Impeachment 3: The MF Has Been Impeached! The Trial Has Begun!

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

Jury intimidation.

This goes right to the core of what the trumplican party is all about. Intimidation and bullying and corruption. To the detriment of all. 

 

[fraurosena]

Dana Milbank jabs his uncompromising finger smack dab in the middle of the sore spot.

John Roberts comes face to face with the mess he made

Quote

There is justice in John Roberts being forced to preside silently over the impeachment trial of President Trump, hour after hour, day after tedious day.

The chief justice of the United States, as presiding officer, doesn’t speak often, and when he does the words are usually scripted and perfunctory:

“The Senate will convene as a court of impeachment.”

“The chaplain will lead us in prayer.”

“The sergeant at arms will deliver the proclamation.”

“The majority leader is recognized.”

Otherwise, he sits and watches. He rests his chin in his hand. He stares straight ahead. He sits back and interlocks his fingers. He plays with his pen. He takes his reading glasses off and puts them on again. He starts to write something, then puts his pen back down. He roots around in his briefcase for something — anything? — to occupy him.

Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.

Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses — the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the attempts to force Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents — gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.

The Roberts Court’s decisions led to this moment in indirect ways, as well. The court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred a new wave of voter suppression. The decision in 2014′s McCutcheon further surrendered campaign finance to the wealthiest. The 2018 Janus decision hobbled the ability of labor unions to counter wealthy donors, while the 2019 Rucho ruling blessed partisan gerrymandering, expanding anti-democratic tendencies.

The consequences? Falling confidence in government, and a growing perception that Washington had become a “swamp” corrupted by political money, fueled Trump’s victory. The Republican Party, weakened by the new dominance of outside money, couldn’t stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party or the takeover of the congressional GOP ranks by far-right candidates. The new dominance of ideologically extreme outside groups and donors led lawmakers on both sides to give their patrons what they wanted: conflict over collaboration and purity at the cost of paralysis. The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans and extend the electoral power of Republicans in disproportion to the popular vote.

Certainly, the Supreme Court didn’t create all these problems, but its rulings have worsened the pathologies — uncompromising views, mindless partisanship and vitriol — visible in this impeachment trial. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), no doubt recognizing that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is helping to preserve his party’s Senate majority, has devoted much of his career to extending conservatives’ advantage in the judiciary.

He effectively stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing for nearly a year to consider President Barack Obama’s eminently qualified nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacancy. And, expanding on earlier transgressions by Democrats, he blew up generations of Senate procedures and precedents requiring the body to operate by consensus so that he could confirm more Trump judicial appointees.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. On the day the impeachment trial opened, the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare. The court sided with Republicans who opposed an immediate Supreme Court review because the GOP feared the ruling could hurt it if the decision came before the 2020 election.

Roberts had been warned about this sort of thing. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, in his Citizens United dissent, wrote: “Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, in his McCutcheon dissent, warned that the new campaign finance system would be “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.”

Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it — and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.

 

This, by the way, is precisely the reason why politicians shouldn't be the ones appointing judges and justices; the Judiciary should be responsible for it. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Democrats detail abuse-of-power charge against Trump as Republicans complain of repetitive arguments"

Spoiler

House impeachment managers laid out the heart of their abuse-of-power case against President Trump on Thursday — charging that his efforts to pressure Ukraine into political investigations were precisely what the nation’s founders wanted to guard against when they empowered Congress to remove a president from office.

The Democrats also detailed their defense of former vice president Joe Biden’s actions regarding Ukraine in anticipation that it will be a major portion of the White House’s defense later this week, saying Biden’s actions were in line with official U.S. policy at the time and not done to benefit an energy company connected to his son.

But a significant number of Senate Republicans remained unmoved and downplayed the case from House managers, dismissing it as repetitive and unpersuasive as they sought to counter Democrats’ narrative at a time when Trump’s lawyers must stay silent in the Senate Chamber.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who led the case for Democrats on Thursday, cited “abuse, betrayal and corruption” as not only the offenses that the nation feared the most when they wrote the Constitution, but also those alleged abuses at the core of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

“The president’s abuse of power, his betrayal of the national interest, and his corruption of our elections plainly qualify as great and dangerous offenses,” Nadler said. “President Trump has made clear in word and deed that he will persist in such conduct if he is not removed from power.”

During his arguments, Nadler also drew liberally from past comments made by key Trump allies, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), Attorney General William P. Barr and lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who all argued there doesn’t have to be a statutory crime committed to impeach a president.

In one of many video clips played on the Senate floor during the trial, Graham — then serving as a House manager in President Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial — defined “high crimes” more loosely than he does now as one of Trump’s staunchest defenders.

“It’s just when you start using your office, and you’re acting in a way that hurts people, you’ve committed a high crime,” Graham said on the Senate floor in the clip from 1999. He was not in the chamber Thursday when his quote was played, but later told reporters that the use of his previous comments was “fair game” and recommended the White House do the same with Democrats when Trump’s lawyers begin their defense of the president.

Nadler made a case to the Senate that it would be unreasonable to expect Congress to envision all types of potential presidential corruption and pass laws explicitly forbidding it.

“The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” Nadler said. “It does not leave us stuck with presidents who abuse their power in unforeseen ways that threaten our security and democracy. Until recently, it did not occur to me that our president would call a foreign leader and demand a sham investigation meant to kneecap his political opponents, all in exchange for releasing vital military aid that the president was already required by law to provide.”

Trump was impeached Dec. 18, with Democrats accusing him of withholding nearly $400 million in military aid and a White House visit coveted by Ukraine in exchange for launching investigations into Biden and his son Hunter, as well as a discredited theory that the eastern European nation interfered in the 2016 election. Trump and his counsel have maintained he did nothing improper when he asked Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 25 call to probe the two matters.

In addition to the abuse of power charge, Democrats also impeached Trump on a second article of impeachment: that he obstructed congressional attempts to investigate the Ukraine matter.

But the second official day of the House impeachment managers’ arguments centered on the Democrats’ abuse-of-power claims. They will wrap up their case Friday. Trump’s team will launch its defense of the president on Saturday, with the key question of whether the Senate will subpoena new witnesses or documents set to be decided around the middle of next week.

The Senate may only come in for a few hours Saturday morning rather then spending a full day on the trial, in part because Trump did not want much of his defense to be aired on Saturday, when the public may be focused on weekend plans rather than the news, according to a GOP official who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

Outside the Senate Chamber on Thursday, GOP senators and the president’s legal team fanned out across the airwaves to push back against the Democrats’ case.

Echoing a comment from several Senate Republicans, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow said “we’re hearing the same things over and over” from the House Democrats.

Meanwhile, even if some Republicans didn’t outright reject the Democrats’ case that there did not need to be an underlying crime for a president to be impeached, most continued to dismiss the overall argument made by the impeachment managers.

“I don’t think that anything they’ve actually alleged — any of the ‘abuses’ — they have actual evidence for,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said during a break in the trial.

White House officials said Thursday that West Wing aides and Trump’s lawyers will continue to be a frequent presence at the Capitol in the coming days as the president’s team works to defend him. Aggressive public relations and press availabilities are a key part of that strategy, one Republican strategist familiar with the planning said.

“This is going to be more than the president tweeting,” the strategist said, adding that the strategy would include Sekulow addressing the media at microphones set up in the Capitol and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) “huddling with 100 reporters” in the hallways.

Trump did tweet Thursday, insisting that Democrats are opposed to a witness deal because they are afraid of what the people called to testify by the GOP would reveal. Democrats have repeatedly said they oppose a witness trade because they believe the witnesses Republicans want are irrelevant to the case.

“The Democrats don’t want a Witness Trade because Shifty Schiff, the Biden’s, the fake Whistleblower (& his lawyer), the second Whistleblower (who vanished after I released the Transcripts), the so-called ‘informer’, & many other Democrat disasters, would be a BIG problem for them!” Trump tweeted.

Though the Republicans’ top desired witness remains Hunter Biden, Graham told reporters Thursday that scrutinizing the former vice president’s son’s service on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, would be better handled through the “oversight” process than by calling him as a witness during the impeachment trial.

The Bidens played a prominent role in the House Democrats’ arguments Thursday, as Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.), another impeachment manager, sought to debunk the allegations that Joe Biden did anything nefarious in his dealings with Ukraine during his time as vice president.

“The allegations against Biden are completely groundless,” Garcia said, detailing how the former vice president’s efforts to oust the Ukrainian prosecutor general were in line with official U.S. policy and supported by international allies.

But Republican senators said the focus on the Bidens by Democrats made the former vice president and his son fair game for Trump’s defense team.

“It means when President Trump’s lawyers stand up and present their defense, that they are going to have the opportunity to present the very significant evidence that’s supported and still supports a serious investigation into corruption at Burisma and ultimately whether Joe Biden participated in that corruption,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) told reporters Thursday evening.

In 2016, Biden was the Obama administration’s point person on Ukraine policy and led a pressure campaign on the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, whom the administration believed was not doing enough to root out corruption among Ukraine’s politicians. Shokin had previously investigated Burisma, but Hunter Biden was not accused of any wrongdoing.

Garcia noted that Trump and Republicans didn’t focus on Biden’s actions toward Ukraine until 2019, when “Biden became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination and polls showed that he had the largest head-to-head lead against President Trump. That became a problem.”

She also referenced a letter from Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and other senators in the Ukraine Caucus to argue that Biden’s desire to see Shokin removed reflected official U.S. policy and was not a sign of personal corruption.

As Garcia spoke, a visibly upset and red-faced Johnson rose from his seat, approached Portman and whispered in his ear. Portman reacted impassively, but his comments did not appear to calm Johnson, who departed the floor for the Republican cloakroom moments later. Johnson, a fierce ally of Trump, said in October that he did not recall signing the letter.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the lead impeachment manager, addressed the other investigation that Trump wanted Zelensky to launch, saying the president floated a “very specific conspiracy theory” that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 despite there being no evidence to support the claim.

“This theory was brought to you by the Kremlin,” Schiff said. “So we’re not talking about generic interference . . . what Donald Trump wanted investigated or announced, this completely bogus, Kremlin-pushed conspiracy theory.”

Earlier, Garcia played clips of news interviews from FBI director Christopher A. Wray and Tom Bossert, a former homeland security aide at the White House, refuting the Ukraine interference theory.

Before the trial officially began Thursday afternoon, dozens of senators from both parties entered a secure facility in the Senate basement to view a classified document provided by Jennifer Williams, a national security adviser to Vice President Pence.

The document was made available under an agreement between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced Wednesday. The document had been previously submitted to the House Intelligence Committee.

Some senators spent only a few minutes in the facility; others stayed for the better part of an hour. Several Democrats emerged to say they didn’t understand why the document had been classified.

“I don’t believe it’s being withheld from the public for national security reasons. It may be withheld for political security reasons,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.).

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[WiseGirl]

[GreyhoundFan]

18 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Read what happened after this interview:

Pompeo needs to go.

[fraurosena]

Oh. I thought the defense would be today. Apparently it's already over...

Not that it's surprising. There is no real defending the indefensible. I love how the House Intelligence Committee is rebutting the defence's claims like this:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

3 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Oh. I thought the defense would be today. Apparently it's already over...

On our local news radio station, they were saying that Twitler was unhappy because his defense would be on a Saturday when fewer people would watch, so he directed them to only do a little today and save the "big stuff" for Monday.

[GreyhoundFan]

I wish the people of Iowa would vote Joni out:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[scoutsadie]

10 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Read what happened after this interview:

Pompeo needs to go.

I made a donation to my NPR member station today and noted that it was because MLK was a bad-ass who pushed him on his failure to support Masha Y.

Also, a friend of mine who works for State left me a vm today and promised if I called him back, he wouldn't yell at me or make me locate Ukraine on a map. Ha. I totally could!

[GreyhoundFan]

"Schiff ‘has not paid the price’ for impeachment, Trump says in what appears to be veiled threat"

Spoiler

President Trump escalated his attacks on Rep. Adam B. Schiff on Sunday, issuing what appears to be a veiled threat against the California Democrat one day before Trump’s team is expected to deliver the crux of its defense in the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history.

“Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man,” Trump tweeted Sunday morning. “He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!”

Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is the lead impeachment manager in the Senate trial.

Schiff responded in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” saying he believes Trump’s remarks were intended as a threat.

“This is a wrathful and vindictive president; I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,” Schiff said in the interview. “And if you think there is, look at the president’s tweets about me today, saying that I should ‘pay a price.’ ”

“Do you take that as a threat?” host Chuck Todd asked.

“I think it’s intended to be,” Schiff replied.

Trump’s targeting of Schiff comes as the president’s attorneys are readying to mount an aggressive defense on Monday.

Democrats are arguing that Trump withheld military aid and an Oval Office meeting to pressure Ukraine’s leaders into announcing investigations of his political rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden, who is a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.

The House impeached Trump in December on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress related to these allegations and his directive that his administration not cooperate with the House’s investigation.

In a two-hour presentation on Saturday, members of Trump’s legal team argued that the president had valid reasons for withholding the aid to Ukraine, and it sought to plant doubts about both the prosecutors’ case and Schiff.

But in arguing their case, Trump’s attorneys omitted facts, presented claims that lacked context or minimized evidence gathered by House investigators.

Democrats contend that Trump has continued to publicly solicit foreign interference in U.S. elections and that the integrity of the 2020 race is at risk. The president fired back Sunday by leveling the same accusation at his political opponents.

“The Impeachment Hoax is a massive election interference the likes of which has never been seen before,” he said in a tweet.

Some Republicans on Sunday defended Trump’s remarks about Schiff. In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said he was not troubled by Trump’s declaration that Schiff “has not paid the price.”

“I don’t think it’s a death threat. I don’t think he’s encouraging a death threat,” Lankford said.

Host Jake Tapper responded by saying that “people who are supporters of the president have heard his rhetoric and then actually tried to bomb and kill politicians and the media.”

This prompted Lankford to refer to the 2017 congressional baseball shooting that targeted Republicans and injured several people, including House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.).

“So to be able to say the president’s trying to be able to spur this on would be able to say Democrats were trying to spur on the killing” of Republicans, Lankford said.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who is also an impeachment manager, called Trump’s tweet about Schiff “absolutely unfortunate” and said the president has said “things that seem threatening to people” in the past.

“He really ought to get a grip and be a little more presidential,” she said on “State of the Union.”

In a tweet later Sunday morning, Trump also took aim at Todd, accusing the “Meet the Press” host of holding a “softball interview” with Schiff and “never even calling Shifty out on his fraudulent statement to Congress, where he made up ALL of the words of my conversation with the Ukrainian President!”

Both sides continue to spar over the question of whether the Senate trial will include witnesses. Some key Senate Republicans, already hesitant on the issue, became even more so over the weekend after Schiff referred to a CBS News report in which an anonymous Trump ally was quoted as having warned lawmakers, ‘Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.’ ”

Several of those GOP senators — including Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) — have criticized Schiff for referencing the report, maintaining that the White House has not threatened them to vote against calling witnesses.

Schiff on Sunday defended his remarks, arguing that they weren’t personal and were intended simply to highlight the challenge for Republican senators in demonstrating “moral courage to stand up to this president.”

“I want to acknowledge that, and I don’t want to acknowledge it in a way that is offensive to them, but I do want to speak candidly about it,” he said. “And if this weren’t an issue, there wouldn’t be an issue about calling witnesses. If we can’t even get the senators to agree to call witnesses in a trial, it shows you just how difficult that moral courage is.”

Another impeachment manager, Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), said on ABC News’s “This Week” that she continues to hope that members of the Senate will vote to call witnesses. She noted that she has been in the Senate chamber with senators for “some pretty long days” over the past week and that many of them have been taking notes on the proceedings.

“I would expect them to do what they have taken an oath and sworn that they would do,” Demings said. “I’m just not going to give up on the Senate, and I’m not going to draw any conclusions.”

Some Republicans, meanwhile, took to the Sunday shows to voice skepticism of the need for the trial to include witnesses.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) argued that Democrats have presented plenty of information already, little of which he said he found compelling. “We don’t need to prolong what’s already taken five months of the American people’s time,” Cotton said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

On “Meet the Press,” Schiff appeared to play down the significance of a potential Senate vote to acquit Trump, arguing that such a vote would be meaningless if no witnesses are allowed to be called.

“They don’t really contest the president’s scheme. … They just tried to make the case that you don’t need a fair trial here; you can make this go away,” Schiff said of the president’s legal team. “But look, if they’re successful of depriving the country of a fair trial, there is no exoneration.”

Harvard Law emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz, a member of Trump’s impeachment team, claimed Sunday that impeaching Trump based on the charges brought by the House would be unconstitutional because in his view, the charges do not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.

“Much of what was presented by the Democrats were not impeachable offenses — they were campaign ads designed to try to show that you should vote for a different candidate,” Dershowitz told “Fox News Sunday,” adding: “That’s fine. Let’s put it up to the voters.”

Dershowitz is expected to argue Monday on the Senate floor that the two articles represent “vague, open-ended criteria” rather than impeachable offenses. He also argues that the framers of the Constitution would agree with him, a claim that is disputed by Democrats and other legal scholars.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

If he believes this, he's the dumbest senator ever: "GOP senator: ‘Hopefully’ Trump will learn lessons from impeachment"

Spoiler

Republican Sen. Mike Braun on Sunday said he hopes the impeachment process will “be instructive” for President Donald Trump’s conduct if he’s acquitted by the Senate.

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Braun was grilled by host Chuck Todd on how Trump will react to beating articles of impeachment, which is seen as a near certainty in a Republican-controlled Senate.

"This president, as you know, he's going to take acquittal and think, 'I can keep doing this,'" Todd said.

"No, I don't think that," Braun replied. "Hopefully it'll be instructive."

"I think he'll put two and two together," the Indiana Republican added. "In this case, he was taken to the carpet."

Trump’s impeachment trial on charges that he abused of power by withholding military aid from Ukraine to pressure its government to investigate his political rivals and obstructed Congress could wind down as soon as this week should the Senate rebuffs Democratic calls for new witnesses, which would require at least four Republicans to break ranks.

Braun added that House Democratic impeachment managers, who ended their presentation Friday, “put together a broad, comprehensive case” but criticized it as “circumstantial in nature.”

Asked if he thinks Trump regrets what he did, Braun answered: "I think he’ll be instructed by what has occurred here and certainly any individual would want to avoid whatever might need to be modified to go through this again because the threat has already been out there that we might find something else to impeach on, which I think is a mistake because I think we need to get back to what most Americans are interested in: the agenda.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

I can't imagine what it must be like to be on the ramparts defending democracy with all your might whilst also dealing with your wife's cancer diagnosis. 

[front hugs > duggs]

And pancreatic at that.....devastating....

[GreyhoundFan]

From Dana Milbank: "Trump’s lawyers are absolutely entitled to their own facts"

Spoiler

For three days, impeachment managers presented the facts to the Senate. On Saturday, the president’s lawyers presented the alternative facts.

As outlined in two hours on the Senate floor, theirs is a world in which Ukraine interfered in the U.S. election in 2016; where the FBI and intelligence community are disreputable; where the United States, not Europe, gives Ukraine the bulk of its foreign aid; where there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine and where a “transcript” of President Trump’s call conclusively proves it; where the halt of military aid to Ukraine was routine, and where Ukrainian officials didn’t even know about it; where the president was barred from impeachment proceedings; and where Robert Mueller totally vindicated Trump.

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Moynihan was wrong. Very likely a majority of senators will, with their votes to acquit, conclude that Trump and his lawyers are perfectly entitled to their own facts.

Saturday’s opening arguments for Trump’s defense were, by Trumpian standards, tame. Senators, perhaps caught off guard by the sober presentation, were on their best behavior; I saw nobody doing crossword puzzles or sending S.O.S. signals.

There was familiar invective from Trump’s lawyers (“fake,” “blind drive to impeach,” “staged public hearings,” “secret hearings in the basement bunker,” “shell game,” “they are here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history"). But their arguments were surprisingly lawyerly, and they at least attempted to mount a serious defense of the president — a feat that filled White House Counsel Pat Cipollone with pride as he completed the second of Trump’s allotted 24 hours of defense. “You’ve heard you’re not going to hear facts from the president’s lawyers,” he said. “That’s all we’ve done.”

This was true — if you subscribe to Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” theory of epistemology.

Alternative Fact: “President [Volodymyr] Zelensky and high-ranking Ukrainian officials did not even know — did not even know — the security assistance was paused until the end of August, over a month after the July 25 call.”

Actual Fact: Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper testified that the Ukrainians were inquiring about the status of the security assistance on July 25.

Alternative Fact: “They kept telling you it was Russia alone that interfered in the 2016 election, but there is evidence that Ukraine also interfered.”

Actual Fact: “We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered,” said Trump’s FBI director, Christopher Wray.

Alternative Fact: The administration fought subpoenas because “the subpoenas were not authorized because there were no votes” to start an impeachment inquiry.

Actual Fact: The administration fought the subpoenas even after the formal vote to open the impeachment inquiry.

Alternative Fact: “The transcript shows that the president did not condition either security assistance or a meeting on anything.”

Actual Fact: The “transcript” is not an actual transcript but a partial reconstruction of the call by the White House. It includes the Trump phrase “do us a favor though” immediately following the Ukrainian president’s mention of military help and immediately before Trump’s request for investigations.

Alternative Fact: “They design[ed] a mechanism here where the president was locked out and denied the ability to cross-examine witnesses” in the House impeachment.

Actual Fact: Cipollone declined an invitation to participate in the House impeachment hearings before the Judiciary Committee.

Alternative Fact: “The Democrats’ allegation that the president engaged in a quid pro quo is unfounded.”

Actual Fact: Told that what he was describing was a quid pro quo, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said at a news conference: “We do that all the time.”

Alternative Fact: “The Mueller Report … after $32 million and roughly 500 search warrants, determined that there was no collusion.”

Actual Fact: “We did not address ‘collusion,’ which is not a legal term,” Mueller testified.

There were other, innuendo-based arguments Saturday that will likely reappear in Trump’s lawyers’ arguments over the next two days: Trump had good reason not to trust the intelligence community, Ukraine is a mess, Adam Schiff is an incorrigible liar, and the whistleblower is in cahoots with Joe Biden. But Saturday was the factual portion — or what passes for it.

It was close enough to reality for Trump’s Republican defenders in the House. Speaking to reporters after Saturday’s argument ended, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who previously said that, “when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is,” declared that Trump’s lawyers had “annihilated” and performed a “surgical dissection” of the case for impeachment.

“Totally eviscerated,” said Rep. Lee Zeldin (N.Y.).

“Completely destroyed,” said Rep. Mike Johnson (La.).

“Completely shred[ded],” Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) contributed.

In the alternative-factual world they call home, this is probably true.

 

[fraurosena]

Yup.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good analysis: "Assessing the Trump team’s 6-point impeachment defense"

Spoiler

President Trump’s legal team in his impeachment trial began its defense on Saturday morning with a slightly more lawyerly version of one of Trump’s favorite tweets: read the transcript.

“They didn’t talk a lot about the transcript of the call,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone told the assembled senators in the Senate chambers at the outset of his remarks, “which I would submit is the best evidence of what happened on the call.”

That line, in itself, is a neat encapsulation of Trump’s case. It focuses on the rough transcript of Trump’s July 25, 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as exculpatory — while also asserting that the central issue is the call itself. It isn’t. The presented evidence shows a broad campaign of pressure of which that call was only one part, a campaign that is harder for Trump’s team to refute.

Cipollone soon transitioned to Michael Purpura, the deputy White House counsel. Purpura began by articulating a six-point defense that his team would offer during its presentation. Those six points, like Cipollone’s claim about the rough transcript: carefully worded, constrained — and often not hard to undercut.

Here’s each point as he stated it, and what the available evidence says about the claims.

The Trump team’s case

1. “The transcript shows that the president did not condition either security assistance or a meeting on anything. The paused security assistance funds aren’t even mentioned on the call.”

Remember what’s at issue here. Trump, on the July 25 call, asked Zelensky to launch two investigations, one focused on former vice president Joe Biden and unfounded allegations about his actions in Ukraine in 2016, and another centered on a bizarre conspiracy theory in which Ukraine is implicated in 2016 election interference. To compel Ukraine to launch those investigations, the Democrats argue, Trump delayed a White House meeting sought by Zelensky and withheld military and security aid scheduled to be sent to Ukraine.

Purpura’s right that the transcript doesn’t include any conditioning of the requested investigations on a meeting or aid during the call. What he doesn’t mention, though, is evidence sitting just outside that call which makes clear that Trump’s team made that conditionality clear to Zelensky’s team.

Trump spoke with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland that morning. Sondland then reached out to then-Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker, asking Volker to call him. Shortly after, Volker sent a text message to Andriy Yermak, a key adviser to Zelensky, with whom he’d earlier had lunch in Kyiv.

“Heard from White House,” Volker wrote. “[A]ssuming President [Zelensky] convinces trump he will investigate / ‘get to the bottom of what happened’ in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington.”

Volker then sent a message to Sondland.

“[H]ad a great lunch with Yermak and then passed your message to him,” Volker wrote. “He will see you tomorrow, think everything in place.”

Sondland testified about that message, which he said, “likely I would have received that from President Trump.”

During the call, Zelensky at one point seems to make explicit reference to the investigate-for-visit mandate mentioned by Volker.

“I also wanted to thank you for your invitation to visit the United States, specifically Washington D.C.,” Zelensky said, according to the rough transcript. “On the other hand, I also wanted (to) ensure you that we will be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation.”

No, Trump didn’t say that Zelensky wasn’t getting a meeting without the investigation. He didn’t need to. His team had already passed that along.

To Purpura’s second point, it is true that there was no mention of the aid during the call. We’ll get to that in a moment.

2. “President Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have repeatedly said that there was no quid pro quo and no pressure on them to review anything.”

In its careful wording, this is also true. Zelensky, sitting with Trump in a meeting on Sept. 25, was asked if he felt pressure from Trump in the call. After indicating that he didn’t want to get involved in the politics of the question, he conceded that he hadn’t felt pushed.

That admission, as he obviously understood, was what Trump wanted to hear. Trump quickly jumped on it: “In other words, no pressure,” he said, paraphrasing his counterpart.

David Holmes, a political staffer at the embassy in Ukraine, explained why he felt that Ukraine would not only have felt pressure but also pressure not to concede that they were being pressured. He was speaking about how Ukraine would have tried to navigate the hold on aid, but the point is broader.

“Whether the hold, the security assistance hold, continued or not, Ukrainians understood that that’s something the president wanted, and they still wanted important things from the president,” Holmes said. “So I think that continues to this day. I think they’re being very careful. They still need us now going forward.”

Purpura suggested that treating Zelensky’s claims with skepticism was akin to reading Zelensky’s mind. Taking the assertions of Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials at immediate face value, though, offers no more assurance of yielding an accurate interpretation.

This conflict gets to the heart of what Trump is alleged to have done. Either the United States has the ability to exert pressure on Ukraine or it doesn’t. Trump asks that we assume there is no implicit pressure at play and that everything that occurred is no more complicated than the most basic reading of events. That request can be evaluated on its own merits.

3. “President Zelensky and high-ranking Ukrainian officials did not even know — did not even know the security assistance was paused until the end of August. Over a month after the July 25th call.”

Cipollone and Purpura lamented that the House impeachment managers had failed to offer evidence exculpating the president, as though prosecutors are generally in the habit of doing so. Included in that overlooked evidence were statements from administration officials indicating that Ukraine and Zelensky weren’t aware of the hold on aid — introduced in early July — until late August when Politico broke the story. Several of those who testified said that this was the first point at which the issue was raised by their contacts in Ukraine.

Trump’s lawyers mostly skipped the evidence that contradicts this, of course. Emails sent on July 25 itself to staffers at the Defense Department indicated that the Ukrainian Embassy was aware of the hold, which had been announced within the administration a week earlier. A former senior Ukrainian official, working in Zelensky’s administration at that point, indicated that she was aware of the hold by late July. Catherine Croft, a State Department official, testified that she was surprised at how quickly her Ukrainian colleagues learned about the hold soon after it was known in the administration, though she didn’t know when precisely that occurred, as Purpura pointed out.

Croft made another point, though, which directly undercuts a claim made by Purpura. “Common sense comes into play right here,” he said at one point. “The top Ukrainian officials said nothing, nothing at all to their U.S. counterparts during all of these meetings about the pause on security assistance. But then, boom, soon as the Politico article comes out, suddenly, in that first intense week of September, in George Kent’s words, security assistance was all they wanted to talk about."

“What must we conclude if we’re using our common sense?” Purpura continued. “That they didn’t know about the pause until the Politico article on August 28. No activity before. Article comes out, flurry of activity.”

During her testimony, Croft explained why Ukraine wouldn’t want to focus on the aid while it wasn’t publicly known.

“If this were public in Ukraine, it would be seen as a reversal of our policy and would, just to say sort of candidly and colloquially, this would be a really big deal, it would be a really big deal in Ukraine, and an expression of declining U.S. support for Ukraine,” she said in her closed-door testimony. “As long as they thought that in the end the hold would be lifted, they had no reason for this to want to come out.”

What Purpura also ignored, of course, is that Sondland himself had informed Yermak on Sept. 1 that the aid would be held until the investigations were launched. He did so of his own volition, as he testified, but it was nonetheless the case that an official close to Trump did inform Ukraine that there was a quid pro quo on this point.

4. “Not a single witness testified that the president himself said that there was any connection between any investigations and security assistance, a presidential meeting or anything else.”

This is a valid point. While several witnesses linked Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani specifically to a meeting-for-investigations qui pro quo, no one testified that they’d been told that Trump made that conditionality clear. The only person who did make such a link was acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney during a news conference in October. But, of course, Mulvaney declined to actually testify.

Trump’s team, justifiably, has long focused on the extent to which Trump himself has been kept at a distance from the allegations. There’s little question that, to some extent, that distance was intentional. Trump told Sondland, Volker and then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry to work with Giuliani, for example, just as he told Zelensky he’d put him in contact with his personal attorney. Giuliani himself told the New York Times and other outlets that he was working on Trump’s political behalf in seeking the investigations. Giuliani was also at the center of an effort to link a White House meeting to the announcement of investigations in a series of interactions in early August.

The link from Trump to those efforts seems obvious, but that it isn’t obvious — at least with the available testimony — retains some aspect of reasonable doubt.

5. The security assistance flowed on Sept. 11, and a presidential meeting took place on Sept. 25 without the Ukrainian government announcing any investigations.

To undercut the idea that the aid or the meeting were conditioned on the announcement of investigations, Trump’s team (as his allies have done in the past) noted that Ukraine got both the aid and the meeting. The aid was, in fact, released on Sept. 11, 2019. The two presidents did meet, in fact, two weeks later.

However.

That aid was only released after attention had been drawn to its being withheld publicly. House Democrats had launched an investigation into the hold. The Washington Post editorial board had explicitly connected the hold to the desired investigations. Trump had already been briefed on a complaint from an anonymous whistleblower in which that connection was mentioned as part of a broad campaign to pressure Ukraine. Trump had faced questions from both Sondland and political allies, like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), about why the aid was being held and if it was being held to pressure Ukraine. The tables, in other words, had turned: now Trump faced significant pressure to release the aid.

Stack those factors against the administration’s stated rationale for the hold. That rationale centers on Trump’s purported concerns about Ukrainian corruption, concerns that weren’t manifested within the administration through any obvious process of evaluation and which for vague reasons were coincidentally alleviated just as all of this external pressure had come into play.

Another salient factor? On Sept. 11, Zelensky was still planning to participate in an interview with CNN in which he’d informed Trump’s team he would announce the investigations. That interview was only canceled once the Ukraine question broke into public view.

The claim that Zelensky got his desired meeting in late September is a simply ridiculous claim. What Zelensky wanted was a one-on-one demonstration that Ukraine is a close ally of the United States by having Zelensky and Trump sit down in the Oval Office. He wanted that photo of Trump and himself shaking hands, something he could present to the world — and Russia — as a statement of the big stick he was able to carry.

On Sept. 25, that’s not what he got. He got a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. That same day, Trump also sat down with leaders from Japan and El Salvador. The day prior, he’d similarly met with leaders from India, the United Kingdom and Iraq. Claiming that the Sept. 25 meeting was what Zelensky sought is like claiming that dancing with a partner once at a party is equivalent to getting engaged.

From the time that Zelensky won his election in April of last year through the end of last year, about a dozen other foreign leaders got precisely the sort of meeting Zelensky sought; among them was Russia’s foreign minister.

6. The Democrats’ blind drive to impeach the president does not and cannot change the fact, as attested to by the Democrats own witnesses, that President Trump has been a better friend and stronger supporter of Ukraine than his predecessor.

This is a subjective claim, but it’s true that, in prior years, Trump had authorized aid to Ukraine including military aid which hadn’t been provided under Barack Obama.

It raises an important question, though: Why did that support collapse in 2019? House Democrats argue that there’s an obvious answer. In April 2019, Joe Biden announced his candidacy. On the morning of July 25, Trump watched a Fox News broadcast showing Biden leading Trump in 2020 polling.

We’re asked to believe that this was not a consideration for a president who has tweeted scores of times about his political opponents. We’re asked to believe instead that he was focused on corruption in Ukraine, something he’d tweeted about only once before early September — and only then in the context of Joe Biden.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess the House impeachment managers didn't dumb it down enough for the repugs: "Republicans decry impeachment as ‘boring’ in an attempt to swiftly dismiss charges against Trump"

Spoiler

Republicans adopted a new defense strategy this past week at President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate: boredom.

A top White House aide called the trial “unwatchable,” Trump’s campaign manager compared the proceedings to watching paint dry, and several Republican senators entertained distractions while downplaying the three-day prosecution as repetitive and unexciting. “They’re really not bringing forth new information,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said of the House impeachment managers Friday.

“I’ve not heard anything new,” added Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.).

Barrasso and Scott were among 53 Republican senators who voted 10 times last week to block new evidence and witness testimony, effectively stripping the proceedings of potential novelty and allowing Trump’s allies to publicly portray the trial as uninteresting and unimportant.

It’s a defense strategy aimed at convincing the public that the third impeachment trial in U.S. history is not worth their time while avoiding substantive questions about Trump’s alleged misconduct, said Heather Cox Richardson, who teaches history at Boston College.

“It’s definitely a strategy to try to get people to not pay attention,” she said. “One of the reasons they’re saying ‘This is stupid and boring’ is because they don’t want people to watch.”

Some lawmakers have openly shown their disdain for the process — reading books, playing with children’s toys, filling out crossword puzzles or wandering from the Senate floor as House Democrats made their case for removing Trump from office.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has also taken care to ensure that it makes for unexciting television, at least in terms of production values. Often just one oddly tilted camera angle is used by cameras controlled by the Senate, since McConnell has not allowed outside television crews or photographers into the chamber.

During breaks in the proceedings, several Republicans told reporters they were unimpressed by the evidence — while sidestepping the fact that they had played a central role in blocking key witnesses and documents from being introduced.

Republicans’ “nothing new” mantra underscores the hear-no-evil approach some are taking as they attempt to defend Trump from charges of high crimes and misdemeanors. The approach also foreshadows the difficulty Democrats will face in persuading a handful of Republicans to vote to extend the trial by allowing for critical documents and witnesses to be introduced.

That vote — expected to take place as soon as this week — could determine whether Trump’s impeachment trial with be the fastest in U.S. history, potentially ending without testimony from any witnesses.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said the effort to brand the trial as unimaginative and stale while denying access to potentially explosive evidence was “duplicitous.”

“To my Republican colleagues who’ve complained that there’s no new evidence in this impeachment trial: You voted more than ten times to block relevant witnesses and evidence,” she wrote Friday on Twitter. “Don’t bury your head in the sand and then complain that it’s dark.”

Republicans have struggled to mount a consistent defense of Trump over the past four months as he has faced allegations that he withheld congressionally approved military aid and a critical White House meeting from Ukraine as he pressured the Eastern European country to announce investigations into his political rivals.

Trump’s defenders have vacillated between criticizing the impeachment process in the House as unfair, complaining about the House’s month-long delay in transmitting the two impeachment articles to the Senate and attacking Democrats for not bringing forward new evidence once the Senate trial began.

Even as Trump has described his conduct with Ukraine as “perfect,” Republican lawmakers have only intermittently defended the president on the substance of the allegations against him.

Several Republicans have indicated that they have already made up their minds, publicly expressing their displeasure with having to sit silently while House Democrats made their case.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said she was “multitasking” by reading a book by Kimberley Strassel entitled “Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America” on the floor of the Senate on Thursday. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was spotted filling out a crossword puzzle and sketching an image of the U.S. Capitol. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) passed out fidget spinners to his GOP colleagues, allowing them to play with the spinning toys as the Democrats made their case. A few lawmakers have dozed off during the marathon trial sessions.

At one point during the proceedings, about a fifth of the seats in the chamber were empty, as several lawmakers left the Senate floor for lengthy breaks or Fox News interviews. While some Democrats have also stepped away from the Senate floor during the trial, most of the empty chairs belonged to Republicans.

Trump has echoed GOP claims that the trial is dull and repetitive.

“The Do Nothing Democrats just keep repeating and repeating, over and over again, the same old ‘stuff’ on the Impeachment Hoax,” he tweeted Friday.

Democrats used more than 21 hours, spread across three days, to lay out their case against Trump, using video evidence and impassioned rhetoric in an attempt to sway senators and the public to back the president’s removal. Some of the oratory performances by chief House impeachment manager Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) have gone viral online.

Some Republicans broke ranks from their colleagues, complimenting Democrats for putting forward a comprehensive case or saying that they had personally found the process interesting.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) said that while the House Democrats’ presentation was “at times repetitive,” he did not find it boring.

“I’d say this is important to the country, these proceedings, and it’s historic,” he said on Saturday. “I wouldn’t describe any of this as boring.”

GOP lawmakers have shrugged at each new piece of evidence that has come to light outside of the Senate trial process — such as an audio file obtained by ABC News of Trump urging the removal of his then-Ukraine ambassador — and several have said they are prepared to block efforts by Democrats to subpoena witnesses who could provide more context about Trump’s conduct.

Unless four Republicans vote with Democrats this week to compel testimony from key figures such as former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, the trial could quickly come to a close. That’s an outcome some Republicans are eagerly embracing, specifically using the boredom argument to make their case.

“I’ve been there for 36 hours, I’ve listened to all the testimony,” Paul said Saturday. “It’s repetitive and partisan and I don’t think anybody in Kentucky, my constituents, want the president to be impeached. They view this as a partisan witch hunt.”

Top White House aides have tried to downplay the trial as unimportant even as the president has shown his interest by tweeting hundreds of times about the proceedings.

Kellyanne Conway, a top White House aide, told reporters Friday that the trial was “sort of unwatchable,” comparing its television ratings to regular daytime programming.

“My own family member informed me that the soap operas on CBS went back on, much to her joy,” she said. “It just seems to me that many Americans are tuning out. . . . How many times can you say the same things over and over and over again, expecting people will still want to tune in?”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham also mentioned television ratings during an interview on Fox News.

“As you’ve seen, the ratings keep going down every day in terms of viewers,” she said. “I think the country is tired of this.”

Two-thirds of Americans overall say the Senate should call new witnesses to testify at the impeachment trial, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Friday. Only 27 percent of Americans say they believe the Senate should decide the impeachment case without calling new witnesses, the poll found.

But most Republican senators have expressed a reluctance about extending the trial. Several Republicans have argued that if the case was as ironclad as the House impeachment managers have claimed, there is no need to subpoena additional witnesses and documents.

GOP lawmakers were notably more engaged with the trial on Saturday as Trump’s legal team launched the start of its case. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), just appointed to the Senate, jotted notes, as did Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and others.

McConnell sat still, hands clasped, listening and staring at the speaker.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he noticed a “tonal” difference in the way Saturday’s session unfolded compared with the sessions where Democrats presented.

“If you looked around the Republican side, at least, particularly during [White House Counsel Pat] Cipollone’s presentation, I didn’t see anybody reading anything. I saw them sitting and listening and taking notes,” Hawley said. “Rapt attention.”

But Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Republicans’ public displays of boredom earlier in the week belied the private angst among GOP senators about the evidence presented by Democrats.

“I hear from individual Republicans about how troubled they are, that they really are becoming convinced” of Trump’s guilt, Brown said. “Those are private. The question is, how afraid are they of this president?”

 

[fraurosena]

23 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I guess the House impeachment managers didn't dumb it down enough for the repugs: "Republicans decry impeachment as ‘boring’ in an attempt to swiftly dismiss charges against Trump"

  Hide contents

Republicans adopted a new defense strategy this past week at President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate: boredom.

A top White House aide called the trial “unwatchable,” Trump’s campaign manager compared the proceedings to watching paint dry, and several Republican senators entertained distractions while downplaying the three-day prosecution as repetitive and unexciting. “They’re really not bringing forth new information,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said of the House impeachment managers Friday.

“I’ve not heard anything new,” added Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.).

Barrasso and Scott were among 53 Republican senators who voted 10 times last week to block new evidence and witness testimony, effectively stripping the proceedings of potential novelty and allowing Trump’s allies to publicly portray the trial as uninteresting and unimportant.

It’s a defense strategy aimed at convincing the public that the third impeachment trial in U.S. history is not worth their time while avoiding substantive questions about Trump’s alleged misconduct, said Heather Cox Richardson, who teaches history at Boston College.

“It’s definitely a strategy to try to get people to not pay attention,” she said. “One of the reasons they’re saying ‘This is stupid and boring’ is because they don’t want people to watch.”

Some lawmakers have openly shown their disdain for the process — reading books, playing with children’s toys, filling out crossword puzzles or wandering from the Senate floor as House Democrats made their case for removing Trump from office.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has also taken care to ensure that it makes for unexciting television, at least in terms of production values. Often just one oddly tilted camera angle is used by cameras controlled by the Senate, since McConnell has not allowed outside television crews or photographers into the chamber.

During breaks in the proceedings, several Republicans told reporters they were unimpressed by the evidence — while sidestepping the fact that they had played a central role in blocking key witnesses and documents from being introduced.

Republicans’ “nothing new” mantra underscores the hear-no-evil approach some are taking as they attempt to defend Trump from charges of high crimes and misdemeanors. The approach also foreshadows the difficulty Democrats will face in persuading a handful of Republicans to vote to extend the trial by allowing for critical documents and witnesses to be introduced.

That vote — expected to take place as soon as this week — could determine whether Trump’s impeachment trial with be the fastest in U.S. history, potentially ending without testimony from any witnesses.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said the effort to brand the trial as unimaginative and stale while denying access to potentially explosive evidence was “duplicitous.”

“To my Republican colleagues who’ve complained that there’s no new evidence in this impeachment trial: You voted more than ten times to block relevant witnesses and evidence,” she wrote Friday on Twitter. “Don’t bury your head in the sand and then complain that it’s dark.”

Republicans have struggled to mount a consistent defense of Trump over the past four months as he has faced allegations that he withheld congressionally approved military aid and a critical White House meeting from Ukraine as he pressured the Eastern European country to announce investigations into his political rivals.

Trump’s defenders have vacillated between criticizing the impeachment process in the House as unfair, complaining about the House’s month-long delay in transmitting the two impeachment articles to the Senate and attacking Democrats for not bringing forward new evidence once the Senate trial began.

Even as Trump has described his conduct with Ukraine as “perfect,” Republican lawmakers have only intermittently defended the president on the substance of the allegations against him.

Several Republicans have indicated that they have already made up their minds, publicly expressing their displeasure with having to sit silently while House Democrats made their case.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said she was “multitasking” by reading a book by Kimberley Strassel entitled “Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America” on the floor of the Senate on Thursday. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was spotted filling out a crossword puzzle and sketching an image of the U.S. Capitol. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) passed out fidget spinners to his GOP colleagues, allowing them to play with the spinning toys as the Democrats made their case. A few lawmakers have dozed off during the marathon trial sessions.

At one point during the proceedings, about a fifth of the seats in the chamber were empty, as several lawmakers left the Senate floor for lengthy breaks or Fox News interviews. While some Democrats have also stepped away from the Senate floor during the trial, most of the empty chairs belonged to Republicans.

Trump has echoed GOP claims that the trial is dull and repetitive.

“The Do Nothing Democrats just keep repeating and repeating, over and over again, the same old ‘stuff’ on the Impeachment Hoax,” he tweeted Friday.

Democrats used more than 21 hours, spread across three days, to lay out their case against Trump, using video evidence and impassioned rhetoric in an attempt to sway senators and the public to back the president’s removal. Some of the oratory performances by chief House impeachment manager Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) have gone viral online.

Some Republicans broke ranks from their colleagues, complimenting Democrats for putting forward a comprehensive case or saying that they had personally found the process interesting.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) said that while the House Democrats’ presentation was “at times repetitive,” he did not find it boring.

“I’d say this is important to the country, these proceedings, and it’s historic,” he said on Saturday. “I wouldn’t describe any of this as boring.”

GOP lawmakers have shrugged at each new piece of evidence that has come to light outside of the Senate trial process — such as an audio file obtained by ABC News of Trump urging the removal of his then-Ukraine ambassador — and several have said they are prepared to block efforts by Democrats to subpoena witnesses who could provide more context about Trump’s conduct.

Unless four Republicans vote with Democrats this week to compel testimony from key figures such as former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, the trial could quickly come to a close. That’s an outcome some Republicans are eagerly embracing, specifically using the boredom argument to make their case.

“I’ve been there for 36 hours, I’ve listened to all the testimony,” Paul said Saturday. “It’s repetitive and partisan and I don’t think anybody in Kentucky, my constituents, want the president to be impeached. They view this as a partisan witch hunt.”

Top White House aides have tried to downplay the trial as unimportant even as the president has shown his interest by tweeting hundreds of times about the proceedings.

Kellyanne Conway, a top White House aide, told reporters Friday that the trial was “sort of unwatchable,” comparing its television ratings to regular daytime programming.

“My own family member informed me that the soap operas on CBS went back on, much to her joy,” she said. “It just seems to me that many Americans are tuning out. . . . How many times can you say the same things over and over and over again, expecting people will still want to tune in?”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham also mentioned television ratings during an interview on Fox News.

“As you’ve seen, the ratings keep going down every day in terms of viewers,” she said. “I think the country is tired of this.”

Two-thirds of Americans overall say the Senate should call new witnesses to testify at the impeachment trial, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Friday. Only 27 percent of Americans say they believe the Senate should decide the impeachment case without calling new witnesses, the poll found.

But most Republican senators have expressed a reluctance about extending the trial. Several Republicans have argued that if the case was as ironclad as the House impeachment managers have claimed, there is no need to subpoena additional witnesses and documents.

GOP lawmakers were notably more engaged with the trial on Saturday as Trump’s legal team launched the start of its case. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), just appointed to the Senate, jotted notes, as did Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and others.

McConnell sat still, hands clasped, listening and staring at the speaker.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he noticed a “tonal” difference in the way Saturday’s session unfolded compared with the sessions where Democrats presented.

“If you looked around the Republican side, at least, particularly during [White House Counsel Pat] Cipollone’s presentation, I didn’t see anybody reading anything. I saw them sitting and listening and taking notes,” Hawley said. “Rapt attention.”

But Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Republicans’ public displays of boredom earlier in the week belied the private angst among GOP senators about the evidence presented by Democrats.

“I hear from individual Republicans about how troubled they are, that they really are becoming convinced” of Trump’s guilt, Brown said. “Those are private. The question is, how afraid are they of this president?”

 

Yeah, burning down the Constitution and killing democracy is sooo yawn-inducing.

/s

[fraurosena]

John Roberts Can Call Witnesses to Trump’s Trial. Will He?

Quote

An overwhelming number of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, believe the Senate should hear from relevant witnesses and obtain documents during President Trump’s impeachment trial. Striking new revelations about the president’s role in the Ukraine affair, as reported from an unpublished manuscript by John Bolton, underscore the need for his testimony and that of others.

Yet Republican members of the Senate have signaled that they intend to uphold Mr. Trump’s unprecedented decision to block all of this material.

But turns out they don’t get to make that choice — Chief Justice John Roberts does. This isn’t a matter of Democrats needing four “moderate” Republicans to vote for subpoenas and witnesses, as the Trump lawyers have been claiming. Rather, the impeachment rules, like all trial systems, put a large thumb on the scale of issuing subpoenas and place that power within the authority of the judge, in this case the chief justice.

Most critically, it would take a two-thirds vote — not a majority — of the Senate to overrule that. This week, Democrats can and should ask the chief justice to issue subpoenas on his authority so that key witnesses of relevance like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney appear in the Senate, and the Senate should subpoena all relevant documents as well.

The Senate rules for impeachment date back to 1868 and have been in effect since that time. They specifically provide for the subpoenas of witnesses, going so far in Rule XXIV as to outline the specific language a subpoena must use — the “form of subpoena to be issued on the application of the managers of the impeachment, or of the party impeached, or of his counsel.”

As you can see, there is no “Senate vote” requirement whatsoever in the subpoena rule. A manager can seek it on his own.

The rules further empower the chief justice to enforce the subpoena rule. Rule V says: “The presiding officer shall have power to make and issue, by himself or by the Secretary of the Senate, all orders, mandates, writs, and precepts authorized by these rules, or by the Senate, and to make and enforce such other regulations and orders in the premises as the Senate may authorize or provide.” The presiding officer, under our Constitution, is the chief justice. As such, the chief justice, as presiding officer, has the “power to make and issue, by himself,” subpoenas.

President Trump’s allies have tried to distort a separate rule (also still in effect), hoping that it could be stretched to say that a majority of senators can override the chief justice’s decision. Rule VII reads, in the relevant part: “the presiding officer on the trial may rule on all questions of evidence including, but not limited to, questions of relevancy, materiality, and redundancy of evidence and incidental questions, which ruling shall stand as the judgment of the Senate, unless some Member of the Senate shall ask that a formal vote be taken thereon, in which case it shall be submitted to the Senate for decision without debate.” So President Trump’s allies are hoping that last clause authorizes a majority of Senators to overrule the chief justice on matters including subpoena issuance.

But its plain text says otherwise. It’s carefully drawn to be about “questions of evidence”: whether, for example, a line of witness questioning is relevant or not. The issuance of a Rule XXIV subpoena, however, is not a question of evidence. In normal litigation, we’d call it a discovery question.

Whatever one calls it here, it simply isn’t an evidence question: It’s not about whether to admit into evidence a particular document, but about obtaining that document in the first place; and it’s not about whether a witness must answer a specific question, but about forcing that witness at least to show up. And that threshold question falls squarely under Rule V — meaning under the chief justice’s authority alone. And that’s why the Senate, despite outlining the rules for subpoenas, never made its subpoena rules governed by Rule VII.

If there were any doubt, recall the language of the Constitution, which orders that, in an impeachment trial of the president, “the Chief Justice shall preside.” To “preside” is not a merely symbolic role; it can mean, just as it meant during President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, to be asked to make a range of actual rulings, including ones on which the chief justice is not merely the first word but also the last.

There’s a reason that, to our knowledge, no chief justice presiding over a president’s impeachment trial has had to confront precisely this issue before: No president has tried to hide all of the facts from Congress before. To be sure, previous presidents facing the prospect of impeachment — like Presidents Nixon and Clinton — have been accused of failing to share all of the information sought from them. But none ever vowed, as Mr. Trump has, to continue “fighting all the subpoenas” regardless of their particular validity. Ultimately, some accommodation was reached in previous impeachment inquiries as to the scope of information provided — including, for Mr. Clinton’s impeachment trial, an eventual agreement on witness testimony. If Chief Justice Roberts is being asked to answer difficult questions, it is a direct result of President Trump’s scorched-earth approach to congressional oversight.

The framers’ wisdom in giving this responsibility to a member of the judiciary expected to be apolitical and impartial has never been clearer. With key Republican senators having told the American people that they prejudged the case against President Trump before it began and even working with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to build the very defense for which they’re supposed to be the audience, the notion that they’re doing the “impartial justice” they’ve sworn to do is very much in question.

The Democrats’ impeachment managers should immediately ask the chief justice to issue subpoenas for key witnesses and documents, insisting that the Senate rules make him and him alone the decision maker about whether to “make and enforce” those subpoenas. That’s his prerogative — and his responsibility, one he can’t simply shift to the senators as permitted for evidentiary questions under the Rule VII carve-out.

What happens next won’t be totally within Democrats’ or the chief justice’s control. As Representative Adam Schiff acknowledged Thursday, the chief justice can decide evidence questions like executive privilege, but his determinations can be overruled by a majority of senators.

Likewise, when witnesses and documents arrive at the Senate, if questions arise about actual evidentiary rulings — like whether Mr. Bolton or Mr. Mulvaney can be forced to answer particular questions — a majority of senators can, under Rule VII, overrule the chief justice. But the first step is getting them to the Senate in the first place.

There’s icing on this cake. The special rules for Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial drafted by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, establish certain obstacles for witness testimony, requiring a deposition first and only then a Senate vote on whether to allow the witness to testify. But those rules apply only to a particular category of witnesses — those called “if the Senate agrees” to them. They manifestly don’t apply when it’s the chief justice who orders witnesses to appear.

Mr. McConnell’s rules separately say that the Senate shall debate “whether it shall be in order to consider and debate under the impeachment rules any motion to subpoena witnesses or documents.” That language cannot restrict Rule V’s pre-existing empowerment of the chief justice to issue subpoenas. To amend Rule V requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate, something Mr. McConnell didn’t get. That is presumably why the rules speak only to whether the Senate should subpoena witnesses or documents — but do not restrict the chief justice’s ability to issue subpoenas under his Rule V authority.

And that’s precisely what the Democrats must ask him to do — now.

 

How much of a political conservative is Justice Roberts?

[47of74]

Ha

Quote

Republican Sen. Mike Braun on Sunday said he hopes the impeachment process will “be instructive” for President Donald Trump’s conduct if he’s acquitted by the Senate.

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Braun was grilled by host Chuck Todd on how Trump will react to beating articles of impeachment, which is seen as a near certainty in a Republican-controlled Senate.

"This president, as you know, he's going to take acquittal and think, 'I can keep doing this,'" Todd said.

"No, I don't think that," Braun replied. "Hopefully it'll be instructive."

Tell ya what Mikey.  If you actually believe that horseshit I've got this for sale.

I can do cash or paypal.

[fraurosena]

Holy shit, guys! Dutch media are reporting that Bolton's manuscript has been leaked and he's admitting the Ukraine quid pro quo!

I'm off to find more info. BRB.

Trump, of course, is denying the hell out of it.