01/20/2020
[From The Spectator's monthly e-newsletter, published this morning]
It appears Mitch McConnell will continue to resist the pressure – some of it coming from his own party – to allow witnesses and documents in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The same partisan resolve equipped him to refuse even to meet with Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, and later earned him the nickname Moscow Mitch when he stared down demands that the Senate vote to curb Russian interference in US elections.
McConnell and South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have both scoffed at the need for an impartial process, announcing loudly to the right wing in their respective states (they are both up for re-election) that they had reviewed the testimony generated during the House impeachment hearings and found it unconvincing. No matter that several witnesses from his own administration placed the President at the center of the extortion scheme to withhold aid from Ukraine in return for potentially damaging evidence against a political rival, Joe Biden.
New documents and public statements have surfaced that double down on damning testimony already in the record.
The source of the most incriminating material is Lev Parnas, principal aide to Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal attorney and the architect of the Ukraine caper. Giuliani, it bears reminding, was once the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, though his resume now seems better suited for a role in The Irishman than the conduct of America foreign policy.
Parnas, in media interviews this week and in the documents he has turned over, implicates Trump and a swath of senior Trump administration personnel, all of whom he says were in close contact with Giuliani throughout. He cites Attorney General Barr and Vice-President Pence, both of whom have been named by previous witnesses as active participants.
Parnas also includes Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has indicated he would be willing to testify. Bolton famously remarked, in reference to the emerging scandal, “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Giuliani are cooking up.” Sondland is the Portland, OR hotel operator, Trump campaign mega donor and Ambassador to the EU, who told House committees last fall that “everyone was in the loop.”
And Parnas outed Trump acolyte Devin Nunes, the dairy farmer and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee who earlier denied ever having spoken to Parnas, but who this week revised his story on Fox News and admitted having had at least one telephone conversation with him. It turns out that before Nunes took his seat in the House committee hearings into impeachment last fall, he had multiple interactions with Parnas, and Parnas had set up meetings with ex-Ukrainian officials for Nunes aide Derek Harvey, a dirt digger who was looking into supposed corruption by former Vice-President Joe Biden as well as the discredited story of a plot against Trump by Ukrainian officials during the 2016 election.
Trump predictably responded “I don’t know him, I don’t know Parnas,” and “I know nothing about him” and “I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken with him.” A flood of photograhs, videos and emails contradict the obvious lie.
It’s hard to know if Parnas, who is under indictment for campaign finance violations, will ultimately be deemed credible. His revelations are consistent with earlier testimony garnered in the House inquiry, and the documents released this week – which include hand-written notes – appear to support his statements.
The President continues to rail against the impeachment process, calling it a “hoax.” We live in a time when senior White House aides defend Presidential lies as “alternative facts,” and lawyers for the President assert “truth isn’t truth.” A weary public is conditioned to regard inconvenient truths as Fake News, goaded by a Fake President (the title of an excellent new book by Ralph Nader and Mark Green) who devotes more of his time to his twitter feed than the burdens of office.
Some parts of the dam may finally be breaking. Susan Collins, the self-contradictory pro-choice Senator from Maine who voted to install arch-conservative jurist Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court after inexplicably asserting she was confident he would protect Roe, insisted in December she needed to hear all the evidence in the case against Trump before deciding whether he should be removed from office. This week, after the explosive Parnas story broke, she reversed course and announced she didn’t think any new evidence should be admitted to the trial. Collins disingenuously questioned why the House hadn’t included the Parnas material in its original inquiry (ignoring the widely-known fact that the documents were only recently made available by court order). There is speculation however she is still considering voting for the inclusion of witnesses, along with Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah, among others.
Also this week, the independent, non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), which works for the Congress, declared the President violated federal law last summer when he withheld funds from Ukraine. “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the accountability office declared, in language that in almost any other era would be considered superfluous.
It’s clear that McConnell feels he can use the power of the majority to block corroborating testimony and compromising evidence and still hold his caucus together. What is less clear in the election year ahead is whether there will be a political cost to Republicans for continuing to make a mockery of the constitutional process.
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