Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Trump is losing the witness argument

Posted on by Greg Dworkin

NY Times:

Republicans are angrily pressing the White House in private about the revelations from the manuscript, saying they were blindsided by the former adviser’s account — especially because the administration has had a copy of it since Dec. 30. Many Republicans have adopted the arguments offered by Mr. Trump’s defense team, but Mr. Bolton’s assertions directly contradict them.

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Don’t miss the forest for the trees. We went from “no witnesses, absolutely not” to threats about “if Bolton, then Hunter Biden and Obama” to “WH prepares for witnesses” in 24 hours. That’s… pretty amazing. Look, we all know what the GOP wants, but they may not get what the script calls for. Their problem is they do not know how to ad lib.

My heart breaks for them. Meanwhile, the witness vote is likely Friday.

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Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:

Here We Have It. The Trump Impeachment Smoking Gun.

A report about a book by John Bolton makes the president’s Republican defenders look like liars and fools. Maybe they’ll be fine with that.

And then, Sunday night, it fell apart. The New York Times reported that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has written in his upcoming book that Trump made explicit the quid pro quo that his lawyers are denying: that Trump told him directly that he wanted to keep the military aid frozen until the Ukrainian government agreed to help with investigations of Democrats. Not only that, but apparently the White House has had Bolton’s manuscript all month. Trump’s team knew this was coming.

While I certainly don’t expect the president’s support in Congress to collapse, it’s impossible not to see close parallels to the “smoking gun” tape that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974. That tape, proving that Nixon ordered his staff to have the Central Intelligence Agency block the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into the Watergate scandal and released to Congress and the public after the House Judiciary Committee had passed articles of impeachment, was so devastating for Nixon not so much because it was proof of his crimes; plenty of proof of plenty of crimes had long since been placed in the record. Instead, it became the moment when conservative Republicans realized that Nixon had deliberately set them up with false arguments even though Nixon knew that the evidence, if released, would undermine those arguments and make them look like liars and fools.

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Nikolas Bowie/NY Times:

Don’t Be Confused by Trump’s Defense. What He Is Accused of Are Crimes.

Abuse of power and obstruction of Congress have long been considered criminal and merit impeachment.

President Trump’s defense falls apart for precisely the same reason. As with burglary, American legal treatises and judicial opinions have long recognized the criminal offense of “abuse of power,” sometimes called “misconduct in office.” In 1846, the first edition of the pre-eminent treatise on American criminal law defined this common-law offense as when “a public officer, entrusted with definite powers to be exercised for the benefit of the community, wickedly abuses or fraudulently exceeds them.” The treatise noted that such an officer “is punishable by indictment, though no injurious effects result to any individual from his misconduct.”

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Frank Figliuzzi and Karen Schwartz/NBC opinion:

Trump impeachment defense lawyers Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz share disturbing problem

While the president still stands accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women, two of his lawyers are embroiled in their own sexual misconduct and assault scandals.

There is a theorem that "creeps of a feather flock together." But there's more to it than the affinity bad men share for each other. The commonality between Trump's approach to life and the posture of the people he's selected to defend him echoes the "Access Hollywood" tape: "When you're a star, they let you do it."

Except now they — Trump, Starr and Dershowitz — are trying to collectively assault us all by defiling our Constitution. That should have every one of us, men and women alike, equally outraged.

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Andrew McCarthy/NRO makes the case for shoddy defense work:

Bolton Blows Up Trump Team’s Foolhardy Quid Pro Quo Defense

They advanced an argument they didn’t need to make, and now it will cost them.

Don’t build your fortress on quicksand.

That’s been my unsolicited advice for President Trump and his legal team. You always want the foundation of your defense to be something that is true, that you are sure you can prove, and that will not change.

Instead, the president and his team decided to make a stand on ground that could not be defended, on facts that were unfolding and bound to change. Last night, that ground predictably shifted. In a soon-to-be-published memoir, former White House national-security adviser John Bolton asserts that the president withheld $391 million in defense aid in order to pressure Ukraine into investigating Trump’s potential 2020 election opponent, former vice president Joe Biden.

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Neal K. Katyal, Joshua A. Geltzer and Mickey Edwards/NY Times:

John Roberts Can Call Witnesses to Trump’s Trial. Will He?

Democratic House managers should ask the chief justice to issue subpoenas for John Bolton and others.

The framers’ wisdom in giving this responsibility to a member of the judiciary expected to be apolitical and impartial has never been clearer. With key Republican senators having told the American people that they prejudged the case against President Trump before it began and even working with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to build the very defense for which they’re supposed to be the audience, the notion that they’re doing the “impartial justice” they’ve sworn to do is very much in question.

The Democrats’ impeachment managers should immediately ask the chief justice to issue subpoenas for key witnesses and documents, insisting that the Senate rules make him and him alone the decision maker about whether to “make and enforce” those subpoenas. That’s his prerogative — and his responsibility, one he can’t simply shift to the senators as permitted for evidentiary questions under the Rule VII carve-out.

What happens next won’t be totally within Democrats’ or the chief justice’s control. As Representative Adam Schiff acknowledged Thursday, the chief justice can decide evidence questions like executive privilege, but his determinations can be overruled by a majority of senators.

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In Iowa news, Nate Cohn/NY Times:

Biden’s Iowa Problem: Our Poll Suggests His Voters Aren’t the Caucusing Type

Why there’s a wide split in recent surveys in the state.

This mismatch — between the voters who say they will participate in a caucus, and the voters who typically show up in primaries — may be at the heart of the wide split in recent Iowa polls.

Many pollsters rely, in some way, on past vote history to conduct their surveys. Some pollsters use it to define which voters could be selected to participate in a survey, like a recent Monmouth University poll that selected registered Democrats or independents who turned out in 2018 or in a recent primary, or who registered since 2018. A Neighborhood Research and Media poll was even more limited in its model for who was likely to vote: voters who turned out in either the 2016 or 2018 primary. These polls in Iowa showed Mr. Biden with the lead, and the Times/Siena poll also found Mr. Biden tied or ahead among these groups.

But new voters/young voters… 

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Bloomberg is passing Pete in the polls. More importantly, he’s on message and will fund beyond his candidacy.

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Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Impeachment and thuggish behavior not playing well with the public

Posted on by Greg Dworkin

The big stories from a not-so-quiet Sunday are the death of Kobe Bryant in company of others, the spread of coronavirus and the bombshell leak of what’s in John Bolton’s book (making Republican Senators scramble), but the pundits haven’t fully caught up with all of that yet.

Aaron Blake/WaPo:

Mike Pompeo’s blatant gaslighting attempt

“It is shameful that this reporter chose to violate the basic rules of journalism and decency,” Pompeo said. “This is another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt President Trump and this administration. It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity.”

The most remarkable portion of Pompeo’s statement, though, came at the end.

“It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine," Pompeo said in it.

The implication is unmistakable: Kelly couldn’t correctly identify the location of Ukraine on the map, and she instead pointed to Bangladesh.

Here’s why there is absolutely no way that happened.

Axios:

Republicans fear "floodgates" if Bolton testifies

There may be enough new pressure on Senate Republicans to allow witnesses at President Trump's impeachment trial, after the leak from a forthcoming book by former national security adviser John Bolton that contradicts what the White House has been telling the country.

Why it matters: This is a dramatic, 11th-hour inflection point for the trial, with an eyewitness rebuttal to Trump's claim that he never tied the hold-up of Ukrainian aid to investigations into Joe Biden.

GOP sources say the revelation could be enough to sway the four Republican senators needed for witnesses — especially since Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine have already strongly signaled they’d vote for witnesses. ...

The state of play: Republican sources tell Axios that party leaders and the White House will still try to resist witnesses because, as one top aide put it, "there is a sense in the Senate that if one witness is allowed, the floodgates are open."

"If [Bolton] says stuff that implicates, say Mick [Mulvaney] or [Mike] Pompeo, then calls for them will intensify," the aide said.

In other words, it would spoil their cover-up. Smoking guns are so annoying.

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NPR:

And in a Saturday interview with All Things Considered, NPR President and CEO John Lansing also came to Kelly's defense.

"Mary Louise Kelly is one of the most respected, truthful, factual, professional and ethical journalists in the United States, and that's known by the entire press corps," Lansing told host Michel Martin. "And I stand behind her and I stand behind the NPR newsroom, and the statement from the secretary of state is blatantly false."

Lansing allowed that tensions can and do arise when journalists ask officials hard questions.

"But this goes well beyond tension — this goes toward intimidation," Lansing said. "And let me just say this: We will not be intimidated. Mary Louise Kelly won't be intimidated, and NPR won't be intimidated."

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Ron Brownstein/CNN:

Boom and bust: Economy and impeachment capture the forces that will determine Trump's fate

"From the beginning of the [University of Michigan] survey through the administration of President George W. Bush, there was a fairly straightforward relationship: Higher scores on this [economic]  index equal better approval ratings," Sides wrote recently in The Washington Post. That relationship began to fray under President Barack Obama. Most experts attributed the change to the nation's increasing political polarization: Polls show that Republicans and Democrats are now more likely to view the economy positively when their party controls the White House. That meant Obama didn't benefit as much as many scholars expected when the economy slowly recovered after the crash of 2008. But Trump, as with many things, has pushed this dynamic to a new peak. Polls capture an unmistakable improvement in voter attitudes about the economy, but those same surveys show that Trump's standing is much weaker than that of any of his recent predecessors among the voters who express such economic contentment… The latest CNN/SSRS poll, released this week, illuminates the same trends from another angle. In the poll, 55% of respondents said they approved of how Trump is handling the economy, a robust number that might normally predict smooth sailing to reelection for an incumbent president. But 29% of the respondents who approved of Trump's economic performance say he abused his power in his dealings with Ukraine, and 23% said they still disapproved of his overall job performance, according to detailed figures provided by the CNN polling unit. The result of this resistance is that despite the spike in positive attitudes about the economy, Trump's overall approval rating has increased by only about 1 percentage point over the past year in the cumulative index maintained by fivethirtyeight.com.

In support of Brownstein’s piece, this am’s poll: even with strong economic support Trump at best breaks even where anyone else would handily lead:

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Edward Isaac-Dovere/Atlantic:

Obama’s 2016 Warning: Trump Is a ‘Fascist’

The newly revealed comment is one of the former president’s strongest known critiques of his successor.

Obama has never gone as far as using the word fascist in public, even though that’s not an uncommon opinion, especially on the left. Journalists and academics who have lived in and studied fascist regimes regularly point to the traits Trump seems to share with those leaders, including demanding fealty, deliberately spreading misinformation, and adopting Joseph Stalin’s slur that the press is the “enemy of the people.” And that’s not to mention Trump’s apparent admiration for living authoritarians, such as Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention,” Trump gushed about Kim in a 2018 interview on Fox & Friends. “I want my people to do the same.”

In the footage from Hillary, Kaine seems to suggest that Obama wanted him to be more aggressive against Trump. “He knows me and knows I tend to” hold back, Kaine says. (This past November, Kaine referred to Trump as a “tyrant” in an interview on the Radio Atlantic podcast.)

In the Sundance interview, Clinton said that Obama had never used the word fascist in conversations with her about Trump. But, she said, what Obama “observed was this populism untethered to facts, evidence, or truth; this total rejection of so much of the progress that America has made, in order to incite a cultural reaction that would play into the fear and the anxiety and the insecurity of people—predominantly in small-town and rural areas—who felt like they were losing something. And [Trump] gave them a voice for what they were losing and who was responsible.”

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Gary Langer/ABC:

Biden holds steady, Warren slips in national poll as Iowa caucuses approach

Joe Biden holds his ground in the new national ABC News/Washington Post poll.

With the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses drawing near, 77% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents nationally say they’re satisfied with their choice of candidates. Far fewer, 24%, are very satisfied, although that’s near the average in ABC/Post polls since 2000.

See PDF for full results, charts and tables.

This poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, finds plenty of room for movement: Just about half of leaned Democrats are very enthusiastic about their choice, and 53% say they’d consider supporting a different candidate. Warren, while weaker as a first choice, leads in second-choice preference.

ABC primary polling 2020
Seven months later, looks much like July 2019

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Leonard Pitts, Jr/Miami Herald:

No, it’s not the economy, stupid. Trump supporters fear a black and brown America.

This column is presented as a service for those progressive readers who are struggling with something I said in this space. Namely, that I see no point in trying to reason with Trump voters. I first wrote that over a month ago, and I am still hearing how “disappointed” they are at my refusal to reach out. So I thought it might be valuable to hear from the people I’ve failed to reach out to.

I’m sure some of you think those emails were cherry-picked to highlight the intolerance of Trump voters. They weren’t. They are, in fact, a representative sampling from a single day in May, culled by my assistant, Judi.

It’s still an article of faith for many that the Trump phenomenon was born out of fiscal insecurity, the primal scream of working people left behind by a changing economy. But I don’t think I’ve ever, not once, seen an email from a Trump supporter who explained himself in terms of the factory or the coal mine shutting down.

I have, however, heard from hundreds like “Matthew,” who worries about “immigrants” and “Gerald,” who thinks people of color have an “alliance” against him. Such people validate the verdict of a growing body of scholarship that says, in the words of a new study by University of Kansas professors David N. Smith and Eric Hanley, “The decisive reason that white, male, older and less educated voters were disproportionately pro-Trump is that they shared his prejudices and wanted domineering, aggressive leaders …”

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Ezra Klein/NY Times:

Why Democrats Still Have to Appeal to the Center, but Republicans Don’t

Polarization has changed the two parties — just not in the same way.

As a result, winning the Democratic primary means winning liberal whites in New Hampshire and traditionalist blacks in South Carolina. It means talking to Irish Catholics in Boston and atheists in San Francisco. It means inspiring liberals without arousing the fears of moderates. It’s important preparation for the difficult, pluralistic work of governing, in which the needs and concerns of many different groups must be balanced against one another.

The Democratic Party is not just more diverse in who it represents; it’s also more diverse in whom it listens to. A new Pew survey tested Democratic and Republican trust in 30 different media sources, ranging from left to right. Democrats trusted 22 of the 30 sources, including center-right outlets like The Wall Street Journal. Republicans trusted only seven of the 30 sources, with PBS, the BBC and The Wall Street Journal the only mainstream outlets with significant trust. (The other trusted sources, in case you were wondering, were Fox News, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart.)

Matt Grossmann and David A Hopkins made this observation a while ago, but it is worth revisiting.

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Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: A fair trial must include witnesses and documents

Posted on by Greg Dworkin

NY Times:

‘Constitutional Nonsense’: Trump’s Impeachment Defense Defies Legal Consensus

As President Trump’s impeachment trial opens, his lawyers have increasingly emphasized a striking argument: Even if he did abuse his powers in an attempt to bully Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election on his behalf, it would not matter because the House never accused him of committing an ordinary crime.

Their argument is widely disputed. It cuts against the consensus among scholars that impeachment exists to remove officials who abuse power. The phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” means a serious violation of public trust that need not also be an ordinary crime, said Frank O. Bowman III, a University of Missouri law professor and the author of a recent book on the topic.

“This argument is constitutional nonsense,” Mr. Bowman said. “The almost universal consensus — in Great Britain, in the colonies, in the American states between 1776 and 1787, at the Constitutional Convention and since — has been that criminal conduct is not required for impeachment.”

Don’t buy the nonsense that Rs are impervious to public pressure. Keep hammering them.

WaPo:

Senate Democrats privately mull Biden-for-Bolton trade in impeachment trial

“Biden and his people don’t want to give it credibility, so there is a stalemate right now, in terms of doing anything new,” one Biden associate said regarding whether the former vice president or his son would testify.

Throw in a second round pick and a player to be named later, and maybe there is a deal to be had.

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NY Times:

McConnell’s changes to the trial rules came after concerns from Republican senators.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, made changes to the proposed rules for the trial after Republicans senators, including Susan Collins of Maine, raised concerns about two provisions, according to a spokeswoman for Ms. Collins.

The aide, Annie Clark, said the Maine Republican wanted to ensure that the resolution as closely resembled the rules adopted by the Senate in the 1999 trial of President Bill Clinton as possible.

Mr. McConnell’s initial plans had deviated in several ways from those carried out in Mr. Clinton’s case.

Consensus is that McConnell was bluffing and his caucus forced these changes.

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More to come as America digests what they heard and saw yesterday.

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Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:

Democrats already have these four victories in the impeachment trial

In his calm and methodical presentation, Schiff scored a victory: Democrats have effectively built the case that the Senate would be guilty of a coverup if it allows Trump to continue to conceal witnesses and documents. (Since the public already believes by huge margins that witnesses should be allowed, Schiff has the wind of public opinion at his back.)…

Schiff and his fellow impeachment managers understand that Trump has been impeached, that a majority of the public believes he obstructed Congress and abused his power and that a really big majority want a real trial. They know Republicans are going to vote to acquit, so the purpose is not a favorable verdict. Rather, it is to hammer home to every persuadable voter that Trump violated his oath and engaged in a coverup, which Senate Republicans are enabling.

The jury is not really the Senate; it’s the public. The defendant is not really Trump; it’s the Republican senators. Understanding this, Schiff got off to a strong start.

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David Mastio and Jill Lawrence/USA Today:

Get ready for the Trump Senate impeachment trial as partisan farce

Here's hoping that Republicans prove us wrong and decide they've had enough of Donald Trump.

[Maastio]: They’ll be standing by Trump whatever comes in the Senate trial, new witnesses or not. Damning new facts or not. And when you are talking to Republicans, even in private, they do a pretty good imitation of being true believers in Trump. Why’s that? In the short term, Trump is the only route to clinging to power.

Pence is viewed as weak tea in rallying the base. And after years of Trump, there’s not much hope on the right for reaching out to the middle in the coming presidential election. Blue-collar Democrats aren’t going to defect to Pence’s traditional brand of Republicanism and he can’t really fake populism with Trump’s verve. Without Trump winning at the top of the ticket, hopes for keeping a grip on the Senate are not high.

I don’t care how damaged Trump is by the Senate impeachment trial next week, there’s no hope his Republican backers will abandon him.  

[Lawrence]: That is a dark view of the party, and probably justified. But until it’s over, as Bill Clinton used to say before The Troubles descended upon him, I still believe in a place called Hope.

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Barbara McQuade/USA Today:

3 top witnesses I'd call in Trump impeachment trial and what I'd ask: Ex-US attorney

It would be tempting to call Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence and Donald Trump. But John Bolton, Mick Mulvaney and Mike Pompeo would be better witnesses.

How to get the truth on Ukraine

Three other witnesses are essential to getting to the bottom of what happened in the Ukraine affair — Bolton, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Because they have not been questioned, House managers would have to violate a prosecutor’s general rule to never ask a question to which they do not already know the answer. But sometimes risk is necessary for reward. These are the key questions these witnesses should be asked.

Questions for all three witnesses:

►Were you aware of any request to any Ukrainian official to investigate Burisma, Hunter or Joe Biden or the role of Ukraine in interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election?

►If so, what was the role of President Trump in that request?

►Why was the Trump administration interested in investigating these matters?

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Conservative columnist:

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In other news:

Will Bunch/philly.com:

Call Richmond’s MLK Day gun rally what it was: An outbreak of terrorism on American soil 

As they marched a stone’s throw from what had been the capitol of the Confederacy, the marchers argued to a man (and they were virtually all men) that, in essence, they want their country back. “I don’t like what they are doing to our rights,” Raymond Pfaff, an 85-year-old man from Louisa County, Va. — where the public schools remained segregated until Pfaff was in his late 30s — told the New York Times at the rally, adding: “I’m a patriotic American. The left is going so far left right now.”

Wason Center for Public Policy:

State of the Commonwealth 2020 Survey Report (Virginia)

Voters strongly support requiring background checks on all gun sales (86%-13%) and passing a ‘red flag’ law (73%-23%); a slight majority (54%-44%) support banning assault-style weapons Voters strongly back the Equal Rights Amendment (80%-13%) A slight majority oppose giving localities authority to remove or alter Confederate monuments (51%-44%) Voters strongly support decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana (83%-14%) Voters strongly support raising the minimum wage (72%-28%) Voters strongly support automatic voter registration (64%-31%), but slightly oppose no-excuse absentee voting (74%-23%) Voters strongly support second passage of the redistricting reform constitutional amendment (70%-15%)

Important, given the gun rights rally yesterday.

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