Dalia Lithwick wrote a good article summarizing the complexity of the first days of the impeachment trial, even as the Trump defense team seems to believe the outcome is a foregone conclusion, much like some Senators.
“And if you don’t know, now you know”, said Hakim “Biggie” Jeffries to Jay Sekulow
Based on the first day alone, it’s clear that there will be a whole lot of process directed at obstructing the Senate trial. There will be overt lying, as was the case with White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s claim that “not even Schiff’s Republican colleagues were allowed into the SCIF,” the secured facility where House committees conducted initial impeachment depositions and Republicans had equal time to ask questions as Democrats. There will be gaslighting, as was the case when Cipollone claimed that Schiff released “a fraudulent version of the phone call” between Zelensky and Trump, when he had actually paraphrased that call, after its substance had been released. Most of all, there will be attacks on Senate Democrats, in lieu of defenses of the president, who has no defense on the merits. We will hear that all testimony is hearsay, unless the president himself says it. The president, of course, has refused to testify, unlike President Bill Clinton during the last impeachment. But do pay attention: because when you hear Republicans claim that Democrats are both too early and also too late to participate in a process, it’s a good sign that there is no process at all.
The problem for Senate Republicans colluding to obstruct the same facts and witnesses that have been obstructed by the White House? Many of those facts are out. More will come out. This isn’t going to stay in the can forever. Schiff closed a portion of his remarks this afternoon with this precise caution: “The facts will come out in the end. The documents, which the president is hiding, will be released through the [Freedom of Information Act] or through other means over time. Witnesses will tell their stories in book and film. The truth will come out. The question is, will it come out in time?”
It’s already too late for the Senate to obstruct that truth. It’s simply too early for history’s judgement.
slate.com/...
Trump’s lawyers were far worse. They played a bad hand badly. Admittedly, they are handicapped by the inescapable reality that their client is guilty as sin. They can’t seriously dispute that Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden — the president said as much from the White House lawn. They can’t even dispute that Trump held up military aid to Ukraine to pressure its government into doing what he wanted. Their only defense on the merits is to claim that the president wasn’t concerned with smearing a Democratic rival but with fighting corruption. But that’s an absurd argument to make given that Trump never mentioned fighting corruption in general during his two phone calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — and given that, as my Post colleague Catherine Rampell notes, he is trying to legalize bribery by American companies.
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It should be no surprise that the lawyers representing a president who has made more than 16,241 false statements since taking office should resort to their own lies — and it won’t matter for the president’s die-hard supporters. The Fifth Avenue Republicans will back Trump no matter what. But a recent CNN poll found that 51 percent of Americans think Trump should be convicted and 58 percent think he abused his power. The transparently false arguments by Trump lawyers will not convince those majorities that they are wrong. The Trump team will win an acquittal in the Senate no matter how badly they argue but, on the present trajectory, they won’t win in the court of public opinion.
www.washingtonpost.com/...