December 8, 2019

I wanted to write tonight about this weekends’ release of a key House Judiciary Committee report, but I got sidetracked as I tried to verify a story. In the end, this post is about disinformation.

Here's what we know happened this weekend in impeachment news: On Saturday, December 7, the majority on the House Committee on the Judiciary (that is, the Democrats) released a report on the “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment.” It’s a reworking of a document prepared by the staff of the Judiciary Committee back in 1974 when the committee was considering impeaching President Richard M. Nixon. There hadn’t been a presidential impeachment since 1868, and they thought they ought to hash out how it should be done, so they set staffers to work on it. (In a lovely twist of historical fate, one of the people who worked on the 1974 document was Hillary Clinton, then a young staffer, a fact that the Republicans needled her about when the document was used against her husband in 1998). The new document is a look at history and the Constitution, and is 52 pages long (the length will matter in just a second).

The report is not just a review of the history of impeachment, though. It takes on Trump and the Republican strategy of trying to discredit the process rather than addressing the president’s behavior. On page 38, is Section VI, “Addressing Fallacies About Impeachment.” This section takes on Republicans’ attacks on the impeachment process, presenting definitive evidence that those attacks were not accurate. On page 48-49, the report actually lists how to sift “truth from fiction” in Trump’s statements, and warns that “when one or more of these red flags is present, there is reason to doubt that the President’s account of his motives is accurate. When they are all present simultaneously, that conclusion is virtually unavoidable.”

The document is a damning look at Trump’s behavior over both the Ukraine scandal and obstruction of justice.

Here’s where things get really fuzzy. Also on Saturday, Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee Doug Collins (R-GA) issued a press release that reads: “Chairman Nadler has no choice but to postpone Monday’s hearing in the wake of a last-minute document transmission that shows just how far Democrats have gone to pervert basic fairness. . . . Democrats waited until after Speaker Pelosi announced that articles of impeachment were imminent and chose the eve of the Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing to share loads of documents that Chairman Schiff has had since this investigation began.”

I have no idea to what he’s referring. His press release says that Democrats “transmitted thousands of pages of documents to House Judiciary Republicans less than 48 hours before Judiciary’s hearing scheduled to examine impeachment presentations from Intelligence and Judiciary committees.” This sounds like the Saturday report, but that’s only 52 pages long, and its supporting evidence was really not very challenging. The report from the House Intelligence Committee had much more intricate documentation—including those explosive phone records involving Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes (R-CA) to the Ukraine scandal—but Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff released that on December 3, Tuesday. Even that was only 300 pages, with copious endnotes. Perhaps Collins means Democrats turned over documents from that report on Saturday? If so, there is no record anywhere that I can find of that document transfer.

Collins went on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo” this morning to reiterate that “This is not fair…. There is no way we could process these thousand documents. But better yet, the Democrats can’t process these documents because this is something that they’re looking to do and use tomorrow, but they’re not even read. This is a show. This is a farce.” Here he appears to be referring to the 52-page report from Saturday.

The Hill, which was the newspaper whose reporter John Solomon worked to push the Ukraine story, reported Collins’s complaint. Newsmax, a widely cited conservative site, also picked up the story and reported that Collins demanded a delay in Monday’s hearing, “citing a data dump Saturday that’s ‘partial, biased and curated to support’ Democrat’s accusations.” Collins “decried the release of thousands of pages of documents to be considered from the House impeachment investigation less than 48 hours beforehand after Republicans requested them nearly a month ago.”

With this report, it hit me. Look how it’s written. It’s entirely true that Collins complained bitterly about a document dump of thousands of pages on terribly short notice. What does not appear to be true is that there WAS such a document dump.

Nonetheless, the story gives an entirely different impression, leading to its final paragraph. Again quoting Collins, it says: “'Under Speaker Pelosi’s leadership, House Democrats have eroded the integrity of our chamber and sacrificed the confidence of Americans who trust Congress to balance power, not abuse it.'” That's a quote from Collins, but it looks like a reporter's conclusion.

The story doesn’t end there. RawStory picked it up for the opposite reason: to emphasize just how massive the case against the president is. It wrote: “According to Newsmax, Collins — who has become one of the president’s main surrogates opposing ouster of the president — fired back at the Democrats over their Saturday release of thousands of pages of documents to be considered from the House impeachment investigation.” See what just happened? Now that document dump is accepted as fact, even though there is no apparent evidence that it happened.

By Sunday night, other conservative websites had picked the story up. For evidence of the document dump, they linked to Collns's initial press release, which by Sunday night had been retweeted 11K times.

So what the weekend gave us was a report from the House Judiciary Committee laying out a very strong case against Trump, and what seems to be a disturbing disinformation campaign by Republicans that, in the hands of the media both for and against the president, turned one man’s alleged outrage into a story that sure sounds like fact, even though so far as I can tell, it is fiction.

Fact versus fiction, I suspect, will be the theme of the rest of this process.

Back to what we know. Tomorrow the House Committee on the Judiciary will resume its public impeachment hearings. The lawyers for the House Intelligence Committee and the House Judiciary Committee will present their findings to the committee members. This is all to aid the process of writing articles of impeachment which is well underway: the Judiciary Committee might vote on them as early as this week.

It appears the Judiciary Committee is circling around two major themes: the Ukraine scandal and obstruction of justice. Tomorrow, the lawyer for the Intelligence Committee will speak to the scandal and the lawyer for the Judiciary Committee will speak to obstruction. It is possible that the obstruction case will include not only Trump’s obstruction of Congress’s investigation of the Ukraine scandal, but also his obstruction of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. There are hints—only hints, mind you—that there might also be something about lying to Congress since it appears that Trump’s written answers to Mueller’s questions might have been contradicted by later evidence.

We’ll see soon enough.