Hiding Biden: How Democrats Crafted First Impeachment, Helping Defeat Trump With Media Help

Posted on February 5, 2021 by RealClearWire

By Mark Hemingway for RealClearInvestigations

By the numbers, Joe Biden is president of the United States because he won the swing states of Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by a combined total of some 43,000 votes.

But he also owes his victory to the groundwork laid by Democrats and their media allies one year before, during the first impeachment of Donald Trump over his supposedly strings-attached demand that the Ukrainian government investigate alleged corruption involving Biden’s son, Hunter.

The first impeachment failed to oust Trump from office, but it helped secure the White House for Biden.

It shielded him from scrutiny, enabling him and his supporters to cast allegations during the campaign about dubious Biden family business ties as rehashed Trumpian conspiracy theories.

Biden’s razor-thin swing state victories might not have materialized if the Trump campaign had been able to gain traction from its October Surprise – a series of articles it helped orchestrate in the New York Post that reported information from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden suggesting corrupt foreign business deals that may have involved his father.

As many as 45% of Biden voters said they were unaware of Hunter’s financial scandals before the election.

That’s likely because Democrats and much of the media discredited or did not report the accusations in the final weeks of the campaign – accusations that were bolstered after the election when Hunter admitted that he has been the subject of an ongoing federal corruption probe since 2018.

Once the Post ran its first laptop article on Oct. 14, Democrats and their allies immediately turned to the narrative they had long used against Trump: foreign interference.

Without evidence save for the claims of Democrat partisans and anonymous official sources — like those commonly relied upon during the debunked Trump-Russia affair — the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico ran stories suggesting the laptop could be Russian disinformation.

Joe Biden said the laptop was a “Russian plan” at the first presidential debate.

The FBI, which was a main driver of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, added to the narrative when word was leaked that the bureau was investigating whether the laptop emails were Russian disinformation.

Twitter and Facebook reacted by actively censoring the Hunter Biden story. Twitter went so far as to lock the New York Post out of its own account.

As the Senate prepares next week to take up a second impeachment of Trump, Republican objections to the Democrats’ handling of the first go-round loom large.

The record of those proceedings shows that they were conducted in a highly unusual manner. In retrospect, it seems clear that they were designed not just to target Trump – but to protect Biden.

Taking Early Aim

Some Democrats were bent on impeaching Trump from the moment he took office, on Jan. 20, 2017. Just 19 minutes after Trump was sworn in, the Washington Post published a piece headlined, “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.”

Those early efforts were spearheaded by Texas Rep. Al Green, who drew up articles of impeachment for alleged misdeeds ranging from Trump’s insulting kneeling professional football players to his firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

Green’s effort led to three different unsuccessful impeachment votes — one in 2017 and two more in 2019 after Democrats gained a House majority in the 2018 election.

Publicly, Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders said they did not approve of Green’s efforts.

“Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” the House speaker told the Washington Post in March 2019.

Privately, Democratic leaders were betting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion would produce a clearly impeachable offense.

They were wrong.

After three years of thorough investigation – as well as thousands of breathless articles and untold hours of TV coverage keyed toward Trump’s prospective guilt – Mueller’s final report, issued in March 2019, concluded that the probe “[did] not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Mueller did not make a determination of whether Trump had tried to obstruct his investigation. Looking at the evidence, Attorney General William Barr determined he had not.

Nevertheless, some powerful Democrats sought to use the Mueller report as the basis to impeach Trump, only to be rebuffed by Pelosi.

The speed of what happened next blindsided Republicans.

The Ukraine Affair

In early August, a CIA employee filed a formal whistleblower complaint against President Trump aimed at forcing Congress to address the matter.

He alleged that Trump had pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July 25 phone call to investigate the Bidens for political purposes, and subsequently made aid to Ukraine contingent on the probe.

Trump reportedly raised the issue because he believed there had never been any serious inquiry into why Hunter Biden, a lawyer with no experience in the energy sector, had been paid upwards of $80,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma.

Hunter received the appointment in 2014, shortly after his father was asked to oversee Ukrainian affairs as Barack Obama’s vice president. In 2016, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine unless it fired a prosecutor widely considered to be ineffective.

The fired prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, testified that he was driven from office because he was investigating Burisma.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son,” Trump told Zelensky, “that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. … It sounds horrible to me.”

At the time of the whistleblower complaint, Biden was favored to win the Democratic nomination for president.

However, the allegations regarding the Trump phone call with Zelensky were problematic from the start. The man who brought the complaint was not really a whistleblower as the term is commonly understood.

He had no direct knowledge of the phone call but had been leaked details of it by one of the seven American officials who were on the call with the president.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose legal opinions are normally binding on these matters, soon concluded the whistleblower complaint did not meet the requirements of an “urgent concern” for it to be forwarded to Congress.

Meanwhile, Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, worked to surface the details of the complaint publicly. He recast obstacles to legitimizing the whistleblower’s complaint as attempts to hide Trump’s malfeasance.

When the White House ultimately made a transcript of the call public, Trump’s rhetorical style, an odd combination of obliqueness and bluntness, made the idea of a quid pro quo – no Biden investigation, no aid — open to interpretation.

Officials from Ukraine, which did not open an investigation, said they never felt pressured by Trump.

Despite the procedural problems with the whistleblower complaint, it provided a semblance of formal process to buttress an all-new impeachment attempt.

Progressives and much of the media cast the call as an abuse of power by Trump who, they claimed, tried to extort a foreign leader to kneecap a political rival. A formal House impeachment inquiry was launched on Sept. 24, 2019, with the full support of Democratic House leadership.

From the beginning, the impeachment inquiry was rife with episodes suggesting Democrats had a larger strategy. To begin with, they took an unprecedented amount of control over the process.

With the 2020 election and the prospect of a second Trump term looming, there would be no years-long special counsel or nonpartisan investigation of this matter.

While the Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, was the traditional venue for impeachment, Democrats decided that Schiff would guide the impeachment inquiry through the Intelligence Committee.

Schiff, who had raised his national profile during the Mueller probe by repeatedly claiming that he had seen more than circumstantial evidence that Trump had colluded with Russia, had already acquired a reputation for fierce partisanship.

In early October, shortly after the impeachment inquiry began, the New York Times reported that Schiff’s office had helped shepherd the alleged whistleblower’s complaint.

The Washington Post fact-checker gave Schiff “four Pinocchios” for repeatedly denying his office’s contact with the man. Nevertheless, Schiff received glowing press coverage for his impeachment efforts.

The mainstream press further enabled impeachment by refusing to publish the whistleblower’s name, in line with Democrat admonitions, even though he wasn’t formally protected by any whistleblower laws.

News organizations disclosed no agreements of source confidentiality with the man, and his identity was common knowledge in Washington.

When Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations reported the evidence that the whistleblower was a then-33-year-old CIA employee named Eric Ciaramella, this news blackout by major media allowed them to ignore his history of partisan ties and anti-Trump statements.

Sperry reported that Ciaramella had served as an adviser on Ukraine to Vice President Biden and had been overheard in 2017 discussing with another staffer how to “take out,” or remove, the new president from office.

That colleague was Sean Misko, who left the White House in the summer of 2019 to join House impeachment manager Schiff’s committee, where, sources say, he offered “guidance” to the whistleblower.

Aside from Schiff’s backstage dealings with Ciaramella, the Intelligence Committee chairman publicly tried to spin Trump’s alleged wrongdoing.

On Sept. 26, the day after the Trump-Zelensky transcript was released, Schiff gave an opening statement before acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified before his committee.

During the statement, Schiff, who had once been an aspiring screenwriter, characterized the president’s behavior on the Zelensky call as being like “a classic organized crime shakedown.” Instead of reading the plain text of the call, Schiff paraphrased what happened in hyperbolic and lurid terms.

“I have a favor I want from you,” Schiff said while seeming to read from a transcript. “And I’m going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand? Lots of it, on this and on that.”

Republicans were appalled.

“He makes up a conversation supposedly between the president and Ukraine which sounds like a script from a cheap comic book. Lies and innuendo. He was called out on it and said, well, I meant it as a parody. Geez, that’s great. The fun begins,” Utah Congressman Chris Stewart would record in his journal, as quoted in “Obsession,” Washington Examiner reporter Byron York’s book on Democrats’ years-long quest to remove Trump from office.

Leaking Testimony

To make the case for impeachment, it was crucial for Democrats to demonstrate the existence of a quid pro quo between Trump and Zelensky, which was ambiguous because Trump never mentioned aid on the call.

Schiff responded to the Volker testimony by taking even more unprecedented steps for Democrats to control the impeachment proceedings. Volker had sat for what was known as a “transcribed interview,” which allowed Republicans to speak about the testimony afterward.

After Volker, Schiff made sure all the witnesses in the impeachment inquiry were deposed, forbidding committee members from discussing what was said publicly.

But the secrecy rules had a convenient and glaring exception – the witnesses themselves could speak about what happened. “The sessions settled into a pattern of secret testimony accompanied by quick leaks of witnesses’ opening statements,” York observes in “Obsession.”

The leaked, one-sided testimonies allowed press speculation to run wild, while House Republicans who knew the particulars were subject to ethics charges if they told the public what had actually been said.

The DNC-Ukraine Nexus

For Democrats, Biden was a fraught issue in the impeachment proceedings. One obvious defense of Trump was for Republicans to argue that the president’s questions about Biden family corruption in Ukraine were legitimate and necessary to protect national security.

Under questioning, multiple witnesses called by Democrats conceded that Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma was concerning, leading to calls for Hunter to testify in the proceedings. (During the subsequent Senate impeachment trial, one Democratic senator, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, said Hunter Biden was a relevant witness.)

Democrats rejected calls to question Hunter Biden, Ciaramella, and others.

“I think we really could have torpedoed impeachment by making the whistleblower detail all of his prior contacts with Schiff and also his prior contacts with Biden as well,” said a Republican House staffer with intimate knowledge of the proceedings who requested anonymity because he did not want to speak for elected officials.

Democrats also shut down Republican attempts to probe the Democratic Party’s own troubling connections to Ukraine during impeachment.

A Politico investigation published in January 2017 “found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the [2016] race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections.”

The article, written by David Stern and Kenneth Vogel, the latter now at the New York Times, reported that Ukrainian officials had helped Hillary “Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers,” including his campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

Key to this effort was a Democratic National Committee operative, Alexandra Chalupa, who met with Ukrainian officials and American journalists in Washington and was invited to the White House by Biden’s Ukraine pointman – the future “whistleblower” Ciaramella.

(Chalupa wasn’t the only Democratic operative pushing Manafort dirt originating in Ukraine at about the same time. So was Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the Democratic contractor behind the discredited Steele dossier on Trump-Russia collusion. He has acknowledged feeding the media Ukraine tips in “Crime in Progress,” the book he co-wrote with his Fusion co-founder Peter Fritsch.)

But even though Politico’s reporting on Ukraine and the DNC was largely unquestioned for three years, the media once again sprang to Democrats’ defense as Republicans sought to make an issue of it.

In the end, Schiff’s secrecy and tight control over who got to testify allowed House Democrats to sidestep any explosive questions about the chairman’s role in instigating impeachment, the DNC’s involvement with Ukraine, and Biden’s potential role in his son’s corruption.

Ultimately, the Senate refused to convict Trump and many Republicans believed that it did little to harm him politically.

“Not a single Democrat speaker referenced impeachment during any of the convention, which is a really amazing thing,” the GOP staffer noted. “That just shows me they didn’t get a whole lot of political benefit out of it.”

Shielding Joe

But if impeachment failed to tarnish Trump as much as Democrats hoped, it appeared successful in delegitimizing valid questions about alleged Biden corruption.

After impeachment, the mainstream media showed almost no interest in investigating Biden family business ties, which were largely characterized as a series of unsubstantiated and debunked allegations.

Christiane Amanpour of PBS expressed the prevailing view in an interview with Republican National Committee spokesperson Liz Harrington when she said “there has never been any issues in terms of corruption” with the Bidens.

After Harrington disagreed and urged journalists to look into the story, Amanpour responded: “We’re not going to do your work for you.”

Some coverage transformed the potential scandals into a positive for Biden. At a campaign event in Iowa, a Democratic voter asked the candidate in December 2019 about allegations of his son’s corruption.

In response, Biden called the voter a “damn liar” and challenged him to an IQ test. CNN national political reporter Maeve Reston characterized the exchange this way: “In a human moment defending his son, Biden showed the authenticity, emotion and readiness for a fight that appeals to so many Democrats as they look for someone who can take on Trump.”

Last September, when a Senate intelligence panel report revealed that a firm co-founded by Hunter Biden received a $3.5-million wire transfer from the wife of a Russian politician, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC did not cover the story.

When Trump raised the issue at the first presidential debate, Biden claimed it had been “totally discredited” even though its existence was confirmed by Treasury Department documents.

This news blackout may have helped propel Biden to victory, but questions regarding the Bidens have not gone away.

There is the laptop, which, far from Russian disinformation, did indeed belong to Hunter Biden, who in December admitted he has been the subject of a federal corruption probe since 2018.

Other evidence and testimony implicate President Biden. Tony Bobulinski, a former naval officer and business partner with Hunter Biden, asserted in October that he met with the senior Biden as part of a plan to secretly give the future president a 10% stake in a deal with a Chinese conglomerate with ties to the country’s communist government.

Bobulinski has provided documents to back up his account and news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal have confirmed they are authentic.

President Biden seems aware of the danger of family embarrassments, including from a January 2020 FBI raid involving allegations of financial fraud at a company where Biden’s brother James was listed as “principal.”

Politico reported last week that the president had pulled his brother Frank aside last summer to tell him, “For Christ’s sake, watch yourself. Don’t get sucked into something that would, first of all, hurt you.”

On Inauguration Day, a law firm’s ad promoting Frank Biden’s relationship with the president caused a new stir.

Such Biden family matters, and Republicans’ awareness that their concealment may have helped seal Trump’s defeat, color Democrats’ long-shot efforts next week to convince at least 17 senators of the opposite party to join their legally and politically fraught effort to convict a president in an impeachment trial after he has left office.

Republicans think the Democrats’ handling of the first impeachment poisoned the well.

“Republican fence sitters are probably already on the record denouncing the unfairness of the House process last time around, since both GOP House members and senators were doing that,” says a GOP staffer who insisted on anonymity. “So if that process was unfair, how can you trust Democrats enough to sign off on impeachment 2.0, when there wasn’t even any process to speak of at all?”

A number of House Democrats involved in the first impeachment declined to comment on their Republican colleagues’ concerns.

In a recent vote, 45 Republican senators went on record saying they did not believe impeaching a former president was constitutional.

Even prominent Senate Democrats, such as 2016 vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, are advocating censuring Donald Trump for fear that a bitter and drawn out impeachment trial is not only futile but will hamper Biden’s ability to get his administration up and running during the crucial early months of the presidency.

Congressional Republicans, for their part, have shown no signs of dropping efforts begun in the first impeachment to investigate what they see as clear Biden family corruption – even after Trump’s second impeachment.

Prominent Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, recently told Fox News they plan to ask Joe Biden’s nominee for attorney general, Merrick Garland, about the Hunter Biden corruption probe during his nomination hearing.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

The post Hiding Biden: How Democrats Crafted First Impeachment, Helping Defeat Trump With Media Help appeared first on The Political Insider.

Republicans are afraid that Trump’s second impeachment trial is going to be ’embarassing’

Posted on February 5, 2021 by Mark Sumner

Donald Trump has been impeached for his role in using lies and incendiary language, over a period of months, to subvert the 2020 election, obstruct the business of the nation, and “gravely endanger the security of the United States and its institutions.” Those articles of impeachment have been forwarded to the Senate, along with supporting documents, to show that Donald J. Trump is uniquely responsible for the Jan. 6 assault on the United States Capitol, and that his behavior on that day “was not an isolated event.”

Unsurprisingly, House impeachment managers intend to focus on exactly these issues: Trump’s words, actions, and inactions as they relate to violence on Jan. 6. That includes how Trump encouraged the presences of white nationalist militias, lied repeatedly about the outcome of the election in ways meant to inflame his supporters, drove the whole mass toward the Capitol, and stood aside in pleasure as insurgents swarmed the halls of Congress.

Just as expected is the response from Trump’s legal team and from Republicans in the Senate. Because they want to Trump’s second impeachment trial to be about anything other than the subject of his impeachment.

What Republicans would enjoy most, would be to spend the entire trial arguing technical points about 19th century cases to prove that Trump can’t be tried now that he’s out of office. Two or three days of debating the impeachment of Judge Mark Delahay (who resigned in 1873 in an effort to avoid being impeached for repeatedly showing up in court drunk) or Secretary of War William Belknap (resigned in 1876 to get ahead of an impeachment for selling a government appointment) would suit them right down to the ground. Republicans would sincerely love to spend a few days putting America to sleep with the inside story of the Grant administration.

That tactic has already been on display in the vote forced by Sen. Rand Paul, in which all but five Republicans voted to just skip the entire trial. It also forms three-quarters of the response to the House impeachment from Donald Trump’s legal team, which would clearly love to spend their time talking about What Would Jefferson Do?

That’s because, as Politico reports, talking about the actual events of Jan. 6, and Donald Trump’s actions that led to men in paramilitary garb searching through the House chamber for hostages could be deeply embarrassing to Republicans. As eternal Trump advisor Steve Bannon notes, “The Democrats have a very emotional and compelling case. They’re going to try to convict him in the eyes of the American people and smear him forever.”

Yes. Because showing Trump’s words next to the results is “very emotional and compelling.” And there’s absolutely no doubt that the House impeachment managers will be pitching their case directly to the public, perhaps even more than to the senators seated in the chamber. After all, barring the discovery of Donald Trump’s fingerprints on the pipe bomb left outside the RNC, it’s highly unlikely that 17 Republican senators will suddenly recover their morality. The best thing that the House team might be able to do, in the sense of preventing Trump from continuing to be a source of divisiveness and damage for the nation, is to give the public a powerful reminder of just how Trump created the insurgency.

That’s why House impeachment managers are working to assemble a video presentation that will put together words and events on Jan. 6. Rather than working with producers who have done documentaries or political ads, the team has been reportedly working with producers of videos used at criminal trials.

As The Washington Post reports, exactly how the trial will play out remains unclear. In Trump’s first impeachment, Republican control of the Senate allowed Mitch McConnell to define most of the proceedings, that included holding a vote to cut off the possibility of hearing from any witnesses. But Sen. Chuck Schumer is not bound by any of those past decisions. House impeachment managers could well choose to call witnesses, in spite of various “threats” from Republicans that calling any witnesses could lead to a drawn-out proceeding. A drawn-out proceeding that keeps hammering at Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy doesn’t seem like something that should concern Democrats.

And, as much as Trump’s attorney’s would love to keep the Senate buried in old citations and out of context statements from the constitutional convention, their own response opens the door to exactly the kind of pounding that Senate Republicans don’t want to see—one in which every one of Donald Trump’s false statements about the election gets hauled out for review. That’s because the response to the House managers included a statement from Trump saying that not only could no one prove he had lied, but he claimed to have won the election.

When it comes to the case that the impeachment managers would like to make, Law & Crime details exactly the points they need to hit to make their case. Key among the things that the managers need to emphasize is this point from the articles of impeachment: “[Trump’s] belief that he won the election—regardless of its truth or falsity (though it is assuredly false)—is no defense at all for his abuse of office.”

It doesn’t matter if Trump believes his own lies. That doesn’t excuse his actions in undercutting American institutions or encouraging violent action. Trump can be as upset by his defeat as he likes—many other election losers were also upset. But whether it was Andrew Jackson or Al Gore, “all of these Presidential candidates accepted the election results and acquiesced to the peaceful transfer of power required by the Constitution.”

Trump’s situation is unique. And his despicable actions deserve to be uniquely punished. If the Senate Republicans have already stopped their ears to the truth, that case will be made to the public.

If Republicans are embarrassed, it’s because they should be.

The Impeachment Trial’s Stacked Deck

Posted on February 5, 2021 by John Yoo and Robert Delahunty

Trump should receive a fair chance to present the facts and legal arguments of his defense.

WATCH LIVE: Trump’s second impeachment trial begins in Senate

Posted on February 5, 2021 (Updated February 9, 2021) by Eric Tucker, Associated Press

House Democrats prosecuting the case told senators they were presenting "cold, hard facts" against Trump, who is charged with inciting the mob siege of the Capitol to overturn the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump rejects request to testify at his impeachment trial

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Meredith Lee

Former president Donald Trump quickly rejected a request by House impeachment managers on Thursday to testify at his upcoming Senate impeachment trial. Lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., sent a letter to the former president's attorneys on Thursday requesting Trump testify before or during his impeachment trial, which begins next Tuesday. Raskin wrote that Trump's testimony was necessary after he disputed the "factual allegations" of the House's Article of Impeachment, which asserts Trump incited...

Nebraska GOP Drafts Resolution to Censure Ben Sasse Before Impeachment-Trial Vote

Posted on February 4, 2021 by John McCormack

Sasse responds: The Capitol riot ‘happened because the president lied to you.’

Trump Team Responds to Democrats’ Request for Former President’s Impeachment Testimony

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Zachary Evans

Trump's trial is set to begin this coming week, after the House voted to impeach the former president for ‘incitement of insurrection.’

Rep. Jamie Raskin invites Trump to speak at his own Senate trial. Trump’s attorneys quickly say no

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Mark Sumner

Ever since Democrats began talking of impeaching Donald Trump for the second time, Republicans in the Senate have been sweating the idea of having to actually confront witnesses. In the first trial, where Mitch McConnell had control over everything that happened, Republicans were happy to just vote away the possibility of any witnesses being called. In this second round, they don’t have that option. So instead their only play has been making threats. If Democrats call a single witness, the Republicans will call the FBI to testify about how the insurgency was planned in advance. If Democrats call a single witness, Republicans will something something Kamala Harris.

There are a number of reasons why these threats are laughable. First, calling the FBI to talk about the pre-planning that went into the assault on the Capitol would only reinforce how Trump radicalized his base. Second, Republicans don’t get to call anyone—it’s Trump’s legal team that gets to request witnesses, and nothing at all says they will play along with a scheme that could hurt their client. Third, the threat is coming from Lindsey Graham and that’s always laughable.

And now it seems that lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin has already asked a witness to appear in the Senate trial. He’s issued an invite to one … Donald J. Trump.

Raskin’s letter gets started quickly by pointing out that Trump has already been impeached (for a second time), is about to be tried in the Senate (for a second time), and has sent a response to the House impeachment managers. Wisely, Raskin just skips right back the first three fourths of that response—which is the part where Trump’s attorney’s attempt to make a case that an impeachment trial after the end of a term is unconstitutional—and gets right down to the one part of the reply that Trump clearly dictated himself. The part where Trump denies that he ever lied and claims no one can actually say for sure that he didn’t win.

Two days ago, you filed an Answer in which you denied many factual allegations set forth in the articles of impeachment. You have thus attempted to put critical facts at issue notwithstanding the clear and overwhelming evidence of your constitutional offence. In light of your disputing these factual allegations, I write to invite you to provide testimony under oath, either before or during the Senate impeachment trial, concerning your conduct on Jan. 6, 2021.

Raskin goes on to point out that both Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton provided testimony under oath while they were still in office. And, for an extra tweak of Trump’s bronzer-coated nose, Raskin adds “whereas a sitting president might raise concerns about distraction from their official duties, that concern is clearly inapplicable here.” In other words, since you’re not doing anything anyway ...

It would be easy to read the entire letter as an extended joke. After all, Trump’s legal team will surely make it clear to him that sitting down to defend his actions on January 6 would be a bad thing. That would be a day when Trump started out partying down while Rudy Giuliani was calling for “trial by combat,” took the stage to once again tell his followers that the election was being stolen and that he would march with them to the Capitol, returned to the White House to wonder why no one else was getting excited about the insurgency, failed to respond to requests for military assistance, and stepped out to tell the terrorists occupying the Capitol that “we love you” and “you’re very special.” Trump raising his hand to testify would be an abysmally misguided idea.

On the other hand, like everyone else, Raskin knows Donald Trump way too well at this point. Throwing down the gauntlet like this, complete with a few obvious digs, is exactly the kind of thing that could make Trump angry and his legal team terrified.

If you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on Jan. 6, 2021

In other words: If you’re too big a chicken to show up, we’ll know you’re a liar.

The odds against Trump taking up the challenge are astronomically high. But Raskin deserves a round of applause for throwing this out there. The proposal here is exactly the kind of ploy that a third-rate third-grade bully like Trump would understand in only one way—Democrats are calling him a coward and a liar.

That’s unlikely to lever his rear into a witness chair. But who knows, it might.

Thursday, Feb 4, 2021 · 8:56:26 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Trump’s lead attorneys (at this moment) have responded to Raskin’s letter.

“We are in receipt of your latest public relations stunt,” write Bruce Castor and David Schoen. Then they delightfully state both that there can’t be a negative inference in the trial, and that the trial is unconstitutional before finishing up with “this use of our Constitution to bring a purported impeachment proceeding is much too serious to play these games.”

What they don’t say is whether or not Trump has seen the letter.

Democrats Demand Trump Testify At Senate Impeachment Trial

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Rusty Weiss

House impeachment managers sent a letter to Donald Trump strongly suggesting the former president testify at the Senate impeachment trial.

The trial, slated to begin on Tuesday of next week, involves a charge from the House that Trump incited a mob of supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

A formal response from Trump’s lawyers “denied” that he “ever engaged in a violation of his oath of office,” and instead he, “at all times acted to the best of his ability to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD) essentially defied Trump to prove his innocence in his own words.

“In light of your disputing these factual allegations, I write to invite you to provide testimony under oath, either before or during the Senate impeachment trial, concerning your conduct on January 6, 2021,” Raskin wrote.

The Democrat then argued that not testifying would be used against him.

“If you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021,” added Raskin.

5) Impeachment mgrs: “If you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021.”

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) February 4, 2021

Lindsey Graham – Not Likely Trump Will Testify at Impeachment Trial

Forbes reporter Andrew Solender tweeted a response from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in which he dismissed Raskin’s demand as little more than a “political ploy.”

“I don’t think that would be in anybody’s interest,” Graham said according to Solender, adding that it would be a “nightmare for the country.”

“This is just a political showboat move. They didn’t call him in the House,” Graham pointed out.

Raskin’s letter attempts to argue that there is precedent for Presidents testifying at their impeachment trial.

“Presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton both provided testimony while in office—and the Supreme Court held just last year that you were not immune from legal process while serving as President—so there is no doubt that you can testify in these proceedings,” he said.

Raskin is seemingly unaware that Trump is no longer the President.

Solender reports that Graham spoke to the former President a couple of days ago and he’s in “pretty good spirits, trying to get adjusted to his new life.”

Lindsey Graham says Dems asking Trump to testify is a “political ploy,” per Hill pool. “I don’t think that would be in anybody’s interest,” he says, calling it a “nightmare for the country” and predicting Trump won’t do it.

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) February 4, 2021

A Political Ploy

Raskin’s letter is rich, not only with political ploys but with irony. Tremendously thick irony, at that.

The Maryland Democrat is “guilty” of the very same thing he is tasked with proving is a high crime and misdemeanor in Trump’s impeachment trial.

Raskin objected to the certification of Florida’s electoral votes in 2017. In fact, House Democrats tried objecting to the certification of electoral votes for Donald Trump that year on 11 separate occasions.

Lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin objected to Florida’s electoral votes in 2017. pic.twitter.com/FsLvJLvA8v

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) January 13, 2021

One could argue, using the Democrat party’s own standard today, that the constant insistence that Trump didn’t really win the election in 2016 led to an incitement of violence on inauguration day.