Loose ends entangle facts on eve of trial
Revelations from president’s side, House investigators add to impeachment drama.
By the time the Senate opened impeachment trials for Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, its members pretty well knew the facts of the accusations against the presidents. None of them needed to turn on The Rachel Maddow Show to learn things they did not already know. But as senators formally convened on Thursday as a court of impeachment in the case of Donald John Trump, new revelations were still emerging, and important questions remained unanswered. The latest interviews by Lev Parnas, the Soviet-born associate of Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, as well as documents released by House investigators, only reinforced the reality that there is more still to be learned.
None of it may matter to the outcome even if more information does present itself in the weeks to come. The quasi-jurors who swore an oath to do “impartial justice” for the most part have already signalled their partiality. And what has been documented so far gives a pretty clear picture of Mr Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine for incriminating information about his political rivals, whether it is cause for removing him from office or not.
Yet there are still so many loose threads to be pulled that the story feels incomplete. Did Mr Trump know “everything that was going on”, as Mr Parnas put it in an interview with The New York Times on the same day he appeared on Maddow’s MSNBC show? Was an American ambassador who had been targeted by Mr Trump really put under surveillance by an unstable associate of Mr Parnas, as text messages indicated?
Underscoring the fluidity of the story was the release on Thursday of a damning new report by the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO). The report concluded that the federal budget office, acting on Mr Trump’s orders, violated federal law by suspending security aid to Ukraine even as the president and his associates were pushing the former Soviet republic for help against Democrats. The accountability office’s finding would presumably be relevant in a trial turning in part on the suspended aid.
And the recent offer to testify by John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, who privately denounced the geopolitical “drug deal” orchestrated by Mr Trump’s other advisers, only underlines that many of the key players in the tale of intrigue have yet to publicly disclose what they know.
The missing information, like almost everything else in Washington these days, is seen through drastically different lenses depending on the viewer’s political perspective.
To Democrats, Mr Parnas’ revelations and Mr Bolton’s offer of testimony only bolster their argument for calling witnesses during the Senate trial, which will get under way in earnest on Tuesday. If the Republican majority led by Sen Mitch McConnell of Kentucky refuses, Democrats say, it will be perpetuating a cover-up on behalf of a corrupt president.
“Both the revelations about Mr Parnas and the GAO opinion strengthen our push for witnesses and documents in the trial,” said Sen Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
To Republicans, the latest claims and disclosures are evidence that House Democrats put together a slapdash investigation that was not thorough enough before they rushed to an ultimately partisan vote on the House floor. It is not the Senate’s job, Republicans say, to do what the House failed to do. Solomon Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel during the investigation that led to Mr Clinton’s impeachment and trial 21 years ago, said the House Democrats should have authorised an impeachment inquiry earlier and issued subpoenas to Mr Bolton and anyone else they wanted to question. “They wouldn’t be in this hot mess,” he said.
One way or the other, it is clear the Senate is opening a trial in a far different position than it did in 1868 when it determined Johnson’s fate or in 1999 when it considered charges against Mr Clinton, both of whom were ultimately acquitted.
The Johnson case turned largely on two allegations — that he improperly fired the secretary of war and that he maligned Congress in a series of speeches. In neither instance were the facts seriously in question, only the legitimacy of his actions.
With Clinton, every significant possible witness had been interviewed by the investigators of independent counsel Ken Starr before Congress took up the issue, and the question before the Senate was really about interpreting the facts and deciding whether they added up to high crimes worthy of removal from office.
With Mr Trump, there was no special prosecutor investigating the Ukraine matter, so it was left to the House itself to unearth the details of what happened. But the president refused to turn over documents and tried to block testimony by current and former advisers. That led Democrats to make the strategic decision not to wait for a prolonged court fight to force key witnesses like Mr Bolton to testify, reasoning that the evidence they had already turned up was enough to justify articles of impeachment.
But they said that decision should not stop the Senate from trying to get to the truth.
Still, there is risk involved for Democrats prosecuting the president. Mr Parnas in some ways mainly amplifies what is already known from other evidence and to the extent that he adds to the case against Mr Trump; his credibility could be attacked given that he has been indicted on campaign finance charges.
As for Mr Bolton, while he was described as critical of the Ukraine pressure campaign by other officials, it is not known whether he would implicate or exonerate the president himself. He left the White House on acrimonious terms and has criticised some of the president’s foreign policy decisions, but he has not become a Never Trumper-style critic.
Still, it may not make much of a difference in the end anyway. Most of the senators and most of the public seem to have made up their minds about Trump’s actions; from the time the House hearings started, polls showed Americans almost evenly divided and their views were not changed by the testimony one way or the other.