The White House offers no substantive defense
The Trump administration has attacked the impeachment process as partisan and unprecedented, decried it for an alleged lack of due process, and complained about the secretive (or public) nature of the hearings.
What it hasn’t done is make a meaningful argument rebutting the charges that President Donald Trump misused his office in a bid to undermine a potential opponent in next year’s election.
Today looks like another missed opportunity. The House Judiciary Committee will take up a report from the Intelligence Committee stating that Trump withheld much-needed military aid to Ukraine to pressure its president to make a public announcement that his government would investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. The report also accuses Trump of obstructing justice by withholding documents and pressuring officials not to testify.
And what will Trump’s defense be? More of the same, apparently. This week, the White House said it would not provide any testimony as the Judiciary Committee takes up the question of impeachment.
Instead, the president’s backers in the House have released their own report that reads, well, a lot like Trump’s complaints. The president did nothing wrong, it asserts. The Democrats are trying to undo the 2016 election. The firsthand accounts of career diplomats, a senior Trump political appointee and a highly decorated Army officer are dismissed as conjecture and hearsay.
The absence of Team Trump at today’s hearing is a pretty damning argument in itself. The administration keeps attacking the process as one-sided and then declining invitations to participate in it.
Two decades ago, when President Bill Clinton was the subject of an impeachment process, he sent lawyers to argue his case, first before the House
Judiciary Committee and then later to the Senate floor.
The Clinton lawyers were nothing if not ... lawyerly. The charge that Clinton had committed perjury before a grand jury was easy to swat down because the president had (finally) told the truth before that grand jury, admitting to an affair with a White House intern. But the obstruction of justice case against Clinton required more effort. His lawyers gave it the serious reply it deserved, rebutting it in part by noting the preponderance of testimony that did not support the charge.
The charges against Trump are more grave than a cover-up of a presidential tryst. He stands accused of no less than undermining America’s national security interests — of holding up aid to a U.S. ally under attack from Vladimir Putin’s Russia — just so he could put the squeeze on that ally to do his political dirty work.
This serious charge deserves a serious response.
We have not heard it yet. When the reaction consists primarily of namecalling and tweeting and denouncing and deflecting, it’s hard to avoid concluding that the White House has no substantive defense to offer.