That’s not how this works

Speaking of pleading not guilty by reason of changing the subject—which is Donald Trump’s defense in the impeachment inquiry—let us take notice of the oft-unnoticed Republican congressman from the 1st District of eastern and north-central Arkansas.

His name is Rick Crawford. He is a former rodeo and radio announcer. He is an efficient regurgitator of Trumpian talking points, as his appearance last weekend on Talk Business and Politics attested.

He sits on the now-key House Intelligence Committee, which is not to say that he will be deciding on Trump’s complicity or lack thereof in Ukrainian and attendant matters. He already has decided all of that, as he related in the television interview.

He has already found his president not guilty by reason of changing the subject.

I contrast Crawford’s view with the latest glimpse of Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s inconsistent tendency toward independent thinking and mild partisan transcendence.

Asked last week about Trump’s conversation with the Ukrainian president, Hutchinson said the president’s words were ill-advised and warranted looking into further. Then he left the continent on a trade trip, having made cautiously expressed objectivity seem like statesmanship.

Crawford got asked if the actions cited in the Trump matter rose to the level of impeachment. The right answer to that isn’t yes or no; it’s that they rise to the level of investigation, which is all Democrats are doing.

But Crawford’s answer was a humdinger.

He said Trump proved his innocence by releasing the “transcript” of the telephone conversation.

That is to say Crawford changed the subject from the central issue of what the president said to the supposedly prevailing fact that the president voluntarily released a version of what he had said.

By Crawford’s reckoning, any criminal suspect who confesses is therefore innocent by confessing. After all, why would one confess if one had something to hide?

I don’t know … as a tactic maybe, seeking to get out ahead of bad information that was inevitably coming, seeking to sanitize that information with the help of members of Congress who’d help him change the subject back home.

Furthermore, the White House did not release any “transcript.” It released a summary said to be an approximation.

And the summary did not exonerate anybody. Nor did it incriminate anybody. What it did was invite reasonable investigatory suspicion, which is our current status.

By releasing information that he had asked for a campaign favor from a foreign leader—and having done so at the very time his administration was holding up authorized military aid to Ukraine—Trump was proving nothing other than the wisdom of Miranda rights.

Then, in the Talk Business interview, Crawford got asked a perfectly logical follow-up: Did further worthy questions arise from the whistleblower’s allegation that White House officials treated the transcript of that conversation abnormally, sending it to super-secret coding so that the usual access to it would be restricted?

Crawford proceeded to respond vigorously to a question that had not been asked. He said the real abuse was committed by the whistle-blower in filing a complaint that was secondhand (as it was, by the whistle-blower’s ready admission, in some but not all cases).

Crawford said the complaint, as hearsay, wouldn’t be admissible in court. And he said the complaint seemed by its style to have been prepared by a law firm. And that, Crawford said, led him to wonder why a simple worker seeking to file a law-protected complaint would need a lawyer.

The question that he’d been asked—whether the White House’s handling of the record of the call commended further investigation … Crawford never got within a time zone of that.

And it’s not as if any of his subject-changing points were valid. Hearsay is usually not admissible in court, though it can be. But this wasn’t court. It wasn’t even an impeachment trial. It was the mere opening of an investigative trail.

Hearsay is what beginning an investigation is all about. It’s called a tip. It’s called detective work.

If the whistle-blower is making up what he says he heard, then a little investigative work and a couple of sworn statements would reveal that.

Anyway, the inspector general had considered the complaint and found it sufficiently credible for further investigation. That the whistle-blower openly acknowledged that parts of his complaint were secondhand helped to make him, by that restraint, credible.

For that matter, the whistle-blower’s complaint meshed with the account of the phone conversation that the White House subsequently released.

It’s like this: The whistle-blower said he’d heard that certain things had been said. Then the White House put out a report in which Trump said those very things. Then Crawford said the whistle-blower had no credibility.

Finally, if you were going to file a complaint against the president of the United States—especially this madly vindictive and law-flouting one—wouldn’t you want a lawyer, and a good one?