TRUMP’S IMPEACHMENT

President Donald J. Trump has done a lot of things during his years in office that may have justified impeachment.  But the final straw, the thing that actually caused his impeachment, was his alleged blackmailing of Ukraine in 2019.  Fighting for its life against a much more powerful Russia, Ukraine desperately needed US arms, $400 million of weaponry that Congress had already approved sending to the country.  But Trump held up shipping the arms, waiting for Ukraine’s leader to publicly announce it was investigating Trump’s likely election rival, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden. 

Or so the House of Representatives claimed.  They charged the President with abuse of power, and also with obstructing Congress for refusing to cooperate with the investigation.  Since the charges are heard and decided by the Senate, and since the Senate was controlled by the Republicans, nobody realistically thought Trump would be found guilty.  Yet Democrats felt they needed to charge Trump anyway, since failing to do so would send the message that it was OK for the president to violate the Constitution and abuse power any way he wanted.

The end result was indeed that Trump was found not guilty by the Senate, by a vote of 52 to 48.  All of the 52 who voted for acquittal were Republicans.  All Democrats voted guilty, along with two Independents and one Republican (Mitt Romney).  Naturally, Trump and his allies portrayed the verdict as proving his innocence.  Yet the evidence presented in the Senate trial, along with those things that were not allowed to be presented, tell a much different story. 

Before we look at those things, let’s rewind to what top Republicans said about the charges against Trump.  Initially, they said there was no evidence of a quid pro quo where Trump would release the military aid in exchange for Ukraine announcing an investigation into the Bidens.  That blackmailing abuse of presidential power was the key allegation behind the whole impeachment effort.  But if the blackmailing quid pro quo were the case, Republicans made clear at first, then Trump’s impeachment was justified.  As more and more information came out in the months before the Senate trial, it became clear that Trump had indeed demanded that Ukraine’s president investigate the Bidens in order to get those American weapons.  In other words, the charges of quid pro quo were true. 

Then in the Senate trial itself, we heard from the following top State Department experts:

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman started things off.  National Security Council’s Director for Russia and Ukraine, he listened in on the call Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25.  On top of his earlier concerns about the false smear campaign against former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, Vindman “did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen” so as to gain domestic political advantage.  He therefore reported his concerns to the appropriate administration counsel, following the required written procedure. 

Dr. Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s top Russia expert at the time, denounced what she called a “fictional claim that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 US election”, a fiction she said was pushed by Russia to divert attention off their own interference.  Trump and his team used this phony claim to justify pressuring Ukraine, and to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. 

David Holmes, a top aide in the US’s Ukraine embassy, testified that withholding the $400 military aid was a way to increase pressure on Ukraine to make such an investigation.  Both Homes and Dr. Hill agreed that investigations into Burisma, an allegedly corrupt company that Hunter Biden was connected with, was merely a way to shift attention to Biden’s potential wrong-doing.  Further, Holmes and Hill said that any reference by Trump and his top people to Burisma was a “widely understood code” for investigating the Bidens. 

Gordon Sondland was Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and a big donor to Trump’s campaign.  He unexpectedly shocked everyone when he testified that there was a quid pro quo and that “everyone (in Trump’s administrations) was in the loop.”  

Marie Yovanovitch, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, detailed how Trump’s man on the scene, Rudy Giuliani, was working with corrupt Ukrainians and spearheaded efforts to get Ukraine to announce an investigation.  She was fired for her efforts to stop that.  Her replacement was….

William Taylor, who testified how Giuliani represented an “irregular” channel of diplomatic efforts to pressure Ukraine to provide Trump with political ammunition against the campaign of Joe Biden. 

All of them, and other key witnesses, rebutted Republican efforts to show they were “never-Trumpers” who were biased against the president and thus falsely testifying against him.  In each case, they were credible, deeply experienced, politically-neutral, patriotic public servants with spotless records who had faithfully served both Democratic and Republican administrations.  As an interesting aside, if so many laudable public servants were “never-Trumpers,” wouldn’t that suggest they must have a damn good reason for opposing the president?  Say, to protect the nation against his many inappropriate and often unconstitutional actions?

But in any case, none of it mattered, as Republicans simply did not want to acknowledge the facts, or even to know the full story.  John Bolton was Trump’s National Security Advisor, with more access to Trump than almost anyone and “in the room” for virtually every foreign policy move for 17 months.  Bolton claimed he had definitive, first-hand information about what actually happened, and offered to testify.  The White House took steps to keep him from doing so, and in any case, Senate Republicans showed no interest in hearing what he had to say. Just recently, Bolton’s book The Room Where It Happened confirmed the charges against Trump, and in fact presented evidence that Trump had tried the same thing with China, imploring Xi Jinping to “make sure I win” the November election in exchange for key concessions.  Actually, his book claims that the Democrats blew it, as they failed to investigate other grounds (besides just the Ukraine incident) for Trump’s impeachment.  As for Trump’s alleged obstructing Congress, Bolton wrote that for Trump, “obstruction of justice (was) a way of life.”

Senator Marco Rubio’s views were typical of those who realized that Trump had done what they previously said justified his impeachment.  They didn’t need to hear more evidence.  As Rubio said “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a president from office.”

For an unbiased, logical observer (the standard expectation of my readers), the bottom line is that Donald Trump was impeached with good reason.  Powerful evidence was presented of his abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, with even stronger evidence not being allowed to be heard.  As in so many other cases during Trump’s administration, Republican Senators judged that Trump’s “base” would severely punish them for a guilty verdict, and that outweighed any genuine consideration of guilt.  Donald J. Trump goes down in history as only the third US president ever impeached, and joined the other two in being acquitted.  That is far from the same thing as saying he was innocent of the charges, however.