Impeachment Today: Drama, Confusion, & Inanity Kick Off Judiciary Hearings
The House Judiciary Committee hearings into impeachment are underway.
On Saturday the Democrats released a 55-page report defining offenses that warrant impeachment as they move forward with crafting articles of impeachment against President Trump.
The document, which was put together by congressional staff and counsel, covers the "constitutional grounds for presidential impeachment," including bribery, abuse of power, betrayal of the national interest and corruption, according to a summary.
The four key findings are:
President Trump abused the power of his office to pressure a foreign nation to interfere in US elections
The President withheld aid and a White House meeting to do so
This conduct undermined our national security
The President engaged in unprecedented obstruction of Congress to cover it up
Also under consideration will be an article of impeachment based on evidence of ten incidents of obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller report.
Republicans on the Judiciary Committee appear to have two tactics: denial and disruption.
“We demand an impeachment hearing without any criticism of the person being impeached” has yet to prove effective, but that hasn’t stopped the GOP from trying.
Here’s a snip from Laura Clawson’s commentary at Daily Kos:
Monday’s impeachment hearing opened with Barry Berke, the counsel for the Judiciary Committee Democrats, laying out the case for impeachment of Donald Trump over his efforts to extort Ukraine into election interference. At the end of Berke’s testimony, which was—it cannot be emphasized enough—a description of Donald Trump’s impeachable offenses, Republicans staged a giant hissy fit over Berke having criticized Trump.
Specifically, they said that part of Berke’s testimony “impugns the motives of the president and suggests he’s disloyal to his country, and those words should be stricken from the record and taken down.”
The White House legal team has declined to participate in the proceedings.
The White House occupant has been Rage Tweeting over the past two days: Sunday saw more than 100 missives. Not that Trump’s feeling defensive or anything.
Meanwhile, the GOP Counsel at the Judiciary Committee hearings is floundering:
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1204096820374384642?s=20
Looking forward to the Senate trial and, most importantly, the continuing loyalty of the trump base, we seem to be headed down a rathole of conspiracy theories aimed at confusing people into thinking that the Ukraine was responsible for interfering in the 2016 election.
As noted over the weekend at the Lawfare blog:
Writing in BuzzFeed News, reporter Ryan Broderick argued that that House Intelligence Committee hearings were really two hearings at once—one Democratic hearing focused on establishing the facts of the Ukraine scandal, and one Republican hearing “seek[ing] to create not just a counternarrative but a completely separate reality,” designed to produce “bite-size Facebook posts” and clips for Fox News.
Broderick explains how that “separate reality” depended on asking the witnesses questions designed to give airtime to discredited theories prominent in the far-right press, like the idea that the black ledger was falsified and released in order to discredit Manafort and thus the Trump campaign.
The most prominent of these theories—and perhaps the most absurd—involves the notion, referenced by Trump in his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that the Democratic National Committee server hacked by the Russian government in 2016 is a physical server that was removed to Ukraine in an effort to hide from the FBI the fact that Russia did not actually attack the DNC, because CrowdStrike—the cybersecurity company that initially investigated the hacking—is owned by a Ukrainian.
None of these assertions is true.
The challenge here is explaining that a conspiracy is not true without engaging with the factual claims that underpin it.
Shot:
https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1204098623665065984?s=20
Chaser:
https://twitter.com/matthewamiller/status/1204101276109299713?s=20
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