A Watershed Day: Dems Lower The Boom, Repubs Regroup & Trump Squawks

SUSAN WALSH / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

It is a huge moment when Democrats and Republicans actually agree on something of substance: They now agree that in an effort spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump forced out the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and then pushed Kiev to announce investigations into his political rivals.  But it is there, as the president's impeachment enters its penultimate phase in the House, that any agreement ends.  Democrats believe that extraordinary series of events were criminal and demand Trump's removal while Republicans say he did nothing wrong. 

Given the Alice in Wonderland aspect of other Republican defenses of the president, this acknowledgement of the facts of the matter, such as they are, is a Democratic tactical victory on a watershed day in only the fourth presidential impeachment inquiry in U.S. history.   

In the face of a deeply damning House Intelligence Committee report made public on Tuesday by committee chairman Adam Schiff that concluded the president put politics ahead of the national interest in an effort to tilt the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump's congressional sycophancy has tacitly acknowledged that the best defense is to simply say that there is nothing wrong with that.   

There was nothing wrong with Trump leveraging nearly $400 million in military assistance to fight Russian aggression and an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in exchange for investigations of a former vice president and 2020 adversary, and his son.  There was nothing wrong with Devin Nunes, the ranking Intel Committee Republican and purveyor of the most outlandish of conspiracy theories, working with Giuliani by trying to foist on Ukrainian government officials the debunked notion that Ukraine not Russia meddled in the 2016 election.  Okay, Russia might have meddled, but Ukraine did the same thing, acknowledge some Republicans. And there was nothing wrong with the White House withholding documents and ordering prospective witnesses not to cooperate with Congress.  

In the starkest of  terms, the Intel Committee report concludes that "The founding fathers prescribed a remedy for a chief executive who places his personal interests above those of the country: impeachment." 

It asserts that Trump's "scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential re-election campaign."   

Left unsaid is that Trump was brazenly supporting Russia by undercutting Ukraine.  

The report, based on more than two months of sometimes searing testimony, much of it from administration officials who defied the president, now goes to the House Judiciary Committee, which on Wednesday began holding its own hearings in the run-up to deciding what the articles of impeachment should be.  The first three witnesses were constitutional scholars who said the president's conduct in the Ukraine scandal alone warrants his removal from office. 

The articles will likely include abuse of power, obstruction of Congress and possibly bribery, but although Democrats control the House and have the votes to impeach, they are divided as to whether to include articles beyond the Ukraine scandal that were outlined in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on the Russia scandal.  These potentially include obstruction of justice and other "high crimes."          

If the Democrats continue to fast-track the proceedings, an impeachment vote is possible before the Christmas holiday with a trial in the Republican-controlled Senate presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts commencing in January. 

The developments further tie together the Russia and Ukraine scandals. 

As 2018 drew to a close, Mueller had secured the cooperation of Giuliani's predecessor, Michael Cohen, longest of longtime Trump advisers Roger Stone was about to be indicted, and Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was in jail after pleading guilty to multiple felonies, where Mueller's prosecutors were pressing him to explain why he had given presidential polling data to an associate with alleged ties to Russian intelligence. 

It was in this moment of crisis, writes Rosalind Helderman in The Washington Post, that Giuliani hit upon the idea of focusing on Ukraine to take the heat off Trump, and the campaign to vilify the Bidens and blame Ukraine for 2016 election meddling was born. That is beyond dispute; Giuliani himself admits as much. 

Trump's Republican congressional allies had released their own report on Monday condemning the impeachment effort as illegitimate and asserting that the president was not seeking personal political advantage, but was instead urging Ukraine to address corruption. 

"I knew they were hot and heavy on this Russian collusion thing, even though I knew 100 percent that it was false," Giuliani recently told conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck.  "I said to myself, 'Hallelujah.'  I've got what a defense lawyer always wants: I can go prove someone else committed this crime." 

Ultimately, Mueller would find that Moscow's efforts to interfere in the 2016 campaign were "sweeping and systematic," but that the evidence he was able to get despite White House resistance could not establish that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia.  But in one of the more delicious ironies in presidential history, Giuliani set out to defend the president against the possibility of impeachment and instead helped create the basis for impeachment.   

And there is another irony: Despite Trump's stonewalling, the House Democrats' strongest evidence came directly from the White House in the form of chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's disastrous admission there was a quid pro quo and the testimony of other administration officials. 

Giuliani is now the subject of several investigations, while phone records obtained by the Intel Committee reveal that he and Lev Parnas, one of his indicted Ukrainian associates, exchanged a flurry of phone calls with Nunes amid Giuliani's effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens, while Giuliani called the White House repeatedly on the day that Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was abruptly ordered to return to Washington.  

The president, in Europe for the 70th anniversary of the NATO alliance, savaged Schiff as "deranged" and "sick," yet again accused Democrats of trying to overturn the results of the 2016 elections through an impeachment inquiry he said "turned out to be a hoax." 

"It's done for purely political gain," Trump said.  "They're going to see whether or not they can do something in 2020 because otherwise they’re going to lose."