Two weeks of hearings by the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee produced a lot of bluster by Republican Congress members as well as Trump’s tweets and statements trying to distract from the truth laid out by witnesses from the State Department and the National Security Council. They confirmed that Trump not only pressed Ukraine’s president to order an investigation of Joe Biden but also pursued a debunked claim that it was the Ukraine, not Russia, that conspired with Democrats to throw the 2016 election..
Trump and his allies falsely claim that Biden, as vice president, stopped a potential prosecution of his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, by threatening to withhold a US government loan to Ukraine. Trump wanted to smear Joe Biden as corrupt. But Biden pushed for the ouster of an ineffective prosecutor, which was a policy of the US government and was coordinated with US allies, such as the European Union and International Monetary Fund. And the Ukrainian gas company was not under investigation at the time of Biden’s actions.
After Trump in mid-July ordered a pause in the distribution of $391 million in security assistance that Congress had appropriated, US officials in Kiev and D.C. scrambled to understand why the decision was made and sought to get it reversed before the authorization expired on Sept. 30.
Trump, in a July 25 phone call, stepped over the line when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “do us a favor” and investigate Biden, a potential rival in the 2020 election. Trump and his defenders have asserted this kind of “quid pro quo” is the normal give and take that takes place between governments.
Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, not only got Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to remove US Ambassador Marie Yovanovich because she wasn’t seen as a team player; Giuliani kept a back channel with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Ukraine special envoy Kurt Volker, who pressed the Ukrainian president to issue a statement that he was opening investigations into Biden and the 2016 election. The US aid and/or a White House meeting with Trump was the bait.
President Zelensky had finally caved to the pressure and scheduled an interview with CNN on Sept. 13, at which he was expected to make the announcement of the investigation. But a few days before the interview, the funds were released after pressure from Congress, and the interview was canceled.
Trump insists that the CrowdStrike, a company that investigated hacking of the Democratic National Committeer (DNC), took the server to Ukraine, where he said CrowdStrike’s primary owner is located. The theory is that Ukrainians hacked into the DNC network in 2016 and framed Russia for it.
In fact, CrowdStrike is based in California and is a publicly traded American company co-founded by US-born George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, who was born in Russia, is a US citizen with no connection to Ukraine, the company says. The DNC server data was copied and submitted to the FBI, the Washington Post reported.
The FBI and DNC disagree on whether the FBI requested access to the DNC’s servers. Former FBI director James B. Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the bureau made “multiple requests at different levels” to access the servers, but the DNC said the FBI never requested access. The DNC had CrowdStrike analyze its network and share findings with the FBI, which Comey called an acceptable substitute.
Cybersecurity expert Thomas Rid told the Post that “handing over the server” as Trump described could have destroyed evidence.
Thomas P. Bossert, Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said Sept. 29 that the president has been told the story is “completely debunked.” “The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go,” Bossert said on ABC’s “This Week.” “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”
But Trump won’t let it go. It is one of those lies that demonstrate his reckless disregard for the truth, which has led him to make more than 13,435 false or misleading statements, many of them repeated on multiple occasions, as of Oct. 9, according to the Post’s Fact Checkers.. That’s an average of almost 22 false claims daily this past fall.
Some Republicans are resorting to the fallback position that what Trump did may be wrong, but it does not call for his impeachment and removal from office. However, extortion is a form of bribery, which is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as an impeachable crime.
And there are plenty of other impeachable acts the House can list in the Articles of Impeachment. Among them are various efforts to obstruct justice, detailed in Robert Mueller’s report, as well as his obstruction of the oversight role of Congress.
Lawyers for the House of Representatives accused Trump of trying to “obstruct his own impeachment” by claiming the authority to block his advisers from cooperating with congressional investigations. The House Judiciary Committee is trying to secure testimony from former White House Counsel Don McGahn, as he testified in special counsel Mueller’s investigation, which laid out 10 instances of apparent obstruction of justice.
The House’s lawyers cited the current top White House counsel’s declaration that the Trump administration would refuse all cooperation with the House’s impeachment inquiry, calling it “illegitimate” and “invalid.” Trump directed McGahn not to comply, claiming his former senior advisers have “absolute immunity” from testifying before Congress.
On Nov. 25, a US District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson disagreed and ordered McGahn to comply with the subpoena, ruling that “no one is above the law,” but the decision was expected to be appealed by the Department of Justice.
Trump also has refused to allow his income tax returns to be released to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, as the law requires. (He also had promised before his election he would make the tax returns public.)
After the first week of hearings, an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted Nov. 16-17 found 70% of Americans think Trump’s request to a foreign leader to investigate his political rival was wrong, but only a slim majority, 51%, believe he should be impeached and removed from office. Most other polls appear to show Americans split over impeachment. On Nov. 26, after the second week of hearings, the average of polls reviewed by FiveThirtyEight showed 48.6% support impeachment and 44.1% don’t support it.
Impeachment probably will not result in the removal of Trump from office, unless voters put pressure on Republican senators who are the bulwark against the Democratic prosecution. Democrats need at least 20 Republican senators to vote to remove Trump.
If Republican senators choose to defend their president’s power grab against republican principals, Democrats should not only run on “normal” policy initiatives to improve health care, economic opportunities for the working class and building green infrastructure to address climate change, but Dems should also focus on taking back the Senate and the White House, and restoring the rule of law. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2019
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