By MARSHA MERCER
For Democrats, the smoking gun arrived gift-wrapped
from the White House.
President Trump ordered notes of his phone call with
the president of Ukraine released Wednesday because, he said, they showed the
call was “innocent,” “wonderful” and “perfect.” Hogwash.
Trump told President Volodymyr Zelensky he needed “a
favor” and directed him to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, who
Trump believes his likely Democratic opponent in 2020, and his son, Hunter
Biden.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden
stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so
whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great,” Trump told
Zelensky, referring to Attorney General William Barr.
He also urged Zelensky to work more closely with his
personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani.
The United States has been “very, very good to
Ukraine,” Trump said, adding Ukraine hadn’t reciprocated.
At the time – July 25 -- Trump was holding up nearly
$400 million in military aid to Ukraine, although Zelensky did not know it.
There’s no explicit quid pro quo in the call, and
Trump insists he’s innocent and wanted only to investigate corruption. Most
Republicans on Capitol Hill are backing him up.
“Nothing (no-quid pro quo) burger,” Sen. Lindsey
Graham, Republican of South Carolina, tweeted, although Sen. Mitt Romney,
Republican of Utah, said the matter is “deeply troubling in the extreme.”
The five-page memo reconstructing the call provided a
picture of Trump’s misuse of his office for political gain.
The call came to light through news reports about a
secret whistleblower complaint in August by an intelligence officer. While Trump had promised an “unredacted
transcript” of the call, the notes contain ellipses indicating words left
out.
The call persuaded House Democrats who had
been on the fence it was time to begin the impeachment inquiry.
The complaint, unclassified and released Thursday by
the House Intelligence Committee, reports an “urgent concern” that Trump “is
using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in
the 2020 election.”
The complaint also reports the White House tried to
cover up the call.
“The actions of the Trump presidency have revealed the
dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal
of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday, announcing the official impeachment inquiry,
even before the notes and the complaint were released.
Trump’s defiant defense appears to be “I did it. So
what?”
As we know, Trump’s MO is to tar his rivals. Joe Biden
is the new Hillary Clinton, the 2016 presidential rival Trump labeled “crooked
Hillary.”
In a news conference Wednesday, Trump lobbed
unsubstantiated charges against the Bidens, as he has previously, claiming they
took $1.5 billion out of China. He also claimed several congressional Democrats
threatened to withhold funds from Ukraine.
Hunter Biden served on the board of a natural gas
company in Ukraine that was investigated by Ukrainian authorities, but he was
not accused of any wrongdoing.
As for impeachment: “It’s all a hoax, folks. It’s all
a big hoax,” Trump said. “Impeachment for that?”
Impeachment is serious business, a last resort used
only three times in American history.
The House draws up an
indictment, called Articles of Impeachment. A simple majority vote of the House
would send the indictment to the Senate for a trial presided over by the chief
justice of the Supreme Court. Two-thirds of the Senate must vote to convict and
remove the president from office.
The constitutional standard for impeachment is
“treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
These do not have to be violations of criminal laws,
but, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers: “offenses which
proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse
or violation of some public trust.”
Democrats have little time to make their case before
the end of the year. The danger for them is winning the battle but losing the
war. If the Republican-controlled Senate leaves Trump in office, he and his
supporters will celebrate his victory and vindication all the way to the polls
in November.
Impeachment now seems inevitable. It will be an ugly
spectacle, a mud bath from which no one will emerge clean. Even if he wins,
Trump will carry an indelible stain into history.
©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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