The Trump team is consistently coming up desperately short in their attempts to counter House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. That continued this weekend, when on CNN’s State of the Union, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway had nothing but freakouts to offer when pressed about the basic facts of the situation, including a July phone conversation in which President Donald Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens. While repeatedly simply talking over the host, Conway employed tactics like spending minutes refusing to directly answer a single question. It was a clown show — although Conway did eventually admit that a quid pro quo had possibly happened.
Host Dana Bash asked at one point:
‘What I hear you saying — tell me if this is correct — is that what the president said in this call, which is all I’m trying to ask about right now, asking the Ukrainian leader to look into Joe Biden — that was appropriate?’
Conway did not answer the question. Instead, she launched into a tirade:
‘Joe Biden as a vice president stopping a prosecution that would have affected his son –‘
Bash countered:
‘He was also a political rival.’
Conway then tried to seemingly insist that Biden… isn’t a political rival of Trump?
She said:
‘No, the president mentioned 2016. He mentioned that.’
This went on. To be clear, Conway’s implication that former Vice President Joe Biden’s effort to get a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor fired is connected to the fact that he’d looked into a company Biden’s son worked for is baseless.
Dana Bash presses Kellyanne Conway on whether President Trump asking the Ukrainian leader to look into Joe Biden and his son is appropriate.
“It’s not impeachable,” Conway says. pic.twitter.com/r0hcYqoEpq
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) November 3, 2019
Asked again whether it’s “okay for the president of the United States to ask a foreign leader” for help in an election, Conway still did not answer the question, but instead, she rambled:
‘It’s not impeachable. Is that where we are now? Is that impeachable? Is it a high crime or misdemeanor?… I feel comfortable saying that he never mentioned 2020, quid pro quo, holding up aid, Joe Biden as his political rival — what the president said was people are talking about Joe Biden and his son. You’re darn right they were!’
The debacle continued. Bash eventually attempted to get the question across of whether military aid for Ukraine was held up in exchange for that Biden dirt, and instead of answering, Conway started ranting about conspiracy theories involving House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — although Bash did eventually get Conway to admit that she supposedly didn’t actually know whether the two things were tied together.
She railed:
‘They have the aid. They’re using the aid… I think if you’re going to do, respectfully, what Adam Schiff does, which is come out and cherrypick ten seconds or ten minutes of ten hours worth of testimony — we have no access to the full testimony, because everything’s been done in the dark in secret. That process has been flawed from the beginning.’
What? Bash asked her about a basic fact and she launched into a tirade about the supposedly “flawed process.” These people have got nothing.
Kellyanne Conway on whether or not military aid was held up because President Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden: “I don’t know. But I know they’ve got their aid” pic.twitter.com/SWqZtqD8D3
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) November 3, 2019
Their lack is symbolized well by the stunts Republicans have been pulling where they’ve simply barged in on protected impeachment proceedings, unsecured electronic devices in hand at one point.
