By Rich Lowry
Monday, January 27, 2020
Adam Schiff did most of the heavy lifting for the House
managers, and if he performed ably, he also relied on arguments and tropes that
don’t withstand scrutiny.
The Democratic case for impeachment and removal is now
heavily encrusted with clichés, widely accepted by the media, meant to give
their indictment additional weight.
In his lengthy opening statement last week, Schiff relied
on all of them, and then some.
This is not to say that the basic charge against Trump —
withholding defense aid to Ukraine to try to force investigations that he
wanted — is wrong, or that Trump’s conduct was proper.
It’s just that to try to get it to the level of
impeachment and removal requires rhetorical gymnastics. Schiff strained to make
Trump’s Ukraine scheme of a piece with Russia’s interference in the 2016
election, to exaggerate its national-security and electoral consequence, and to
portray removal as the only remedy.
Here are 15 times that Schiff related a stilted,
distorted, or flatly erroneous version of events:
1. “Just as he made use of Secretary Clinton’s hacked
and released emails in the previous presidential campaign.”
Schiff wanted to connect Trump to Russia’s hacking, even
though there is no connection. So he said Trump “made use” of the emails. But
what does that mean? That he cited them. Well, so did everyone else. As Byron
York pointed out the other day, the press widely reported on the WikiLeaks
disclosures. If it was blameworthy to make a big deal of information revealed
in the hacks, Bernie Sanders was a major offender, calling for the resignation
of then–DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz after the DNC hack.
2. “In 2016, then–candidate Trump implored Russia to
hack his opponent’s email account.”
Again, this is an attempt to make Trump responsible for
Russia’s hacking. It refers to a press conference where Trump made a
tongue-in-cheek reference to the Russians’ being rewarded by the press if they
found Hillary’s missing emails. The Russians did attempt to spearfish a domain
used by Clinton’s personal office on the same day, but it’s hard to believe
Russian hackers were taking their cues from Trump, and of course, they had
already hacked the DNC — hence, the occasion for Trump’s riff.
3. In pushing the Ukrainians on the discredited
CrowdStrike theory, Trump was “attempting to erase from history his previous
election misconduct.”
Trump has been, no doubt, desperate to find someone else
to finger for the Russian hacking since Russia is such a focus of his critics,
but the hacking wasn’t his work, so to refer to it as “his previous election
misconduct” is absurd.
4. Robert Mueller testified “that Russia systemically
interfered in our election to help elect Donald Trump, that the campaign
understood that, and they willfully made use of that help.”
Schiff wants to portray Mueller as having found Trump
guilty in his probe, when he actually found no evidence of collusion.
5. After Mueller catalogued Russian interference, the
very next day, “President Trump is on the phone with a different foreign power,
this time Ukraine, trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the next election.”
In the Schiff version, a Trump caught red-handed working
with the Russians to interfere in U.S. politics then immediately turns around
to work with the Ukrainians. But the opposite was true. It was Trump’s sense of
outraged innocence over the Mueller probe that partly motivated him to focus on
Ukraine’s purported role in getting the Russia investigation started.
6. Trump believes “that under Article II, he could do
anything he wants.”
This has become a favorite chestnut of Democrats during
impeachment, but it wrenches Trump’s statement out of context. He was talking
about having the inherent Article II power to fire special counsel Robert
Mueller. Whatever you might have thought about the wisdom of such a move, Trump
was correct about his power.
7. “The military aid that we provide Ukraine helps to
protect and advance American national-security interests in the region and
beyond.”
This is certainly true, but every time Democrats revert
to the importance of Ukrainian defense aid as a matter of policy, it raises the
question of why, by and large, Democrats went along with Barack Obama’s refusal
to provide any lethal assistance to Ukraine whatsoever and how Trump, overall,
has been better on Ukraine assistance.
8. Trump is guilty of “abusing the powers of that
office in such a way to jeopardize our national security.”
It’s ridiculous to suggest that what turned out to be a
brief hold on Ukraine aid had dire national-security consequences for the U.S.
9. “He personally asked a foreign government to
investigate his opponent.”
This has become the conventional way that Democrats refer
to Trump’s request of Zelensky, although in concrete form it became a push to
get them to commit to probe Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy company that
had Hunter Biden on its board. An investigation of Burisma is not the same
thing as an investigation of Joe Biden. Assuming the Bidens aren’t at the
center of some corrupt scheme involving Burisma (and there’s zero indication
that they are), the investigation would have been a nothingburger in its impact
on U.S. politics. Trump would have touted the investigation, but it is doubtful
that this would have had any more impact than his already full-throated
denunciations of Biden corruption.
10. Trump was asking the Ukrainians to help “smear a
political opponent.”
This accords more with Schiff’s fictional version of
Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president than the reality. The
Ukrainians weren’t being asked to manufacture evidence against Joe Biden, and
an investigation of Burisma presumably wouldn’t have smeared him, per the above
point.
11. Acting ambassador Bill Taylor testified that the
Trump team wanted the Ukrainians “in a public box” by publicly committing to
the investigations, and this shows that “President Trump didn’t care about the
investigations being done.”
Schiff’s theory is that Trump wanted only a public
announcement of an investigation, so he could use it against Joe Biden in his
campaign. Usually, though, if you want an official to publicly commit to
something, it’s to make it harder for him to back out of his promise.
12. Trump doesn’t have a right to solicit “prohibited
foreign aid in his reelection.”
This makes it sound like Trump was raking in Ukrainian
campaign contributions and getting the Ukrainians to run ads in swing states.
In reality, he was pushing for the Ukrainians to investigate a Ukrainian
company, the practical political effect of which would have been nil in the
U.S.
13. “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at
the ballot box, for we can’t be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”
It’s really amazing that Democrats have gone, in about
three years, from insisting it’s impermissible to question the potential outcome
of an election, when Trump ill-advisedly did so at a debate in 2016, to making
it central to their worldview. They believe they were robbed in 2016 and also
believe they will perhaps be robbed again. But Hillary lost under her own power
in 2016, and regardless, it’s beyond the power of one person to rig a national
election that will draw massive attention and turnout.
14. “I don’t think that impeachment power is a relic.
If it is a relic, I wonder how much longer our republic can succeed.”
Schiff argues that failure to remove eviscerates the
impeachment power. Since no president has ever been convicted and removed, it’s
not clear why this would be. It just means that there is a high bar to removal.
15. “If impeachment and removal cannot hold him
accountable, then he truly is above the law.”
Again, Schiff wants to portray impeachment as the only
way a president can be held accountable, when Congress has all sorts of other
levers — from investigations, to funding, to inter-branch relations, to censure
— to hold a president accountable.
No comments:
Post a Comment