Probe tests Republicans’ alliance with president
One Republican WASHINGTON hadn’t read the whistle-blower’s complaint. Another called President Donald Trump’s conversation with the Ukraine leader “thin gruel” for any impeachment effort. A third said the whole thing was “blown way out of proportion.”
And yet, as more details emerged about what the president said and the efforts to shield it from view, Republicans were straining Thursday under the uncertainty of being swept up in the most serious test yet of their alliance with the Trump White House.
The quickly moving events
caught Republicans off stride. While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stayed silent throughout the day, other Republicans easily defended the president and some simply shrugged it off.
“It’s just the president being President Trump,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
But amid the jumble were signals, ever so slight, that the tumult of the Trump presidency may have entered a new phase for the party that’s being defined, enthusiastically for some, reluctantly for others, by his tenure.
“We owe people to take it seriously,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a onetime Trump rival who is now member of the Intelligence Committee.
“Right now, I have more questions than answers,” he said. “The complaint raises serious allegations, and we need to determine whether they’re credible or not.”
Others past and potentially future presidential hopefuls, Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, also voiced cautious concern in recent days with the same term: “troubling.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the president engaged in nothing short of a “cover-up” as Democrats turned their laser focus on the Ukraine matter as central to their impeachment probe. Thursday brought striking new revelations about the extent to which the White House sought to “lock down” Trump’s call.
One certainty was that Congress and the White House are now squaring off for a rare, if not historic, impeachment investigation that will consume both sides and deepen the political divide ahead of the 2020 election.
Pelosi called it a “sad week” in which she, siding with the vast majority of House Democrats, dropped her reluctance to launch an impeachment inquiry of the president.
“This is nothing that we take lightly,” she said.
Pelosi read from the whistle-blower’s declassified complaint of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after he asked him to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
As the House plunges into an impeachment inquiry, Republican leaders found themselves once again unable to strike a consensus in the face of extraordinary actions coming from the White House that now seem the norm.
McConnell opened the Senate without mentioning the whistle-blower’s complaint and declined to engage when reporters asked about it in the halls.
The House Republican leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, defended the White House decision to “lock down” the details of Trump’s call by putting all the records of it on a separate computer system.
“Could I see why you’d want to put it on a more secure server?” McCarthy asked. “I think in the world of technology today, yeah, people should secure what’s going forward.”
The defense of the separate computer system at the White House was striking for Republicans who joined Trump in pursuing information on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server during her time as secretary of state.
Yet the restraint being shown by other Republicans gave nod to the seriousness of the situation and what is yet to come in the impeachment inquiry.
“There are a lot of questions, absolutely,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.