harmful to the credibility of [Cipollone’s] office.”

The document produced by the White House this weekend is a little more organized, but the arguments and the angry tone are the same. Read together, Cipollone’s October letter and this new document written with Sekulow set expectations for the president’s defense: barely contained, and barely coherent, rage—a middle finger stuck at the impeachment process, rather than any kind of organized effort to convince senators or the public that the president’s conviction would be unmerited, imprudent, or unjust.

Consciously or not, Trump’s pick of defense counsel for the Senate trial sends the same message. Along with Sekulow and Cipollone, the president will be represented by the former independent counsels Ken Starr and Robert Ray—Starr’s successor in the investigations against Bill Clinton—and the Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, among others. This is not the legal team one might expect a president facing the fight of his political life to select. Starr, after all, made robust arguments during the Clinton impeachment against the assertion of executive privilege and made others for the impeachability of a president for obstructing an investigation into his conduct using privilege claims. Dershowitz has made plenty of arguments against impeaching and convicting Trump in recent years, but he has a habit of staking out positions that are not merely iconoclastic—like that the president may be impeached only for violating the criminal code, or that the Supreme Court could overturn an unjust conviction in an impeachment trial—but intellectually sloppy, too.

Were Trump trying to make a traditional legal argument, he’d have picked the wrong legal counsel. But that’s not what the president is trying to do. CNN describes the president’s merry band as a “Fox News defense team,” noting that the main through line among the lawyers representing Trump is that they have all regularly appeared on the president’s favorite network. It’s not that the president’s legal team lacks talent. Starr was, after all, an esteemed appellate lawyer, a judge on the D.C. circuit, and the solicitor general of the United States. And Dershowitz was a Harvard law professor. But the president isn’t fundamentally making a legal case here. His arguments are that his phone call was “perfect,” that there’s a “deep state” conspiracy against him, and that impeachment is an effort to overturn an election. You don’t need good lawyers to make such silly arguments. You need lawyers who will yell untruths loudly, lawyers whose very presence will argue the us-against-them nature of the president’s defense.

And this is a group of people who do just that. Just by being there, they will make the president feel good, feel validated. Their presence will give expression to his anger, in the same way that Brett Kavanaugh’s tirade against the Senate Judiciary Committee reportedly delighted Trump.

For this reason, the contradiction of choosing Starr to argue in favor of a hyperaggressive vision of executive privilege and against conviction on the basis of obstruction of justice isn’t a problem, just as Dershowitz’s lazy argumentation and Cipollone’s hyperventilating outrage aren’t problems either. They’re the whole point. Flaunting the dissonance of having Starr defending a president in an impeachment trial is itself an expression of rage and defiance against the president’s critics—including, one must imagine, Hillary Clinton, whom both Starr and Ray investigated. It’s a legal team designed to own the libs, and the fact that Dershowitz has been accused of perpetrating misconduct against women (allegations he denies), and Starr of mishandling an investigation into such allegations, is perhaps no coincidence.

To the extent that there is an argument in the president’s defense, it’s that the president’s rage is more important than building a systematic legal case. Putting together a legal brief, after all, depends on a system of mutual understanding between the writer and the audience. The goal is to convince a neutral arbiter of the correctness of one’s point, within a structure of traditions and constraints. Trump’s howl of anger is a declaration that he doesn’t need to convince any arbiter, abide by any constraints, or reach any understanding, because his own emotions are the most important thing.

But the flip side of Trump’s insistence on his own preeminence is his grasping need for other people to reaffirm him. And so the president’s defense, the argument and the team alike, has another purpose: It’s a message to Republican senators. It says to each of them that no, the White House will not make a factual argument on the merits of the case—not a real one, anyway. And no, it will not make a real legal argument either. It, rather, will announce that, per George Orwell, two plus two equals five. And it will demand of the senators that they get in line to endorse that proposition, preferably on television, where the president can see. It will be a failure of loyalty if they are not willing to do this. And they will be subject to retaliation.

It’s not a strategy that would work in court. But the Senate is not, at the end of the day, a court—even when it’s sitting as the trial court of an impeachment. The Senate is a body composed of people who, as the past few years of Republicans’ willing subjection to Trump have shown, are exquisitely sensitive to this sort of pressure.

And the more absurdly bombastic the defense gets, the stronger this message becomes.

BENJAMIN WITTES is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings institution

Copyright © 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

BBC News

menu

Trump impeachment: President’s lawyers demand immediate acquittal

20 January 2020

Image captionPresident Trump is facing two counts of impeachment

President Donald Trump’s legal team, representing him at his impeachment trial, has demanded that he is immediately acquitted by the Senate.

In a brief submitted on Monday, they called the impeachment “a dangerous perversion” of the constitution.

Meanwhile House impeachment managers submitted their own brief, saying Mr Trump engaged in “corrupt conduct… to cheat in the next election”.

Impeachment hearings will begin on Tuesday at 13:00 (18:00 GMT).

Mr Trump is charged with abusing his presidential power by asking Ukraine to investigate Democratic political rival Joe Biden - and of obstructing Congress as it looked into his conduct.

During the course of the trial, Senators will hear arguments for six hours a day, six days a week. It will be presided over by the US chief justice, John Roberts.

It is only the third time in US history that a president is facing an impeachment trial.

The trial could, in theory, lead to Mr Trump being removed from office. But as a two-thirds majority of 67 votes in the 100-seat Senate is required to convict and oust Mr Trump, and there are only 47 Democrats in the Senate, the president is widely expected to be cleared.

Mr Trump will be at the economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, when his trial opens.

What did the briefs say?

The 171-page brief submitted by Mr Trump’s legal team is the first comprehensive defence of the president, ahead of the trial beginning in earnest.

It sets out to undercut the charges against Mr Trump, branding them “frivolous and dangerous” and arguing that they don’t constitute either a crime or an impeachable offence.

“House Democrats settled on two flimsy Articles of Impeachment that allege no crime or violation of law whatsoever - much less ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanours’ as required by the Constitution,” it said.

“They do not remotely approach the constitutional threshold for removing a President from office.”

At the same time, an opposing brief from House managers - all Democrats - accused Mr Trump of using his “presidential powers to pressure a vulnerable foreign partner to interfere in our elections for his own benefit”.

“In doing so, he jeopardised our national security and our democratic self-governance,” it added. “He then used his presidential powers to orchestrate a cover-up unprecedented in the history of our republic.”

What are the charges?

First, he’s accused of seeking help from Ukraine’s government to help himself get re-elected in November.

It is claimed that, during a call with Ukrainain President Volodymyr Zelensky, he held back military aid in exchange for an investigation into Hunter Biden - the son of Mr Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden, and a former member of the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

The second allegation is that, by refusing to allow White House staff to testify at the first impeachment hearings last year, Mr Trump obstructed Congress.

President Trump denies the charges against him.

Copyright © 2020 BBC.

-----------‘---- -------’------’

POLITICO

Ad

IMPEACHMENT

Poll: Most Americans want Trump removed from office by Senate

51 percent of respondents support the Senate convicting Trump on articles of impeachment

01/20/2020 05:01 PM EST

A majority of Americans want the Senate to convict and remove President Donald Trump from office, according to a new poll conducted by CNN.

Fifty-one percent of respondents to the poll want the Senate to convict Trump on the impeachment charges brought by the House, which would lead to his immediate expulsion from office. Meanwhile, 45 percent of respondents said they don’t want to see the president removed. The poll was conducted from Jan. 16-19 and released Monday, on the eve of the Senate impeachment trial, which gets underway Tuesday, though senators were sworn in last week.

The numbers are the most favorable for removal since another CNN poll in June 2018. Approval for impeachment and removal has generally hovered between 36 and 47 percent, peaking at 50 percent in polls from October and November 2019, once impeachment proceedings were underway in the House.

The latest poll also suggests Americans are largely invested in the impeachment proceedings, with 74 percent of respondents saying they are either very closely or somewhat closely following the developments.

The majority of respondents to CNN’s survey said they want the Senate to hear from more witnesses, with 69 percent wanting the Senate to hear fresh testimony, and only 29 percent rejecting the idea.

Democrats have lambasted the White House for preventing members of the administration from testifying for House investigators before the articles of impeachment were sent to the Senate. While Democrats in the Senate hoped to remedy the problem by calling on witnesses in their trial, Senate Republicans have largely rejected the idea of hearing from witnesses, saying that was the House’s job.

CNN’s study was conducted by phone among a sample of 1,156 respondents. The margin of error is +/- 3.4 percentage points.

© 2020 POLITICO LLC



impeachment trial begins

Pres. Trump just snubbed his outspoken personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, keeping him from joining his growing defense team for the impeachment trial. Giuliani has reportedly proven too large a liability, including his links to indicted businessman Lev Parnas, and this report tracks Giuliani’s history of questionable business judgment, including another major figure who was indicted after running the NYPD, a business alliance Giuliani later admitted was a “mistake.”

© 2019 NBC UNIVERSAL

The New York Times

NEWS ANALYSIS

‘Constitutional Nonsense’: Trump’s Impeachment Defense Defies Legal Consensus

The president’s legal case would negate any need for witnesses. But constitutional scholars say that it’s wrong.

By Charlie Savage

Published Jan. 20, 2020Updated Jan. 21, 2020, 6:45 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — As President Trump’s impeachment trial opens, his lawyers have increasingly emphasized a striking argument: Even if he did abuse his powers in an attempt to bully Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election on his behalf, it would not matter because the House never accused him of committing an ordinary crime.

Their argument is widely disputed. It cuts against the consensus among scholars that impeachment exists to remove officials who abuse power. The phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” means a serious violation of public trust that need not also be an ordinary crime, said Frank O. Bowman III, a University of Missouri law professor and the author of a recent book on the topic.

“This argument is constitutional nonsense,” Mr. Bowman said. “The almost universal consensus — in Great Britain, in the colonies, in the American states between 1776 and 1787, at the Constitutional Convention and since — has been that criminal conduct is not required for impeachment.”

But the argument is politically convenient for Mr. Trump. For any moderate Republican senator who may not like what the facts already show about his campaign of pressure on Ukraine, the theory provides an alternative rationale to acquit the president.

Indeed, if it were true, then there would also be no reason to call witnesses like John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, because what he and others know about Mr. Trump’s motivations and intentions in his Ukraine dealings would not affect the outcome of the trial.

Mr. Trump’s legal team hammered away at the argument in its 110-page brief submitted to the Senate on Monday. “House Democrats’ newly invented ‘abuse of power’ theory collapses at the threshold because it fails to allege any violation of law whatsoever,” the president’s lawyers wrote.

Many legal scholars say senators should not take this argument seriously. They point, among other things, to evidence that for centuries before the American Revolution, the British Parliament impeached officials for “high crimes and misdemeanors” that constituted abuses of power but were not indictable offenses. The pattern informed the framers of the Constitution, who echoed that concept.

One precedent — a high-profile case against a former British governor-general in India named Warren Hastings accused of mismanagement, mistreatment of locals and military misconduct — unfolded during the drafting and ratification of the Constitution and was reported in American newspapers.

His chief prosecutor, the famous parliamentarian Edmund Burke, argued that Mr. Hastings’s actions violated the public trust even though they were not indictable. (Mr. Hastings was acquitted, but only many years later.)

The original draft of the Constitution had made only treason and bribery a basis for impeachment. But according to James Madison’s notes of the Constitutional Convention, George Mason brought up the Hastings case and proposed expanding the definition of impeachment to cover something like it. After rejecting the term “maladministration” as too broad, the convention participants decided to add the English term “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Mr. Bowman — whose scholarship on impeachment law is cited in a footnote in the Trump legal team brief — called the arguments in that brief “a well-crafted piece of sophistry that cherry-picks sources and ignores inconvenient history and precedent.” For example, he noted, it makes no mention of how the Hastings case involved allegations of abuses of power that were not indictable crimes.

Scholars pointed to other major landmarks. In 1788, as supporters of the Constitution were urging states to ratify the document, Alexander Hamilton described impeachable conduct in one of the Federalist Papers as “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust,” and “political” offenses that injure society.

Mr. Hamilton also wrote that impeachments would differ from common trials in part because prosecutors and judges would not be as limited “in delineation of the offense.”

Critics of the Trump team’s theory have also noted that when the Constitution was drafted, hardly any federal criminal laws had been written. And several early impeachment proceedings — including against a judge who got drunk while presiding over cases — did not involve indictable offenses.

“It is just quite clear that the commission of a crime is neither necessary nor sufficient for an act to be impeachable,” said John Mikhail, a Georgetown University law professor. He portrayed the Trump legal team’s argument as not merely wrong, but as not even worthy of being deemed serious.

But Alan Dershowitz, a leading proponent of the theory, disagreed. An emeritus Harvard Law School professor and a celebrated criminal defense lawyer, he has joined Mr. Trump’s legal team and is preparing a presentation about the idea that he said he expects to make to the Senate on Friday.

Among other things, Mr. Dershowitz said in an interview, he interpreted Mr. Hamilton to be saying not that any violation of the public trust is impeachable, but that only crimes that are also violations of the public trust meet that standard.

He also said that there were some common-law crimes at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, and that the framers expected Congress to eventually enact criminal laws that could serve as the basis for impeachments.

Mr. Dershowitz said he intended to model his presentation on an argument put forward at the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson by his chief defense counsel, Benjamin Robbins Curtis, a former Supreme Court associate justice.

Mr. Johnson was saved from conviction and removal when the vote fell one short of the necessary supermajority. Mr. Curtis had argued that Mr. Johnson was not accused of committing a legitimate crime, and that removing him absent one would subvert the constitutional structure and make impeachment a routine tool of political struggle.

But other legal scholars, like Laurence Tribe, a constitutional specialist at Harvard Law School and an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, have argued that Mr. Dershowitz is overreading and misrepresenting this aspect of the Johnson trial, especially against the backdrop of other evidence about the original understanding of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and the range of factors that went into Mr. Johnson’s narrow acquittal.

In an opinion article in The Washington Post, Mr. Tribe accused Mr. Trump’s legal team of using “bogus legal arguments to mislead the American public or the senators weighing his fate.”

Listen to ‘The Daily’: Lessons From the Last Impeachment Trial

At the opening of only the third Senate trial of a president in U.S. history, we ask: What can the previous proceedings teach us about this time?

From one perspective, the argument might not matter. Mr. Bowman noted that while the House article refers to no criminal statute, the conduct described in the abuse-of-power one “plainly draws from” the crime of soliciting a bribe.

(The Government Accountability Office has also concluded that the Trump administration’s freezing of a congressionally appropriated military aid package to Ukraine amounted to an illegal impoundment of funds, but there are no criminal penalties associated with violating that law.)

But Mr. Dershowitz said that if the House had the evidence and the votes to charge Mr. Trump with bribery, then it needed to say so explicitly.

Some of Mr. Dershowitz’s critics have questioned whether he really believes what he is now saying, noting that in 1998, during the Clinton impeachment, he said: “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.”

Mr. Dershowitz argued that his position today was not inconsistent with what he said in 1998, pointing to his use of the phrase “technical crime” and saying that he is arguing today that there needs to be “crime-like” conduct. He also said he did not know about Mr. Curtis’s 1868 argument during the Clinton impeachment era, and reading it had affected his thinking.

Still, he acknowledged that his interpretation is an outlier.

“My argument will be very serious and very scholarly,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “The fact that other scholars disagree, that’s for the Senate to consider. There is a division — most of the scholars disagree with me. I think they’re wrong.”

But Mr. Mikhail said Mr. Dershowitz and the Trump legal team were wrong, and he noted that many senators of both parties went to law school or were otherwise legally sophisticated.

“These are very smart, legally informed people,” he said. “They understand the law. They can certainly see through ruses and efforts to distract and divert.”

© 2020 The New York Times

youtu.be/VxPhLTzJ5EE

Watching Senate proceedings, Schumer amendments tabled , resuming at 8 pm Eastern time, if Trump is vindicated, then in all probability, the Putin threat/collusion as an overriding security bilateral interest, dwarfs the issue of any advantage politically to Trump.

Trump’s greed has to play into Putin’s threat. BLACKMAIL!

The Reason Sekulow gives creedance to Trump not accepting the Congressional requests for summons was that they were not duly authorized by a vote by the House of Representatives.

Ha Ha Ha

What a show!

{All amendments tabled and the Republican resolution passed predictably along party lines.

The CHIEF Justice was not even allowed to adjudicate on the materiality of possible witnesses.

Is this a disgrace which will come down to history judging the truthfulness of.the Senate? Will this enhance a deteriaring of Congress as a check on executive power? Will it embolden the president to comment on the impeachment as Nothing more than more witch hunt and benefit him in the 2020 election, inviting more foreign interference? Will Trump dip into the cookie jar?
Is a fair trial is done with with the adoption of Mc’Conmel’s resolution?

Only history will tell. and the question remains how history will judge , or can be revised now, of it becomes unfavorable.
Will a perpetual shadow cover U.S. policy from this point on. regardless of the outcome.

And finally. how will the president govern henceforth. and will public opinion diminish any executive action, and will Trump truly adopt dictatorial , even monarchical features in national and international affairs.
These questions are yet remain unanswered.}

The New York Times

The Trump Impeachment

Republicans Block Subpoenas for New Evidence as Impeachment Trial Begins

Republicans made last-minute changes to their proposed rules to placate moderates, but they held together to turn back Democratic efforts to subpoena documents.

By Nicholas Fandos

Published Jan. 21, 2020Updated Jan. 22, 2020, 1:56 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — A divided Senate began the impeachment trial of President Trump on Tuesday in utter acrimony, as Republicans blocked Democrats’ efforts to subpoena witnesses and documents related to Ukraine and moderate Republicans forced last-minute changes to rules that had been tailored to the president’s wishes.

In a series of party-line votes punctuating 12 hours of debate, Senate Republicans turned back every attempt by Democrats to subpoena documents from the White House, State Department and other agencies, as well as testimony from White House officials that could shed light on the core charges against Mr. Trump.

The debate between the House impeachment managers and the president’s legal team stretched into the early hours of Wednesday morning in a Senate chamber transformed for the occasion, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. presiding from the marble rostrum and senators sworn to silence looking on from desks piled with briefing books. It was the substantive start of the third presidential impeachment trial in American history.

Tensions grew so raw after midnight that Chief Justice Roberts cut in just before 1 a.m. to admonish the managers and the president’s lawyers to “remember where they are” and return to “civil discourse.”

“They are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body,” he said.

On its face, the prolonged debate was about the rules and procedures. But it set the stage for a broader political fight over Mr. Trump’s likely acquittal and will help shape the 2020 campaign.

Democrats were laying the groundwork to argue that the trial was rigged on Mr. Trump’s behalf and to denounce Republicans — including the most vulnerable senators seeking re-election — for acquiescing. Republicans, for their part, insisted that the Senate must move decisively to remedy what they characterized as an illegitimate impeachment inquiry unjustly tarring the presidency.

Standing in the well of the Senate, the Democratic House impeachment managers urged senators to reject proposed rules from the majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, that would delay a debate over witnesses and documents until the middle of the trial, with no guarantee that they would ever be called.

“If the Senate votes to deprive itself of witnesses and documents, the opening statements will be the end of the trial,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the lead manager. He said Mr. McConnell’s proposal was tantamount to saying, “Let’s have the trial, and maybe we can just sweep this all under the rug.”

But Republicans were unpersuaded and, just before 2 a.m. Eastern, voted along party lines, 53 to 47, to ratify Mr. McConnell’s trial plan. As adopted, the resolution would pave the way for oral arguments against Mr. Trump to begin as soon as Wednesday.

They rejected 10 other amendments by the same margin. An 11th Democratic proposal, to lengthen the timetable for the prosectors and defense to file trial motions, gained the support of one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, but still failed.

At the heart of the trial are charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress approved last month by the Democratic-led House. They assert that Mr. Trump used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into his political rivals, withholding as leverage nearly $400 million in military aid and a White House meeting. The president then sought to conceal his actions from Congress, the charges say, by blocking witness testimony and documents.

Mr. Trump’s legal team argues that the charges are baseless and amount to criminalizing a president’s prerogative to make foreign policy as he sees fit. In a break with most constitutional scholars, they also claim that the impeachment was unconstitutional because the articles of impeachment do not outline a specific violation of a law.

But on Tuesday, the debate focused principally on what would constitute a fair trial.

“This initial step will offer an early signal to our country,” Mr. McConnell said before it got underway. “Can the Senate still serve our founding purpose?”

Mr. McConnell also received a sharp reminder about the limits of his power to control an inherently unpredictable proceeding.

Under pressure from Republican moderates, he was forced early in the day to make some last-minute changes to the set of rules he unveiled on Monday, which would have squeezed opening arguments by both sides into two 12-hour marathon days. Mr. McConnell’s rules also would have refused to admit the findings of the House impeachment inquiry into evidence without a separate vote later in the trial.

The compressed timetable was in line with a White House request to quickly dispense with opening arguments so that Mr. Trump’s team could complete his defense before the weekend.

But Ms. Collins, Rob Portman of Ohio and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, among others, objected privately to those provisions, which they believed departed too much from procedures adopted unanimously for the 1999 trial of President Bill Clinton and could further expose Republicans to accusations of unfairness.

The objections were raised at a closed-door luncheon just before the trial was to begin, according to aides familiar with the conversation. Mr. McConnell rushed to submit a revised copy of the resolution — with lines crossed out and changes scrawled in pen in the margins — when it was time for the debate.

Members of Mr. Trump’s defense team, including Jane Raskin, arriving on Tuesday at the Capitol.Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

When the resolution was read aloud on the Senate floor, two days had been extended to three and the House’s records would be automatically admitted into evidence, though Mr. McConnell inserted a new provision that would allow Mr. Trump’s team to move to throw out parts of the House case.

The last-minute reversal underscored the influence of a small group of moderate Republicans in the narrowly divided Senate whose interests and demands could prove decisive in a more formal debate over witnesses and documents to come.

Half a world away, Mr. Trump sought to use the global stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to project confidence about his standing at home. He swatted away questions from reporters about the trial, instead bragging about the strength of the American economy under his leadership.

But in the Senate chamber, Mr. Trump’s lawyers replayed many of his most frequent and personal grievances, accusing Democrats in only slightly more lawyerly terms of conducting a political search-and-destroy mission.

“It’s long past time that we start this so we can put an end to this ridiculous charade and go have an election,” said Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel.

The historically rare debate was rendered even more unusual by the traditional Senate rules that prohibit senators from speaking on the chamber floor for the duration of the proceedings and instead empower the House managers and White House defense lawyers to debate the proposals. The effect was that on the trial’s first day, the Senate chamber split cleanly into partisan factions, with the managers siding with Senate Democrats and Mr. Trump’s lawyers taking the place of the Republicans.

Mr. Cipollone rose first, delivering a brief statement urging senators to support Mr. McConnell’s proposed rules and accusing Democrats of seeking to use the Senate to complete their sloppy investigative work.

“We believe that once you hear those initial presentations, the only conclusion will be that the president has done nothing wrong,” Mr. Cipollone said, “and that these articles of impeachment do not begin to approach the standard required by the Constitution.”

Democrats, who came armed with slick digital slides and video clips to drive home their arguments, spent hours detailing the factual record compiled by the House investigation and cataloging the witnesses and thousands of pages of highly relevant documents Mr. Trump had succeeded in withholding. Senators facing such a grave decision as removing a president, they argued, have a responsibility to try to push all the facts to light.

“With the backing of a subpoena authorized by the chief justice of the United States, you can end President Trump’s obstruction,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the first woman in history to speak on the Senate floor as an impeachment manager. “If the Senate fails to take this step, you won’t even ask for the evidence. This trial and your verdict will be questioned.”

Just an hour or so before the trial began, the seven House managers submitted one final written rebuttal to arguments put forward against their charges by Mr. Trump’s lawyers. In 34 pages, they rejected the lawyers’ assertion that abuse of power was not an impeachable offense and that Mr. Trump had acted legally when he ordered administration officials not to appear for questioning in the House or provide documents for the impeachment inquiry.

Locked in silence for much of the day, senators were able to talk only before the proceeding began or during brief breaks. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday morning, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, denounced Mr. McConnell’s rules as deeply unfair and skewed toward Mr. Trump.

The House impeachment managers held a news conference before the trial on Tuesday.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

“It is completely partisan. It was kept secret until the eve of the trial,” he said. “The McConnell rules seem to have been designed by President Trump and for President Trump, simply executed by Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans.”

Inside the chamber, Mr. Schumer forced votes on demanding documents and compelling testimony from four current and former Trump administration officials who were blocked from speaking with the House: John R. Bolton, the former White House national security adviser; Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff; Robert B. Blair, an adviser to Mr. Mulvaney; and Michael Duffey, a White House budget official.

Each time, Mr. McConnell moved to kill the proposal before it could be considered, and was sustained by unified Republican support. At one point, he offered to short-circuit the debate to speed up the votes, but Democrats who want a full account of Mr. Trump’s blockade on record declined.

“This is the fair road map for our trial,” Mr. McConnell declared. “We need it in place before we can move forward.”

Even after Tuesday’s changes, Mr. McConnell’s proposal makes way for potentially the fastest presidential impeachment trial in American history, particularly if the Senate declines to call witnesses.

Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, offered several amendments to the impeachment rules.Credit…Calla Kessler/The New York Times

Only two other American presidents have stood trial in the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors. Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868, and his trial took the better part of three months, featuring testimony from dozens of witnesses and extended periods for discovery, before he was ultimately acquitted by just a single vote. Mr. Clinton’s trial lasted five weeks, included testimony from just three witnesses and resulted in an overwhelming acquittal.

Without witnesses, Mr. Trump’s trial could conclude by the end of January. If senators ultimately do call witnesses, that timeline could stretch weeks longer.

Nicholas Fandos is a national reporter based in the Washington bureau. He has covered Congress since 2017 and is part of a team of reporters who have chronicled investigations by the Justice Department and Congress into President Trump and his administration. @npfandos

Jan. 21, 2020

© 2020 The New York Times Company

The swamp being charged against either s use is but a project taken up by our current politicians, to force their hand to avoid the inescapable choice between the swamp swallowing any way out of the contradictions that capital and social incongruity determines in depersonalizing and further denationalizing human ‘natural rights’, or, find themselves being looked back at their grotesque representational mirror image.

The future of politics looks bleak. The blow up of executive power is unavoidable, if paralyzing fear is not to overtake a worldly capitalism.

That is the winning hand of Russian dialectical blackmail in this simulated, artificial world.

A Satirical Take on the Daily Shenanigans of our Current ‘Narcissist in Chief’

Who is Really on Trial?

The slow drip of damning facts continue to reaffirm The Don and his crime gang’s shakedown of Ukraine.

As a result of Lev Parnas damning and riveting interview with Rachel Maddow this week-which implicated practically everyone in the administration except the president’s cook*-I have been thinking of producing “I Love Lev” t-shirts and buttons.

Anyone want to go in on a business venture with me? For starters, we can set up a cart outside of the Trump Hotel, as I heard there are people paying good coin for the booze; some like Robert Hyde get so intoxicated that they decide to curry favor with The Don by setting up surveillance of Marie Yovanovitch, America’s former ambassador to Ukraine. (Remember, she’s the one that The Don said would be “going through some things.” Never did she imagine she would be monitored by her own government!)

Text’s show that Hyde was sending messages about Marie’s whereabouts in an attempt to catch her doing something egregious and justify her firing.

Here are a few of Hyde’s texts to Lev:

“She’s talked to three people. Her phone is off. Computer is off.”

“She’s next to the embassy.”

“Not in the embassy.”

Rumor has it that Hyde surveilled Maria entering the women’s bathroom and instructed the thug following her to change the sign to “Men”, but he was caught in the act by another woman who called the local authorities on him.

Madcap stuff.

I hope C-Span covers that trial as it will be must see TV and will actually have witnesses. And given the Republican game plan of denial and blind allegiance to The Don, there might be a better chance of convicting him through the trial of the Ukrainian thug.

The Don keeps insisting it was a “perfect phone call” and his Republican colluders say: maybe it wasn’t perfection but perfection is so overrated.

He keeps insisting that he barely knew Parness, even though every day new photos of the two of them emerge with big smiles on their faces. Pictures of Lev with Don Jr, Ivanka and Jared have also just surfaced. Seems there are enough photos to make a family photo album. We can title it: “Lev and the First Family’s Illicit Adventures,” though we are still waiting for the one where Lev has his arm around Melania before it can go to press. Supposedly, there is a special pullout section with Lev and Rudy G. That part is entitled: “Two Thugs With Some Ugly Mugs”!

Even the finding by the independent Government Accountability Office, that The Don’s withholding of money appropriated by Congress for Ukraine was illegal, had no teeth with the Republican Party, which from this point on will be referred to as the “Immoralist Party.”

The agency found that the White House violated the law because it did not notify Congress about withholding the spending. Instead, the administration was arguing that it had the right to determine the “best use of such funds,” ignoring Congress’s power to set spending requirements.

According to the G.A.O. “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the accountability office wrote in an opinion released Thursday. “The withholding was not a programmatic delay.”

The White House response was: “we thought we dissolved this agency; and anyway, why are these people so obsessed with the law as it is so overrated!”

The Republican Senators’ response was: “Did you have to wake us up from my nap to tell me that?”

Republican strategy to the new revelations was summed up beautifully by Martha McSally, Senator of Arizona.

When McSally was asked a by a CNN reporter whether she would consider the new evidence being released, she snorted that the reporter was “a liberal hack.”

An hour or two later, her campaign created a fund raiser with her snort. If you recall McSally lost her race to Krysten Sinema, but was appointed to serve out John McCain’s term. Seems McSally has decided that being as much of a belligerent asshole as The Don will lead her to victory in November. Arizona we turn our desperate eyes to you.

I was not a fan of John McCain, but boy what I would give to see his response to the current circumstances. Between his hatred of The Don (remember the joy he had giving his famous thumbs down Obamacare vote?) and his commitment to protecting our democracy, I believe he would not be cow-towing to The Don. What would have been really interesting was to see what the despicable Lindsey Graham would have done with the conscience of McCain hovering over him. Might have made great political theater.

Let’s face it. The facts are very clear: The Don committed an egregious impeachable offense. He abused his power and has been covering up Congress’s attempt to get to the truth by refusing to turn over documents and not allowing witnesses to testify. He is guilty as charged. Now even the Republican defense that he didn’t commit a crime is neutered by the G.A.O., which unequivocally stated that The Don’s actions violated the law. That sounds like a criminal act, right?

I am sick and tired of pundits lamenting about how The Don has taken over the Republican Party, oops I mean the Immoralist Party. Please spare me the victimhood nonsense. The Senators are grown-ups. Charged with protecting our democracy, they are enacting the story of Pinocchio in reverse; they have gone from humans to puppets with an evil Geppetto playing them. In this version Geppetto’s nose is always elongated because he never stops lying.

The Don is the person on trial but it is actually the Immoralist Party that really is on trial.

Their unwillingness to honor the oath they took on the Senate floor as Chief Justice Roberts swore them in as jurors is not only dishonorable, but a big middle finger to the people of this country and to democracy itself. Their compliance and collusion with the evil puppet master neuters what is supposed to be a co- equal branch of government; it reduces congress to what Groucho Marx has called “a mockery of a travesty of a sham.”

In essence, once they choose the position of cult member, they bestow upon The Don even more power than he already has; the criminal and huckster escapes again. His vindication allows him to abuse his power even more than he already has.

It makes me think of the moment at a wedding when the person presiding says: “If anyone can show just cause why this couple cannot lawfully be joined together in matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.” In the Senate, someone needs to get up and say: “Anyone with a commitment to democracy and a sense of morality speak now; if you don’t, we are in for anything but peace”.


House concludes in Senate trial:

The New York Times

The Trump Impeachment

Updated 42 minutes ago

Trump Impeachment:

House managers wrapped up their oral arguments on Friday, focusing on the obstruction of Congress charge against the president. Here were the highlights.

In his closing, Schiff said acquitting Trump would be ‘an unending injury to this country.’

House prosecutors focused largely on the obstruction of Congress charge.

A recording appears to capture Trump talking about Yovanovitch.

The fight over admitting new evidence, like documents and witnesses, goes on.

Trump’s defense team expects to make a short appearance on Saturday.

Some senators are pulled in by name to the case they are deciding.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, speaking to reporters during a break in the trial on Friday.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

In his closing, Schiff said acquitting Trump would be ‘an unending injury to this country.’

House impeachment managers closed their three-day presentation to the Senate by arguing that allowing President Trump to remain in office would continue to threaten the country’s security.

In his closing remarks, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, cast Mr. Trump as a continuing threat to the Constitution and implored senators not to set a precedent that would cede Congress’s investigative authority to the executive branch for generations to come.

“If we are to decide here that a president of the United States can simply say, ‘Under Article 2, I can do whatever I want, and I don’t have to treat a coequal branch of government like it exists, I don’t have to give it any more than the back of my hand,’” Mr. Schiff said, “that will be an unending injury to this country.”

Another impeachment manager, Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, told senators that the goal was to “protect against future presidential misconduct that would endanger democracy and the rule of law” and described Mr. Trump’s obstruction of Congress as “a constitutional crime in progress.”

House prosecutors focused largely on the obstruction of Congress charge.

Democrats used most of their final seven hours and 53 minutes of oral arguments to make their case that Mr. Trump obstructed Congress, the second article of impeachment against him.

Discussion of Mr. Trump’s alleged cover-up had focused primarily on his defiance of subpoenas for testimony and documents in the impeachment inquiry. But two of the managers, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Mr. Crow, suggested to senators that those moves were part of a longer cover-up, much of which took place behind the scenes before the House had even learned of the pressure campaign.

“They were determined to prevent Congress and the American people from learning anything about the president’s corrupt behavior,” Mr. Jeffries said of lawyers at the White House and Justice Department who bottled up reports in July, when White House foreign policy advisers became alarmed by the legality of a White House meeting with Ukrainian officials and Mr. Trump’s July 25 phone call with the country’s leader.

Mr. Crow said the president’s cover-up intensified after three House Democratic committee chairmen announced in early September that they were investigating the suspension of $391 million in military aid earmarked for Ukraine. Now, White House budget officials rushed to put together a justification for a weeks-old freeze.

“This is where the music stops, and everyone starts running to find a chair,” Mr. Crow said.
— Nicholas Fandos

A recording appears to capture Trump talking about Yovanovitch.

A lawyer representing Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, said on Friday that he turned over to congressional Democrats a recording that appeared to be of Mr. Trump speaking about Marie L. Yovanovitch, the United States ambassador to Ukraine at the time.

According to ABC News, which first reported the existence of the recording on Friday, Mr. Trump could be heard on the tape, saying, “Get rid of her.” The president went on to say: “Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. O.K.? Do it.”

Joseph A. Bondy, Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, described the recording as having “high materiality to the impeachment inquiry.” The emergence of the recording coincides with a push by Democrats in the Senate to call more witnesses and seek additional evidence for the trial.

Ms. Yovanovitch was removed from her post last spring on Mr. Trump’s orders after being the subject of a smear campaign by his allies, who saw her as an impediment to their agenda, which included efforts to force Ukraine to announce investigations into the Bidens.

The fight over admitting new evidence, like documents and witnesses, goes on.

Once Mr. Trump’s lawyers conclude their arguments, sometime between Saturday and Tuesday, senators are expected to have a short debate on whether to admit new evidence and witnesses to the trial. Republicans defeated an effort to consider the matter before the start of oral arguments, drawing outrage from Democrats, who have maintained that there could not be a fair trial without them.

The evidence-and-witnesses argument is the crux of the charge that Mr. Trump obstructed Congress. New evidence has emerged since the House completed its impeachment inquiry last year, and one of the president’s former national security advisers, John R. Bolton, said he would testify at the Senate trial if he received a subpoena. (Mr. Bolton did not testify before the House.)

This is an area where Democrats have been hoping to sway some of the Republicans who have signaled they might be open to hearing from witnesses, including Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Democrats also are holding out hope for Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who is retiring at the end of this term.

The No. 1 witness Democrats want to hear from is Mr. Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who played a central role in the Ukraine pressure campaign.

Mr. Mulvaney is “the chief cook and bottle-washer in this whole evil scheme,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters on Friday morning.

Trump’s defense team expects to make a short appearance on Saturday.

Mr. Trump’s team is set to begin presenting his defense at 10 a.m. Saturday. They will have the Senate floor for up to 24 hours if they choose to use all their time, but they plan to start with a short presentation on a day that the president has already derided as “Death Valley” in television ratings.

According to people briefed on the plan, Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Jay Sekulow, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, will appear and speak for about an hour each, although officials said the planning was still fluid.

One argument his defense is expected to make — that Mr. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly made — is that there was no pressure campaign on Ukraine, because the Trump administration released the military assistance without getting anything in return from President Volodymyr Zelensky.

One of the House impeachment managers tried to pre-emptively dismiss that argument Friday afternoon.

“Regardless of whether the aid was ultimately released, the fact that the hold became public sent a very important signal to Russia that our support was wavering,” Mr. Crow told the senators. “The damage was done.”

Some senators are pulled in by name to the case they are deciding.

As the Democratic House managers outlined how Mr. Trump and officials in his circle orchestrated and tried to hide his pressure campaign on Ukraine, they ended up name-checking some of the senators now serving as jurors.

The arguments underscore the actions several lawmakers took when they learned Mr. Trump was withholding the nation’s military aid for Ukraine and the involvement of some senators in the very affair that they are now considering as jurors.

Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, both leaders of the bipartisan Senate Ukraine Caucus, urged Mr. Trump to release the aid. Mr. Johnson traveled to Kyiv to tell Mr. Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, that he had tried but failed to persuade Mr. Trump to release the aid; Mr. Portman called Mr. Trump and privately lobbied him for hours before he eventually released it.
— Catie Edmondson

Trump is not in the chamber, but he is on Twitter.

Mr. Trump on Friday got an early start on Twitter, firing out 42 retweets and quotes from his supporters and two posts of his own by 8 a.m.

“The Impeachment Hoax is interfering with the 2020 Election,” Mr. Trump wrote in one of the posts, redirecting the Democrats’ arguments on Thursday that he had abused the power of his office by pressuring Mr. Zelensky to undertake politically motivated investigations that could affect the election.

Just before the Senate trial resumed, Mr. Trump addressed the annual March for Life, becoming the first sitting president to appear in person at the gathering of anti-abortion demonstrators. He made the surprise announcement on Twitter on Wednesday, just before the start of the Senate trial — a reminder to his conservative Christian supporters that he still shared their values.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Mark Twain, the original presidential impeachment commentator.

Mark Twain’s 1868 presidential impeachment takes read like today’s news

By Ephrat Livni in Washington DCJanuary 25, 2020

“I believe the Prince of Darkness could start a branch of hell in the District of Columbia (if he has not already done it), and carry it on unimpeached by the Congress of the United States, even though the Constitution were bristling with articles forbidding hells in this country,” Mark Twain wrote in 1868 about the first-ever presidential impeachment of Andrew Johnson, commander-in-chief #17.

The sentence could arguably have been penned today, and reading Twain is a helpful reminder that there really is nothing new under the sun or in American politics.

Just like on a historic winter weekend past, American lawmakers will spend this Saturday considering impeachment. President Donald Trump’s lawyers will make opening statements in the Senate trial, arguing that commander-in-chief #45 committed no impeachable offenses and accusing Democrats of turning policy disputes into constitutional violations, claims that mirror Twain’s complaints about “Radical Republicans” of yore.

A literary impeachment history

Twain came to work in Washington, DC in November 1867, just before Johnson’s impeachment trial. He complained about local atmospheric conditions, writing:

There is too much weather … It is tricky, it is changeable, it is to the last degree unreliable. It has catered for a political atmosphere so long that it has come at last to be thoroughly imbued with the political nature … if the President is quiet, the sun comes out; if he touches the tender gold market, it turns up cold and freezes out the speculators; if he hints at foreign troubles, it hails; if he threatens Congress, it thunders; if treason and impeachment are broached, lo, there is an earthquake!

The correspondent quickly landed a congressional side hustle for extra cash, a common practice back then. Twain visited Nevada senator William Stewart wearing a battered hat, with “an evil-smelling cigar protrud[ing] from the corner of his mouth,” the politician recalled. Despite this “sinister appearance,” Stewart hired Twain as his secretary, and the aspiring novelist returned the favor by forging the senator’s signature, responding to constituent complaints with literary-style admonitions, and rejecting a Treasury Department report because “there were no descriptive passages in it, no poetry, no sentiment—no heroes, no plot, no pictures—not even wood-cuts.”

By contrast, Twain’s political pieces had all that (minus the wood-cuts). He penned a satire featuring himself as the hero in a rollicking fake news account mocking calls for president Johnson’s impeachment. In it, Twain, as “Doorkeeper of the Senate,” charges chamber entrance fees, votes on both sides of motions, and interrupts scheduled discussions to talk female suffrage by “always commencing with the same tiresome formula of ‘Woman! Oh, woman.'”

The “grand tableaux” concludes with two Judiciary Committee impeachment reports about these alleged constitutional infractions. However, the allegations levied against Johnson weren’t as laughable as the humorist’s fictional account.

Johnson had been Republican president Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, a Democrat from Tennessee who served as VP for only 42 days before Lincoln’s 1865 assassination. The southerner’s conciliatory approach to states threatening secession after the civil war angered “Radical Republicans.” They blamed Johnson’s leniency for the Black Codes, which denied freed slaves their civil rights, that Confederate states imposed once back in the union’s fold.

Battle wounds were fresh and Johnson’s presidency was stormy. After attempting to dismiss war secretary Edward Stanton without congressional approval in violation of the Office of Tenure Act that the president had vetoed, Radical Republicans in 1867 moved for impeachment.

As Trump supporters now complain, it was not the first time the president’s opposition called for his removal. Like some today, Twain believed the prosecution stemmed from a kind of “deep state” conspiracy in a government “filled with radicals who have openly clamored for the impeachment of the President.” Indeed, the 19th-century writer at times sounded starkly like team Trump.

Take the recording ABC News reported on yesterday, related to the president’s allegedly corrupt Ukraine dealings. It seems to reveal two former business associates of Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani last year complaining that longtime State Department employee, US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, was badmouthing Trump and predicting impeachment, to which the president apparently responded, “Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.”

Yovanovitch was eventually recalled. Trump has denied association with his lawyer’s people. But he admits he was never a “fan” of the ambassador, defending his decision to remove her as presidential prerogative and not part of any corrupt scheme.

Or as Twain once put it, “A Cabinet may dispense patronage. The one we have at Washington does this on a small scale, but more to the President’s injury than benefit. Nearly all the government employés are in sympathy with Congress, supply[ing] aid and comfort to the radicals.”

History and repetition

The “radicals” past made headway. As Twain wrote, “And out of the midst of the political gloom, impeachment, that dead corpse, rose up and walked forth again!”

Twain’s zombie is back now, and if Johnson’s historic trial is any indication, Trump will be acquitted. The 17th president narrowly avoided conviction after a long, bifurcated Senate trial that concluded in late spring.

Twain predicted this outcome by early April, having watched impeachment excitement fade, only to be subsumed by cynical political calculations. He accused impeaching Republicans of a disconcerting “disposition to drop the high moral ground,” fearful of retaliation upon recapture of the presidency.

But he spared no one his scorn. “The Democrats do not howl about impeachment much now, a fact that awakens suspicion. Maybe they are satisfied that to martyr the President would make a vast amount of Democratic capital for the next election,” Twain wrote.

His analysis still works. A presidential election is looming and both parties will be considering the consequences of this impeachment in that light. Concerns about coming payback may convince Democrats to strategically chill. Republicans have compared Trump’s martyrdom to Jesus’s plight, hoping a failed attempt will help him win four more years in November.

Time will tell just how much history repeats. But it’s notable that the Democrat Johnson lost his post-trial election to a “Radical Republican.”

In the end, however, Twain condemned both parties for placing politics above principles, putting all jokes aside and writing, “This everlasting compelling of honesty, morality, justice and the law to bend the knee to policy, is the rottenest thing in a republican form of government. It is cowardly, degraded and mischievous; and in its own good time it will bring destruction upon this broad-shouldered fabric of ours.”

{Now the Senate’s turn.

It is becoming increasingly evident that both, the Republicans and the Democrats can not be both right, in their evaluations.

Either one is right, then the other has to be wrong.

The more times goes on, the more the questions of falsifying the truth becomes appearent, with the Dems calling the Republicans lists at one point, and viva versa.
That is what the august bodies of U S government have been reduced to.

And brazenly, with very little respect for anybody, in or out of government, public or private.

This is very bad for the government as well as for the people who voted them in, and it reeks of political desperation.
Now we have the first day the Republicans had their say, and its really astounding how contrary their rhetoric is.

It kind of reiterates the contradictions inherent within what is said and implied in Trump’s released, and the question of who causes a replication of duplicity comes up.
Is it really possible that the voting public will be satisfied with two versions, a sort of retro-synthesis, a logical de-integration of dialectical reasoning?

Here is what went on today:}*

IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY

Trump’s Senate impeachment trial: What happened on Day 5

Charges that Democrats were trying to interfere in the election, Trump doesn’t trust intel officials, and what about the Bidens?

Jan. 25, 2020, 1:25 PM EST / Updated Jan. 25, 2020, 1:28 PM EST

President Donald Trump’s legal team began their defense of the president in Trump-ian fashion on Saturday, charging Democrats were the ones who are trying to interfere in the 2020 election and accusing lead House manager Adam Schiff of being dishonest.

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow also gave an astonishing explanation for why his client turned to outsiders for his dealings with Ukraine — he doesn’t trust his own officials.

Here are five takeaways from Saturday’s abbreviated opening arguments in the president’s Senate trial, which will continue on Monday.

  1. Dems are the real danger

The House of Representatives impeached Trump for abuse of power, essentially charging that Trump was trying to force Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 U.S. election. In his opening argument, White House counsel Pat Cipollone argued the Democrats were the ones trying to interfere.

“They’re asking you to remove President Trump from the ballot in an election that’s occurring in approximately nine months, they’re asking you to tear up all of the ballots across this country on your own initiative — take that decision away from the American people, and I don’t think they spent one minute of their 24 hours talking to you about the consequences of that for this country,” Cipollone told the Senate.

Removing the president, he said, would be “an irresponsible abuse of power.”

“Let the people decide,” Cipollone said.

  1. Targeting Schiff

Trump’s team also took aim at Schiff, the California congressman who the president regularly derides as ‘Shifty Schiff’ (and did again on Saturday), telling the senators he’d made several misleading comments.

White House deputy counsel Mike Purpura, a member of Trump’s defense team, focused on Schiff’s summary of the president’s July 25 call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy at a hearing in the House, which Schiff said sounded like a “shakedown.”

“That’s fake, that’s not the real call,” Purpura said. “That’s not the evidence here.”

  1. Matter of trust

Sekulow said Trump engaged in what Democrats have called “shadow diplomacy” in Ukraine because his faith in U.S. intelligence agencies was badly shaken by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference.

“In his summation on Thursday night, Manager Schiff complained that the president chose not to go with the determinations of his intelligence agencies regarding foreign interference and instead decided he would listen to people that he trusted, and he would inquire about the Ukraine issue himself,” Sekulow said. “Mr. Schiff did not like the fact that the president did not apparently blindly trust some of the advice he was being given by the intelligence agencies.”

“The president had reason to be concerned about the information he was being provided. Now we could ignore this. We can make believe this did not happen. But it did,” Sekulow said.

He also accused Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election, something FBI Director Chris Wray has denied.

  1. The Bidens

What happened?

After expectations that Trump’s lawyers were going to after Joe and Hunter Biden and Burisma — Sekulow said earlier in the day that Democrats had “opened the door” to discussing the Bidens — it didn’t happen. Joe Biden was mentioned only in passing.

Download the NBC News app for full coverage of the Senate impeachment trial

But that doesn’t mean they won’t be in their crosshairs when the president’s team picks up their arguments again on Monday.

  1. Short day

Trump’s team had said they anticipated Saturday’s arguments, which they described as “coming attractions,” would last about three hours but lasted only two.

A senior administration official told NBC News that Trump’s defense won’t take as much time as the House managers did to present their case, and might even wrap up their presentation on Monday. The trial resumes then at 1 p.m. ET

Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.

*{represent my comments }

{ There is much more to this Trumpism that meets the eye.

On the lowest tiers, rests political apathy.

What this represents is dressed in various narratives, but at this point, it could be advanced that the American People have no real interest with who gets elected president, for it’s not merely the fact that grass roots has been disjointed from what is visible in the high follutin’ legalese of those who understand what’s going on, but, they really lost caring.

The potus may be an off vaudeville politico, or a high wire act, or an illusionist. He may be a magician, a felon, an impresario, or maybe, and may be even a computer .

As long as the world’s supposed privileged population defined as fans of Jenny Craig who still can shed those unsightly unwanted fat that prevents them from rushing to their nearest auto dealer.

And not for purposes of the obvious, but to prevent walking more than a block to the nearest drive in.

If we think for a second that nature’s evolutionary journey began with this intention, then we had better think twice.

Schiff calls Trump ‘vindictive’ and says Trump’s tweet was intended to intimidate

By Chandelis Duster and Kristen Holmes, CNN

Updated 12:14 PM EST, Sun January 26, 2020

Washington (CNN)Lead House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff on Sunday called President Donald Trump “wrathful and vindictive,” adding that he thought a morning tweet by the President was intended to intimidate him.

During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Schiff was asked if he viewed Trump’s tweet that “he has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!” as a threat. Schiff responded, “I think it’s intended to be.” Trump’s Twitter attack on Schiff was one of several the President launched online Sunday against Democrats and his Senate impeachment trial.

Later Sunday, Trump – who often tweets and retweets attacks on people he feels have wronged him – also insulted “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd who conducted the earlier interview with Schiff.

Democrats and Schiff accused Trump of “witness intimidation” during the House impeachment hearings over his tweets attacking former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence.

Top takeaways from the start of the Trump team’s impeachment defense

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on Sunday admonished the public for putting “meaning behind” what the President says and said Trump was not threatening Schiff.

“I think that people, and this has been a theme actually throughout this process, people put meanings behind what he says,” Grisham said in an interview on Fox News. “The President speaks in a very unique way, he’s a counterpuncher, he’s saying what it’s on his mind.”

Pressed on what the President meant, Grisham said she hadn’t yet talked to Trump about his tweet, but said she thinks Trump meant Schiff “hasn’t paid the price with voters, he hasn’t paid the price yet with the people of this country who see that he’s been lying and very obsessed.”

Schiff defends impeachment argument

In concluding the House’s opening argument Friday evening, Schiff, a California Democrat and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, delivered a lengthy argument for removing the President from office on the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

In his “Meet the Press” interview,Schiff defended his citation of a CBS News report that said Republican senators had been told “your head will be on a pike” if they vote against the President. Schiff’s comment, made during the final day of his team’s opening arguments, sparked an audible reaction from Republican senators in the chamber – a reaction some Democrats have dismissed as faux outrage.

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford criticized Schiff for quoting the report, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” that he and other senators were offended by it.

“The offensive part is there is he was saying that the President had communicated to us that our heads will be on a pike if we oppose him, and all of us looked at each other and we have heard no such comment from the President,” Lankford said.

Schiff told Todd that he was making an argument that it is going to be very difficult for senators to stand up to Trump.

“And I think I have to be very candid about this … I made the argument that it’s going to require moral courage to stand up to this President,” he said. “And this is a wrathful and vindictive President. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it and if you think there is, look at the President’s tweets about me today, saying that I should pay a price.”

‘I think it was a huge mistake’

Asked about his reaction to Trump’s legal team’s first day of opening arguments in the impeachment trial Saturday, Schiff said he believed the President’s team was “afraid of what witnesses have to say,” therefore the White House’s entire trial strategy has been to “deprive the public of a fair trial” – reiterating yet again that a fair trial requires witnesses.

Trump’s legal team, he said, “basically acknowledged the scheme” – and that its main argument was “you don’t need a fair trial here,” adding that there was no “exoneration” if the country was deprived of a fair trial.

Schiff also said he thought it was a “huge mistake” that Trump’s lawyers repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 US presidential election.

“I was surprised. I think it was a huge mistake… they go and double down on that same crazy conspiracy theory that Ukraine hacked the DNC server. It’s astonishing,” Schiff said. “On the first day of the President’s defense, to say that the President should disbelieve his own intelligence agencies, has every right to believe (Russian President) Vladimir Putin. I wouldn’t want to make that argument.”

The President’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow has signaled that the defense team is likely to go after former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as the Russia investigation into the President and the opposition research dossier from ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.

The President’s team is delivering its presentation as White House and Senate GOP sources have told CNN they are confident they will defeat a vote next week for additional witnesses that would extend the trial. But there were no mentions of the former vice president or his son Saturday.

Schiff, asked about a possible deal where Democrats and Republicans would both call the witnesses they want in order to have trial testimony, said he believes the President “has the right to call relevant witnesses…in his defense,” but he made clear he did not believe that Hunter Biden is a “relevant witness.”

“If we’re talking about a fair trial… (Senators) can’t say, 'Well, we’re going to allow the President to trade witnesses that don’t shed any light on the facts, but would allow him to once again try to smear his opponent,” Schiff said.

“Hunter Biden can’t tell us anything about the withholding of military funding. Hunter Biden can’t tell us why the President wouldn’t let the President if Ukraine into the Oval office. Hunter Biden can’t tell us anything about that,” he added.

This story has been updated with comment from White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham.

© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY

Democrats demand Bolton testimony after report his book says Trump tied Ukraine aid to Biden probe

The reported account in an unpublished manuscript by the former national security adviser counters the White House’s defense of the president.

Jan. 26, 2020, 7:37 PM EST / Updated Jan. 26, 2020, 9:19 PM EST

By Lauren Egan

WASHINGTON — Democrats stepped up their calls Sunday night for former national security adviser John Bolton to testify at President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial after an explosive report alleged that in his unpublished book, he said Trump personally tied Ukraine aid to an investigation of the Bidens — an account that conflicts with the president’s.

“John Bolton has the evidence,” tweeted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

According to the manuscript, as reported by The New York Times on Sunday night, Trump told Bolton that nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine would not be released until it offered assistance with investigations of Democratic targets, including former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

NBC News has not seen a copy of the manuscript or verified the report, which cited multiple sources familiar with Bolton’s account.

The contents of the manuscript were described as a rough account of how Bolton would testify should he be called as a witness in the Senate trial. The prospect of new witnesses has been viewed as unlikely given most Republicans’ reluctance to accept additional testimony.

Hill Democrats said Sunday that the new report highlighted the urgency of a Senate request for Bolton’s testimony — a move that would require several GOP votes.

“It’s up to four Senate Republicans to ensure that John Bolton, Mick Mulvaney, and the others with direct knowledge of President Trump’s actions testify in the Senate trial,” Schumer tweeted. Mulvaney is Trump’s acting chief of staff.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., tweeted that with the news Bolton reportedly had firsthand knowledge of Trump’s decision that ran counter to the White House account of the president’s actions, the “refusal of the Senate to call for him, other relevant witnesses, and documents is now even more indefensible.”

The House Democrats’ impeachment managers said in a statement that there could be “no doubt now that Mr. Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the President’s defense and therefore must be called as a witness at the impeachment trial of President Trump. Senators should insist that Mr. Bolton be called as a witness, and provide his notes and other relevant documents.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. — one of the senators running for the Democratic presidential nomination whose campaign has been affected by the need to serve as a juror in the impeachment trial — echoed the sentiment Sunday. “I don’t know how my Republican colleagues cannot call for witnesses…” she said while campaigning in Iowa. “We should all be calling for witnesses. We have to get to the truth.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, also campaigning in Iowa, told NBC Sunday night that he did not have “any idea of what’s in the book. But if it in fact contradicts Trump, it’s not a surprise.”

The president’s allies have said the aid delay was unconnected to Trump’s requests that Ukrainian officials announce investigations that stood to undercut his domestic political opponents, including Biden.

In the unpublished book, Bolton is reported to allege that other administration officials, including Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr, were made aware of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s unusual involvement in a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine well before it became a central element of the whistleblower complaint at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

Bolton attorney Charles Cooper appeared to confirm the substance of the report Sunday, saying that the manuscript had been submitted to the National Security Council last month for a standard review for classified information and that it was "clear, regrettably, from The New York Times article published today that the prepublication review process has been corrupted and that information has been disclosed by persons other than those properly involved in reviewing the manuscript.”

The White House did not immediately respond to an NBC request for comment.

Last week, Trump expressed misgivings over the prospect of Bolton’s testimony.

“The problem with John is, that it’s a national security problem,” he told reporters at an impromptu press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, adding that Bolton “knows some of my thoughts, what I think about leaders — what happens if he reveals what I think about a leader and it’s not very positive?”

Lauren Egan, Alex Moe and Hallie Jackson reported from Washington.

//////////////////////////////\\\\\/////////

Bolton update

POLITICO

IMPEACHMENT

Trump team braces for deeper impeachment drama after Bolton surprise

The president’s lawyers are already contemplating which administration witnesses would be best to rebut potential testimony from Bolton — if enough Senate Republicans turn against them.

President Donald Trump and his former National Security Adviser John Bolton in September of last year. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

01/27/2020 05:49 PM EST

Within just 24 hours, White House officials went from feeling self-assured about the speediness of the Senate impeachment trial to scrambling to squash John Bolton’s bombshell allegation.

Now, White House officials and Trump lawyers are preparing for the possibility that the Senate impeachment trial will summon witnesses — dragging out the trial for days or weeks, cutting into plans for the State of the Union address and delaying Trump’s pivot to his reelection campaign.

The “only good news for Trump is this f---- up the campaign schedule for the Senate [2020] candidates for weeks to come,” said one Republican close to the White House.

Calling witnesses would make the trial much more unpredictable for the White House and Republican Senate leadership, which was caught by surprise by the revelations in Bolton’s book manuscript. The book draft says Trump told Bolton to keep withholding military aid to Ukraine until officials there agreed to investigate his political rivals, a statement that undercuts a key element of the Trump’s legal defense.

Trump called that information “totally false” at the White House on Monday morning, after he launched a series of overnight tweets refuting the allegation.

“This opens up a can of worms because the senators don’t get to vote on calling individual witnesses,” said a former senior administration official. “If Bolton testifies, then what does that mean for Pompeo or Mulvaney and assertions of executive privilege? It gets complicated and uncertain really fast.”

Trump lawyers are already thinking through which witnesses would be best to rebut potential testimony from Bolton and are eyeing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Bolton has said he will testify if the Senate subpoenas him.

The White House is also viewing the calling of witnesses as a tit-for-tat situation — if Democrats want to call Bolton, then Republicans and Trump will try to call their own witnesses. Trump has long wanted the Senate to hear from witnesses like Hunter Biden or even the whistleblower who helped trigger the president’s impeachment.

“Does the White House assert executive privilege over Bolton? If so, who goes to court?” the Republican close to the White House added. “Does the court take jurisdiction or say this is a political question between the other two branches? Does Roberts make the decision? Does he have the power to do so? So many questions.”

In an interview, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called the Bolton book disclosures a “bombshell with political shrapnel going in all directions toward the Republican Party to figure out how to handle this.”

The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

On Sunday night, senior administration officials were taken by surprise and rushed to find out information about who knew what and when. The White House fielded concerns from Republicans on Capitol Hill who were not aware of the allegations in Bolton’s manuscript.

A senior Republican aide said GOP leadership was not made aware of the allegations ahead of time.

Bolton’s attorney was quick to point a finger at the White House for allegedly leaking the contents of the book to the New York Times and called the review process “corrupted and that information has been disclosed by persons other than those properly involved in reviewing the manuscript.”

“Ambassador John Bolton, Simon & Schuster, and Javelin Literary categorically state that there was absolutely no coordination with the New York Times or anyone else regarding the appearance of information about his book, THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED, at online booksellers. Any assertion to the contrary is unfounded speculation,” said Bolton spokesperson Sarah Tinsley.

The revelations came just before the White House presented its second day of opening arguments in the Senate impeachment trial — though one aide insisted it would not change the overall legal strategy and promised the outreach to Republican senators would continue, as it has for the last several weeks.

Team Trump, while privately flustered and re-calibrating due to the Bolton disclosures, didn’t show any hint of concern Monday on the Senate floor. Jay Sekulow, the longest-serving personal attorney for Trump, opened the day’s proceedings with a cloaked reference to the former Trump aide.

“We deal with transcript evidence. We deal with publicly available information. We do not deal with speculation, allegations that are not based on evidentiary standards at all,” he said.

Sekulow then served as an emcee to introduce a series of lawyers who’d defend the president, starting with former Clinton independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Starr delivered a sweeping historical look back at impeachment and warned against the long-term consequences of removing Trump. Jane Raskin then questioned the hyper focus on her fellow attorney colleague, Rudy Giuliani.

Meanwhile, talking points sent from the White House sought to discredit Bolton, saying the leaks of his book did little to change the facts of the impeachment case because Ukraine ultimately received its security assistance.

Trump campaign staffers and surrogates implied the leak of Bolton’s book was timed to goose his own book sales. “It’s really pretty remarkable that the leak to the NYTimes about the alleged contents of John Bolton’s book coincided precisely with the pre-order page going live on Amazon,” said Tim Murtaugh, communications director for Trump‘s 2020 campaign.

Before Trump’s lawyers took to the Senate floor in the early afternoon, several House lawmakers including Reps. Mark Meadows, Mike Johnson, Doug Collins and Debbie Lesko emerged from Vice President Mike Pence’s Capitol Hill office. One of them, Rep. Lee Zeldin, labeled the Bolton revelations as the Democrats’ “big shiny object of the day to distract what will be several hours of addressing as many things as you can possibly address.”

Several Trump advisers defended the president on Monday afternoon on TV, Trump’s preferred medium of communication.

“I don’t want to speak for my Senate colleagues, but there are always political repercussions for every vote you take,” Meadows said on CBS when asked about the consequences of party members breaking with Trump. “There is no vote that is higher-profile than this.”

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

Fox News

TRUMP IMPEACHMENT

Published January 27, 2020

Last Update 32 minutes ago

Dershowitz calls out House Dems in Trump’s Senate impeachment trial after Bolton shock waves

By Gregg Re | Fox News

Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, delivering a spirited constitutional defense of President Trump at his Senate impeachment trial Monday night, flatly turned toward House impeachment managers and declared they had picked “dangerous” and “wrong” charges against the president – noting that neither “abuse of power” nor “obstruction of Congress” was remotely close to an impeachable offense as the framers had intended.

In a dramatic primetime moment, the liberal constitutional law scholar reiterated that although he voted for Hillary Clinton, he could not find constitutional justification for the impeachment of a president for non-criminal conduct, or conduct that was not at least “akin” to defined criminal conduct.

“I’m sorry, House managers, you just picked the wrong criteria. You picked the most dangerous possible criteria to serve as a precedent for how we supervise and oversee future presidents,” Dershowitz told the House Democrats, including head House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

He said that “all future presidents who serve with opposing legislative majorities” now face the “realistic threat” of enduring “vague charges of abuse or obstruction,” and added that a “long list” of presidents have previously been accused of “abuse of power” in various contexts without being formally impeached.

The list included George Washington, who refused to turn over documents related to the Jay Treaty; John Adams, who signed and enforced the so-called “Alien and Sedition Acts”; Thomas Jefferson, who flat-out purchased Louisiana without any kind of congressional authorization whatosever; John Tyler, who notoriously used and abused the veto power; James Polk, who allegedly disregarded the Constitution and usurped the role of Congress; and Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and others would also probably face impeachment using the Democrats’ rules, Dershowitz said.

“Abuse of power,” he argued, has been a “promiscuously deployed” and “vague” term throughout history. It should remain a merely “political weapon” fit for “campaign rhetoric,” Dershowitz said, as it has no standard definition nor meaningful constitutional relevance.

Dershowitz then said he was “nonpartisan” in his application of the Constitution, and would make the same arguments against such an “unconstitutional impeachment” if Hillary Clinton were on trial – passing what he called the “shoe on the other foot” test.

“Purely non-criminal conduct such as abuse of power and obstruction of Congress are outside the range of impeachable offenses,” Dershowitz said.

He quoted Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis – one of the two dissenters in the notorious 1857 “Dred Scott v. Sandford” decision and counsel for President Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial in 1868 – as saying there can be no impeachable offense “without a law, written or unwritten, express or implied.”

Johnson, Dershowitz observed, was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act – a statute essentially designed to create the pretext to impeach Johnson. By passing the law first, lawmakers expressly recognized that criminal-like conduct was needed for impeachment, Dershowitz argued. (No president had ever been impeached for non-criminal conduct until Trump’s impeachment last year.)

Indeed, a “close review of the history” near in time to the founding of the United States, Dershowitz said, revealed that the founders explicitly wanted to avoid making impeachment so arbitrary and powerful that it effectively created a “British-style parliamentary democracy,” in which presidents served at the pleasure of the legislature.

Dershowitz further suggested that the “rule of lenity,” or the legal doctrine that ambiguities should be resolved in favor of defendants, also counseled toward acquitting the president. The Constitution permits impeachment and removal of presidents for “treason,” “bribery,” and “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but does not clearly define the terms.

Responding to reports that former national security adviser John Bolton has written in his forthcoming book that Trump told him he wanted to link Ukraine aid to an investigation of the Bidens, Dershowitz argued that even an explicit “quid pro quo” would not constitute an impeachable “abuse of power.”

“Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power, or an impeachable offense,” Dershowitz said. “That is clear from the history. That is clear from the language of the Constitution. You cannot turn conduct that is not impeachable into impeachable conduct simply by using terms like ‘quid pro quo’ and ‘personal benefit.’”

“It is inconceivable,” Dershowitz said, that the framers would have intended such “politically loaded terms” and “subjective’” words without clear definitions to serve as the basis for impeachment.

Fearing a partisan impeachment process, the framers had rejected the offense of “maladministration” as a basis for impeachment, Dershowitz noted, and “abuse of power” was similarly vague.

Dershowitz wrapped up his argument, steeped in historical and textual analysis of the constitution and founding documents, by urging senators to reject the “passions and fears of the moment,” as the framers had similarly warned.

A series of Republican senators lined up to shake Dershowitz’s hand after his presentation concluded.

Hunter Biden in the crosshairs

Separately, Pam Bondi, in a methodical presentation earlier Monday at the impeachment trial, took the fight directly to Hunter Biden – underscoring, again and again, how even media outlets with a left-wing “bias” questioned the younger Biden’s lucrative service on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings while his father oversaw Ukraine policy as vice president.

A 2014 Washington Post report, Bondi noted, asserted that the “appointment of the vice president’s son to a Ukrainian oil board looks nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst.”

A 2014 Buzzfeed News article stated that “serious conflict of interest questions” were raised by Biden’s appointment.

A June 2019 ABC News report called it “strange” that Burisma, which was widely accused of corruption, had agreed to pay Hunter Biden’s company “more than a million dollars a year,” just after Biden was kicked out of the Navy allegedly for cocaine possession.

It was hardly surprising given all the media attention, Bondi went on, that career State Department official George Kent flagged Biden’s apparent conflict of interest, but was told essentially not to bother the vice president’s office – or that the Obama administration had prepped former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch for questions about Burisma ahead of her Senate confirmation.

Bondi’s point-by-point defense of Trump’s concerns about the Bidens’ potential corruption came on the second day of Republican arguments.

Fox News has been told that Trump’s defense team will wrap up on Tuesday within a few hours after the trial resumes at 1 p.m. ET. “Everyone should be able to go home for dinner,” a source close to the team told Fox News.

The next phase of the trial, involving 16 hours of written questions that the senators can submit to be answered by Democratic House managers and Trump’s lawyers, will not start until Wednesday. Then, there will be a vote on whether to hear more evidence or witnesses.

The written questions could focus either on legal issues, like the theoretical ones raised by Dershowitz, or factual matters that could prove uncomfortable for Democrats.

“Hunter Biden was paid over $83,000 a month, while the average American family of four during that time each year made less than $54,000,” Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, said incredulously in her remarks.

Bondi: Hunter Biden’s decision to join Burisma raised red flags immediately

Eric Herschmann: Why not impeach Obama, too?

In his own comments to the Senate, Trump lawyer Eric Herschmann argued that Burisma couldn’t even get its story straight concerning Biden’s duties.

In a May 2014 Burisma news release, the company claimed Biden would head up the country’s “legal unit,” Herschmann observed. “But, on October 13, 2019, Biden’s lawyer said that ‘at no time’ was he in charge of Burisma’s legal affairs.”

Even Hunter has admitted, speaking to ABC News, that he “probably” would not have been on the board of Burisma if he were not the vice president’s son, Bondi noted.

Bondi and Herschmann were arguing that Trump did nothing wrong when, in a July call with Ukraine’s leader, he called for the country to look into Joe Biden’s on-camera admission that he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor by withholding $1 billion in U.S. assistance to Ukraine.

What Biden didn’t reveal, Bondi said, was that the prosecutor was investigating Burisma at the time – or that Hunter Biden was serving in a highly lucrative role on Burisma’s board.

Republicans reinvigorated

The Trump team’s aggressive arguments on Monday heartened Republicans both inside and outside the Senate chamber.

“Pam Bondi is on the Senate floor nailing Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and the Obama White House for their role in/handling of Ukrainian corruption,” North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows tweeted. “If it wasn’t obvious already… President Trump was right to press for reform” in Ukraine, he wrote.

In a heated news conference, Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said the proceedings had offered just the “beginning” of “serious evidence of corruption” involving Burisma. Reporters repeatedly interrupted Cruz, and at one point a questioner suggested that Cruz’s children had also benefited from nepotism in obtaining lucrative board roles – even though they’re in elementary school.

Using Democrats’ logic, a stronger case for impeaching former President Obama could be made, Herschmann argued later. He noted that Obama had been caught on camera promising Russia’s president that he would have more “flexibility” on missile defense issues after the 2012 election – an apparent instance of a “quid pro quo” involving politics influencing foreign affairs.

“The president exercises official power. In his role as head of state during a nuclear security summit after asking the Russian president for space, he promised him missile defense can be solved? What else can that mean than in a way that can be solved for the Russians?” Herschmann asked. “He was asking an adversary for space for the express purpose of furthering his own election purposes… ‘after my election, I have more flexibility.’ Obama knew the importance of missile defense in Europe but decided to use it as a bargaining chip.”

Herschmann accused Democrats of overreach by attempting to remove the president by a vote of the Senate.

BOLTON MANUSCRIPT LEAKS JUST AS AMAZON BOOK PREORDERS GO LIVE; TRUMP FIRES BACK

“We, on the other hand, trust our fellow Americans to choose their candidate… and let the American people choose,” he said. “Maybe they’re concerned that the American people like historically low unemployment, maybe the American people like that their 401(k)s have [grown].”

Also speaking on behalf of the president, Ken Starr, whose independent counsel investigation into then-President Bill Clinton resulted in his impeachment, bemoaned what he called an “age of impeachment." Impeachment, he said, required both an actual crime and a “genuine national consensus" that the president must go. Neither existed here, Starr said.

“It’s filled with acrimony and it divides the country like nothing else,” Starr said of impeachment. “Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachment understand that in a deep and personal way.”

Trump’s team further challenged Democrats’ claims that Trump’s fears of Ukraine meddling were a “conspiracy theory” – noting that Schiff, D-Calif., had spent years accusing the Trump team of colluding with Russia without any evidence.

Although Democrats – and some news outlets, including The Associated Press – repeatedly claimed that the idea of Ukraine meddling was a “conspiracy theory,” a Ukrainian court has ruled that officials in the country did illegally meddle in the U.S. election. Additionally, a 2017 investigative report by Politico found extensive efforts by Ukrainians to hurt Trump’s presidential campaign.

Biden campaign rapid response director Andrew Bates shot back quickly in a statement to Fox News.

“We didn’t realize that Breitbart was expanding into Ted Talk knockoffs,” Bates said. “Here on Planet Earth, the conspiracy theory that Bondi repeated has been conclusively refuted. The New York Times calls it ‘debunked,’ The Wall Street Journal calls it ‘discredited,’ the AP calls it ‘incorrect,’ and The Washington Post Fact Checker calls it ‘a fountain of falsehoods.’ The diplomat that Trump himself appointed to lead his Ukraine policy has blasted it as ‘self serving’ and ‘not credible.’ Joe Biden was instrumental to bipartisan and international anti-corruption victory. It’s no surprise that such a thing is anathema to President Trump.”

“We didn’t realize that Breitbart was expanding into Ted Talk knockoffs.”

— Biden campaign rapid response director Andrew Bates

Democrats have accused Trump of seeking to “make up dirt” on the Bidens, and alleged that Trump himself delayed sending aid to Ukraine until the country took a public look at the issue.

Bolton looms large

Meanwhile, senators faced mounting pressure Monday to summon Bolton to testify at the trial, after an excerpt from the former national security advisor’s forthcoming book apparently leaked. According to the manuscript, Trump told Bolton he had suspended aid to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation of the Bidens. The White House strongly denied the claim.

“We deal with transcript evidence, we deal with publicly available information,” attorney Jay Sekulow said. “We do not deal with speculation, allegations that are not based on evidentiary standards at all.”

Prior to his presentation Monday, Dershowitz said that the Bolton issue wouldn’t affect his presentation, centering on constitutional law.

Dershowitz quotes ‘Dred Scott’ dissenter Justice Curtis: No impeachable offense ‘without a law, express or implied’

Republican senators have faced a pivotal moment, and pressure was mounting for at least four to buck GOP leaders and form a bipartisan majority to force the issue. Republicans have held a 53-47 majority, and a mere majority vote would be required on the question of witnesses.

“John Bolton’s relevance to our decision has become increasingly clear,” Utah GOP Sen. Mitt Romney told reporters. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a key moderate swing vote, said she has always wanted “the opportunity for witnesses” and the report about Bolton’s book “strengthens the case.”

At a private GOP lunch, Romney made the case for calling Bolton, according to multiple reports. Other Republicans have said that if Trump’s former national security adviser is called, they will demand reciprocity to hear from at least one of their witnesses. Some Republicans have wanted to call the Bidens.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., appeared unmoved by news of the Bolton book, telling Republicans they would take stock after the defense team concluded its arguments.

McConnell’s message at the lunch, said Indiana GOP Sen. Mike Braun, was, "Take a deep breath, and let’s take one step at a time.

©2020 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. All market data delayed 20 minutes.

Mitt makes his move

The occasional Trump critic is in the middle of an internal GOP fight over the impeachment tri

01/27/2020 10:06 PM EST

After staying relatively quiet throughout the House’s impeachment inquiry, Sen. Mitt Romney now finds himself in the middle of an increasingly bitter debate in his own party.

The Utah Republican has long been open to hearing from former national security adviser John Bolton and other witnesses in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, a position shared by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). The trio has searched for a fourth crucial vote to win a majority, but up until Sunday, those appeals seemed to be going nowhere.

Yet following a New York Times report that Trump told Bolton that frozen Ukrainian aid would be restored only if officials in Ukraine announced an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Romney’s push for witnesses has some life — and some Republicans are displeased.

Romney “made a strong pitch” for witnesses during a closed-door lunch of Senate Republicans on Monday, according to Republicans familiar with the meeting. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) urged his colleagues to wait until after Trump’s defense team finishes its presentation and senators go through a lengthy question-and-answer session to make a decision on what’s become the biggest issue of the trial.

But Romney is already making his move. And though he serves on the Republican whip team, Romney is now effectively working against party leaders and arguing to colleagues that the proper way to test each side’s contention is to hear from people directly involved in the Ukraine saga.

“It has been pointed out so far by both the House managers as well the defense that there has not been evidence of a direct nature of what the president may have said or what his motives were or what he did,” Romney said on Monday evening. “The article in the New York Times I think made it pretty clear that [Bolton] has some information that may be relevant. And I’d like to hear relevant information before I made a final decision.”

Romney’s push for Bolton to testify is drawing blowback from some of his colleagues, with recently appointed Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) asserting he wants to “appease the left.” Loeffler and her husband, New York Stock Exchange Chairman Jeffrey Sprecher, donated more than $1.5 million to a super PAC that backed Romney’s 2012 White House run. But now Loeffler is expected to face a challenge for her seat from GOP Rep. Doug Collins, and she’s eager to demonstrate her loyalty to Trump by taking on an occasional critic of the president.

Sen. Mitt Romney.

Still, Romney isn’t going full Trump resistance: He knows his group can’t bring in Bolton alone without enraging some of his colleagues. So any successful effort to hear new testimony would also likely have to include witnesses whom Trump wants to subpoena too.

“My expectation is that were there to be that testimony from Mr. Bolton, that there would be testimony from someone on the defense side as well in order to get some 50-plus people to agree,” Romney said. “I’m not going to be counting noses as to who would support or not support that at this stage, but I may down the road.”

A former governor of Massachusetts, 2012 presidential nominee and wealthy businessman, the 72-year-old Romney makes an unlikely freshman senator. But he’s mostly fit in with his colleagues — even hosting the party’s informal dinner on Monday with helpings of Chick-fil-A.

Yet Romney does get a rise out of Republicans when he challenges the president. Romney’s GOP colleagues remember his harsh rhetoric against Trump during the 2016 campaign, though tensions have ebbed and flowed in the past four years.

“I’d rather he not” push for witnesses, said Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.). “He isn’t all that close to the administration. … I don’t agree with him.”

Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) has compared Romney to “Jeff Flake on steroids,” and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) asserted last fall that Romney “thinks the worst of the president.” Trump himself called Romney a “pompous ass” when he expressed concerns about asking other countries to investigate Joe Biden.

A senior administration official acknowledged Bolton’s book could hurt the GOP’s efforts to block witness testimony but said it wasn’t because of anything Romney is doing.

“He’s doing what he’s already doing. It’s personal" between him and Trump, the official said.

Romney, though, rarely engages on any insults or digs at him. Asked about Loeffler’s Monday diss, Romney praised the brand-new senator and said he was glad she’s serving.

“He’s a leader,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) of Romney. “I have respect for his views, not that I agree with him all the time.”

Romney’s proposal to include the president’s witnesses along with any Democratic-preferred witnesses like Bolton has been frequently discussed among Republicans, most recently on Monday. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania was among the Republicans broaching the idea, though it didn’t seem to be catching fire in the broader Senate GOP.

“I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere. I really don’t think so,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.). “I think it will get to the point of where you have a few considering it.”

Most Republicans are eager to dispense with the Trump trial and have argued that bringing in witnesses could drag it on for weeks if issues of executive privilege are raised in the courts.

Senate GOP leaders acknowledge that Romney is pushing his position, but so far, they publicly argue the dynamic inside the Republican Conference has not changed despite the Bolton revelations.

“It’s not a new position for [Romney]. He’s been on that position for quite a while,” said Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Senate Republican. “He didn’t say anything new at lunch that he hasn’t said before.”

If the effort to subpoena Bolton moves forward, Republican leaders will respond with their own explosive push to call Hunter Biden or another witness favored by the White House. Other Trump allies are also echoing this line, declaring that if Bolton is called, then “the floodgates are opened.”

“I don’t see the need to have more witnesses unless we have a lot more witnesses,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). “I don’t know what the country would gain from that.”

Romney sent shock waves through the Capitol when he said on Monday morning that it’s “increasingly likely” that more Republicans would embrace his call for witnesses.

Among the senators most likely to join Romney, Collins and Murkowski are Toomey, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Rob Portman of Ohio or Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, according to GOP sources. But none have taken the public plunge.

Barrasso said the witness vote — set for Friday — “is still going to be close. They need four. And I haven’t seen anybody shift.”

Romney said later Monday evening that he didn’t base his earlier statement on any inside intel. He just thinks that if Bolton is willing to talk, logically, Republicans should be willing to listen.

“My sense was that based upon the fact that there was apparently relevant information, material information that others would say: ‘Yeah, OK, that’d be interesting to hear if we could,’” Romney said.