December 17, 2019

Dec 18, 2019

Today, pressure mounted on Trump over impeachment and Russia, and he cracked.

The day started with a letter from 700 historians—now more than 1500—saying “It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.”

Then an op-ed in the New York Times by Republican heavy-hitters, including lawyer George Conway and former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, attacked Trump’s “crimes, corruption, and corrosive nature.” Afraid of “the Republicans’ flirtation with authoritarianism,” they wrote: “Mr. Trump and his enablers have abandoned conservatism and longstanding Republican principles and replaced it with Trumpism, an empty faith led by a bogus prophet.” “As Americans, we must stem the damage he and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character.”

They announced the formation of the “Lincoln Project” a superPAC designed to turn swing state voters against Trump and pro-Trump candidates, even if it means losing the Senate. Reports say their war chest already has millions of dollars.

Trump’s people sneered at this “pathetic little club of irrelevant and faux ‘Republicans,’ who are upset that they’ve lost all of their power and influence inside the Republican Party,” but I think they’re worried, and they should be. The Republican Party is long overdue for exactly this split, which it has made twice before. Once that split gave us Dwight Eisenhower, and once it gave us Theodore Roosevelt, for whom the new superPAC was originally named.

The news kept coming. We knew that Giuliani associate Lev Parnas had concealed from the government $1 million he had received from an account in Russia. Today, US prosecutors told a judge that the source of that money was Dmytro Firtash, a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch associated with the Russian mob. The money went to the account of Parnas’s wife, Svetlana Parnas.

This means that Firtash was paying Parnas, and Parnas was paying Giuliani, who was working for Trump for free. This ties Trump to Russian mobsters.

Also, Devin Nunes, the Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, tried to sidestep the issue of his own calls with Parnas by saying: “I got a call from a number that was Parnas’s wife….”

And there is yet more evidence that Russia is part of the Ukraine scandal. A social media analysis firm has traced false posts about US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, amplified by reporter John Solomon at The Hill, to Russia. Images of a “do not prosecute” list, which were entirely fabricated, originated in Russia. They were used to get her removed from her post.

All this, while Republican Senators have opened an investigation into the discredited argument that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election and into the Bidens. Their investigatoin focuses on the unsubstantiated claims of Andrii Telizhenko, a former staffer at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, who says the Democratic National Committee colluded with the Ukrainian government in 2016. (He has produced no evidence, but says he will share documents for the impeachment trial.) Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein from the Committee on the Judiciary, Gary C. Peters from the Committee on Homeland Security, and Ron Wyden from the Committee on Finance wrote a letter to the Republican chairs of their committees noting that their investigation was the same one Trump had tried to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing. It accused them of advancing Russian disinformation that would interfere with the 2020 election, and it reminded them that, if they persisted, they must share any evidence they were using, that is, to show they had cause to investigate and were not simply giving Trump his investigation announcement.

Tonight Pence got dragged in again, when House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff wrote to the Vice President to warn that classified witness testimony indicated that Pence might have deliberately misled the committee about his own conversations with Zelensky. (Early on, Trump told reporters that his own call with Zelensky was no different than Pence’s.) That Schiff dropped this news today suggests he is deliberately applying pressure.

But the president’s machinations in Ukraine have not stopped. Tonight we learned that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has recalled the acting US ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, who testified about the administration’s effort to pressure Ukraine president Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the Bidens. His text, “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” was a big deal in the impeachment hearings. And Guiliani continues to boast that his ongoing investigations will help Trump’s reelection.

While all this was going on, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to allow any witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial. Minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) asked: “Why is the president so afraid of having these witnesses come testify?” Good question. A Washington Post/ ABC News poll showed that 71% of Americans think that Trump should allow his top aides to testify, and that 53% of Americans disapprove of Trump while only 39% approve. If only four Senate Republicans break ranks, they could force McConnell to allow testimony.

Talk that first-term Democrats in red districts might vote against impeachment ended today with Jared Golden’s (D-ME) announcement that he would support one of the two articles. Right now, it looks like only two House Democrats will vote no: First-year Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who has announced he is switching parties (most of his staff has resigned in protest), and Collin Peterson (D-MN) whose district Trump won by 30 points. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is also a cypher.

Tonight, protesters turned out across the nation to call for impeachment and a fair trial.

All this pressure led to today’s biggest news. This afternoon, Trump published a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, copied to both the Senate and the House of Representatives, “for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.”

He wrote the letter with Legislative Affairs Director Eric Ueland, Stephen Miller, and Michael Williams, an advisor to acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, permitting his lawyers to review it only after it was written. It was a six-page single-spaced unhinged rant that echoed his tweets and conspiracy theories. It began by sneering at Pelosi’s statement that she prays for the president and ends just after: “Perhaps most insulting of all is your false display of solemnity. You apparently have so little respect for the American People that you expect them to believe that you are approaching this impeachment somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly. No intelligent person believes what you are saying.” In between is a litany of all the wrongs Trump feels he has endured, including that “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”

Normally, Trump’s performances are designed for his base, but this is a raw roar of anger. His base is not going to read six single-spaced pages, and if they do, even they will find it embarrassing and sad, the fury of a man who sees that he is losing control of a situation.

Later tonight, Pelosi sent a short, serious letter to her caucus. She needled Trump with a comment about this “very prayerful moment in our nation’s history,” but also emphasized that “Our constituents look to us to be respectful of the Constitution and Defenders of our Democracy, and to proceed in a manner worthy of our oath of office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Tomorrow’s schedule for the House of Representatives is historic. It reads: “H.Res. 755—impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.”

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Notes:

Historians’ letter: https://medium.com/@historiansonimpeachment/historians-statement-on-the-impeachment-of-president-trump-6e4ed2277b16

Lincoln Republicans: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/17/project-lincoln-can-patriotic-republicans-save-country/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/foiled-in-2016-never-trump-republicans-launch-new-super-pac-in-effort-to-oust-trump-in-2020/2019/12/17/79dc08f4-20e6-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html

Thread on Parnas: