Hearings about public opinion, not impeachment
The Donald Trump hearings grind on to their inevitable end. Regardless of what they hear in evidence, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives will vote to impeach the U.S. president. Regardless of what they hear in evidence, the Republican majority in the Senate will vote to acquit him.
In that sense, the public hearings now on before the House intelligence committee are literally a show trial. They are not designed to elicit new information. Virtually everything that has been revealed in these hearings to date was already known. Rather they are designed to influence public opinion. Prior to the 2020 presidential election, the Democrats hope to show Americans that Trump is unfit for a second term.
Conversely, the Republicans hope to show Americans that the accusations against the president are political sour grapes from a party that never accepted Trump’s 2016 victory. Each side has some merit. Trump can be outrageous. He is a boor and a groper. His falsehoods are legion. His idiosyncratic foreign policy, while nowhere near as bad as that of George W. Bush (remember Iraq), has played havoc with U.S. allies.
Trump’s attempt to have Ukraine launch a corruption investigation into former U.S. vice-president Joe Biden, a political rival, is a step too far.
But the Republicans are right when they accuse the Democrats of overreach. By their actions, the Democrats have made it clear that they will not be satisfied until Trump is impeached for something.
They tried and failed to tie him to Russia’s alleged attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Now, they are accusing him of extorting Ukraine’s new government by threatening to deny it military aid unless it launched an investigation into Biden.
That Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Biden is beyond dispute. It is spelled out in the transcript, released by the White House, of a July 25 telephone call between the two presidents.
“I would like you to do us a favour,” Trump said to Zelenskiy. That favour had two parts: First, an investigation into Ukraine’s alleged involvement — against Trump — in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and second, an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter. When the elder Biden was U.S. vice-president dealing with Ukraine, his son was a director of a Ukrainian energy company accused of corruption.
In the July 25 telephone conversation, Trump also makes it clear that Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer and former New York mayor, was to be considered point man on these investigation requests. In that call, the U.S. president didn’t say how he would respond if Zelenskiy didn’t do him these favours. But at the impeachment hearings this week, U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland said Guiliani told him that two requests from Kyiv were contingent on Ukraine’s co-operation in this regard: a future telephone call between the two presidents and a face-to-face meeting in the oval office.
Sondland said that no one explicitly told him that delivery of a stalled military aid package to Ukraine was linked to the investigations requested by Trump. But he said he assumed this was the case. Incidentally, the aid package was eventually delivered even though Zelenskiy did not announce the investigations Trump wanted.
But these are mere details in this very political exercise, where each side accuses the other of dark motives.
Polls suggest support for impeachment has dropped slightly since the hearings began. If the Democrats want to prevail in this show trial, they will have to do better.