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Trump Impeachment Trial: Humpty Trumpty may yet have a great fall

Trump Impeachment Trial: Humpty Trumpty may yet have a great fall
An American flag flies at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Jan. 30, 2020. Democrats face dwindling chances to get testimony from former National Security Adviser John Bolton and others in the Senate impeachment trial as the pool of Republicans willing to even consider defying President Donald Trump keeps shrinking. (Photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The ‘Impeachment Show’, starring the entire US Senate, dozens of congressmen and women, famous or infamous lawyers, media stars, and a bunch of heavies apparently on leave from Mafia movies, continues every day. A key moment may come as early as the end of this week, on 31 January.

For days, weeks, indeed many months now, the American public – and the world – has been tantalised or tormented by the possibility President Donald Trump and his retainers will be decisively driven from office. They see him dragging the tattered remnants of his ostentatious, gold lamé curtains behind him, like a figure on his way to a kind of contemporary Calvary, while phalanxes of Washington DC residents, journalists, and Democratic politicians jeer and toss overripe fruit and vegetables at him.

Of course, there is an alternative vision. In that one, those self-same baying crowds are finally driven from Washington’s many Greco-Roman-styled government buildings, museums, and memorials by hordes of burly, heckling, baseball cap-wearing men, caps bearing the letters “MAGA”, and brandishing assault rifles and sabres, just as the dawn of a second Trump administration term beckons. These two, very different, metaphorical political tribes and their competing visions are a sad reflection of the very real, deeply divided state of American politics.

The ongoing impeachment trial of Donald J Trump has now reached the stage where the 100 members of the US Senate (53 Republicans and 47 Democrats) are now asking direct questions of both the prosecutorial teams – the first comprising the team of Democratic Party House of Representatives prosecution managers led by the seemingly inexhaustible California congressman, Adam Schiff. The second is the president’s defence attorneys. This team consists of a bevy of lawyers led by Jay Sekulow. That team includes Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr. The first of these two has been in the national spotlight for decades in lurid trials like those of Hans von Bulow and OJ Simpson, and the latter was the chief prosecutor during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial two decades ago.

In their three days of presentations, Schiff’s team focused relentlessly on the constitutional horrors stemming from Trump’s abuse of governmental authority and power in order to put the squeeze on the new Ukrainian government in pursuit of dirt on Joe Biden (and the consequent obstruction of Congress in its oversight role to get to the bottom of this). This presidential play was, in fact, what then-National Security Adviser John Bolton had called a mafia “drug deal” – pursuing a Ukrainian public announcement of an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, before Trump would release sorely-needed anti-tank missiles and accede to meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Never mind that this military hardware had already been appropriated by Congress and that the Ukrainians were being sorely pressed by Russian military formations and eastern Ukrainian separatists, and that they really needed that muscle before disaster would ensue. Never mind, too, that the Trumpian obsession was with squashing Joe Biden’s presumed danger as a Democratic Party nominee for the presidency in 2020, rather than some kind of eager pursuit of corrupt dealings by Ukrainians.

And never mind, even further, that the president was firmly fixed on the idea it was really those sneaky, crafty Ukrainians who had been the real Svengalis behind the whole raft of electronic interference tactics in the 2016 US election. And that they had then craftily pushed the spotlight of suspicion onto the Russians – Trump’s seeming near-allies in confronting the mythic deep state in the depths of his own US government.

This particular fairy tale had been summoned from the murky depths by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and then spun by him, hard. Just by the way, he, Giuliani had had interesting business dealings over in Ukraine with some of the very people Zelensky had been elected to displace.

Thereupon, Giuliani had found a mob of shady characters like Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman (formerly Ukrainian Soviet citizens, but now Americans) who were marshalled into service as part of an effort to circumvent official US policy and simultaneously drive the sitting American ambassador out of Kyiv by the next air flight. Really. The whole thing has begun to sound like a Robert Ludlum airport novel, but there it was. There it is.

In their presentations and in response to questioning, the president’s lawyers had been arguing for an extraordinary expansion of presidential authority and freedom of action. In effect, they argued, this whole mess was simply a dispute over policy choices among presidential advisers, and in that situation, the president had the deciding vote.

Effectively they were also saying that whatever the president called the national interest pretty much was just that, regardless of whether such actions actually were in the president’s personal interest as well. Essentially, too, they were conceding the facts as argued by Adam Schiff and his colleagues, and then arguing, instead, that whatever those embarrassing facts were, they simply were not impeachable offences.

But then along came the manuscript penned by John Bolton, the former national security adviser. Bolton, of course, had been very publicly fired by Trump, and Bolton has clearly communed deeply with playwright Oscar Wilde and his famous advice that revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

Reportedly, Bolton’s as yet unpublished writing says directly and specifically that Trump outlined to him – in the Oval Office – the reported trade of weapons and a presidential meeting in exchange for a public statement of investigations into the Bidens. If he wrote that, and if it stands up under withering scrutiny (even if the government’s declassification authorities try to confiscate Bolton’s manuscript), if he testifies, it could effectively blow out of the water any claim by Trump’s coterie that there is nothing to see at this particularly messy, multiple-vehicle freeway crash.

And Bolton’s writing or the possibility of his testifying about the contents of his manuscript has set in motion a messy squabble about whether the Senate should call additional witnesses such as Bolton, just as soon as the Q&A period winds up. A vote to call witnesses would only require a majority vote of 51 senators, not the two thirds required for a conviction.

As a result, there are now all kinds of feints and manoeuvres designed to recruit a handful of Republican senators to support the Democratic stance of going for witnesses, or, on the other side, to hold the line against calling any witnesses and maybe even luring a few Democrats over to the no-more-testimony side. But with the dramatic leaks from Bolton’s memoir, the whole story line has become jumbled.

On the face of it, it seems appalling that Trump could end up being acquitted without hearing from the very kind of person Republicans have been insisting – from the first – that no conviction should happen, absent first-hand testimony. It is possible the vote on witness testimony will come on Friday 31 January, and that vote may be the key moment in this whole impeachment saga. DM

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