We begin today’s roundup with analyses of Donald Trump’s defenses to the House impeachment inquiry. First up, The Nation’s John Nichols takes on the “but Ukraine ultimately received the aid!” defense:
Apart from the problem of a “defense” that suggests the president was trying to do wrong but didn’t fully achieve his goal, this argument splits the wrong hair. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute reminds us: “Attempts to bribe exist at common law and under the Model Penal Code, and often, the punishment for attempted bribery and completed bribery are identical.” That’s useful. But even more useful is an understanding of the fact that impeachment is not a legal intervention that requires evidence of a specific criminal act or statutory violation, as President Trump and so many of Republican allies on the House Intelligence Committee so desperately want the American people and their elected officials to imagine.
And here is The Washington Post editorial board on the subject:
That’s like arguing that, if an armed robber flees the bank he is holding up before getting any money, he should be excused. Mr. Trump released the hold on aid to Ukraine only after Congress announced an investigation.
Moreover, there was harm. The episode damaged U.S.-Ukrainian relations. Instead of supporting Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as he sought to fend off Russian aggression, Mr. Trump signaled to both the Ukrainians and Vladimir Putin that the United States was an unreliable ally.
Eugene Robinson explains that just being bad at attempting a crime doesn’t mean it’s not a crime:
There are two problems with arguing that Trump is innocent because his scheme ultimately failed: the facts and the law.
The stubborn facts are that the military aid to Ukraine was released only after a whistleblower’s complaint came to the attention of Congress, meaning the jig was up; and that Zelensky was all set to announce the bogus investigations Trump wanted.
Catherine Rampell:
According to Republicans’ airtight legal reasoning, nothing Trump does can be considered criminal because somebody else somewhere might be doing something worse. And just as O.J. Simpson pledged to search for the real killer, Trump and his fellow Republicans are on the hunt for the Real Crimes.
The New York Times editorial board argues that Trump’s attempt to intimidate witnesses may amount to another article of impeachment:
For Mr. Trump, Ms. Yovanovitch’s determined pursuit of longstanding American anticorruption efforts was evidently a problem. It was impossible to square his treatment of the ambassador, a career Foreign Service officer with an exemplary record, and his conversation with Mr. Sondland with any claim that Mr. Trump was intent on advancing the rule of law, as opposed to his own political interest.
And over at USA Today, Mimi Rocah and Jennifer Rodgers also take on the topic of witness intimidation, arguing it’s clearly wrong but does not fit under federal criminal statutes:
As a legal matter, do Trump’s actions rise to the level of witness intimidation or harassment under the federal statutes? Such a case would come down to whether a prosecutor could prove that Trump’s intent in sending the tweet was to intimidate or harass Yovanovitch and/or other witnesses in the impeachment inquiry against him.
Given the ongoing pattern of conduct that Trump has demonstrated, it’s possible. […]
Critically, though, impeachment is not a criminal matter, and so these federal statutes, including their strict intent requirements, are irrelevant here. The real issue for these impeachment proceedings is whether Trump appears to be using his platform and the power of the presidency to intimidate and harass witnesses who are providing highly damaging testimony against him. The answer to that is clearly yes.
On a final note, The Nation asked the 2020 candidates how they would tackle inequality. It’s worth a click for the history of inequality it provides:
In the early 1900s, after a generation of Gilded Age excess, American progressives of most every stripe arrived at a broad common vision of how best to mold a decent society. The nation needed, reformers and revolutionaries agreed, to narrow the grand divide that separated the nation’s poor many from its most privileged few, and that meant focusing on both the absence of wealth and its concentration. Americans needed to battle, as publisher Joseph Pulitzer put it, “predatory poverty” as well as “predatory plutocracy.”