Last week, House Democrats concluded their initial round of public impeachment testimony, which included damaging evidence from figures ranging from top Ukraine diplomat Bill Taylor to E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland. This weekend in an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Trump ally Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) indicated that none of the evidence had swayed him. He offered up a completely nonsense attempted defense of the president’s behavior, at one point talking as if he was having a different (talking point-driven) conversation than the interviewer, Chris Wallace.
Wallace asked him for his opinion on the president’s behavior, and his initial response was a complaint about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — not an exaggeration.
Wallace ranted:
‘Here’s what I see. I think that Speaker Pelosi is acting in a manner that’s insincere, even by the standards of Congress. I think she is turning impeachment into a routine political weapon. I think nobody is above the law, but nobody is beneath it, and I find it unconscionable that they have not allowed the president to defend himself on the House side — can’t call witnesses, can’t offer rebuttal evidence. In terms of the substance, I think the quid pro quo is a red herring.’
Watch:
WATCH: Chris Wallace ask Senator John Kennedy (R) whether the president was focused on corruption generally in Ukraine or looking for dirt on Joe Biden. Check your local listings. #FNS #FoxNews #Impeachment #Politics pic.twitter.com/khhhNh5nfF
— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) November 24, 2019
To be abundantly clear, despite Trump lodging these complaints before, there is no precedent for Trump being able to call witnesses in the House portion of the impeachment proceedings. They’re gathering evidence — Congress has hearings all the time without presidential involvement. Trump just wants special treatment.
Kennedy went on to say that “according to Speaker Pelosi, President Trump asked for the investigation of a political rival” from Ukraine. That’s not “according to Speaker Pelosi”! That’s according to the publicly available evidence from the White House. Although desperate Republicans resorted to saying he’d been joking, at one point, Trump even said Ukraine and China should investigate the Bidens while standing in front of rolling cameras outside the White House. No matter Republicans’ attempted defenses, Chinese authorities took the demand seriously — they issued a statement saying they’d be launching no Biden investigation.
Kennedy’s apparent explanation is that Trump asked for an investigation of “possible corruption by someone who happens to be a political rival.” There is little to no substantive difference between that and the line he attributed to Pelosi. In both cases, according to the basic laws of the reality that some Republicans have completely dumped, Trump asked for an investigation of a political rival. It doesn’t matter if he made a show of focusing on the completely baselessly alleged corruption or the rival — he still did it.
Not only that, but he also asked for that investigation in exchange for military aid and a summit in D.C. for Ukraine. During his recent public testimony, Ambassador Sondland bluntly asserted that yes, there was that quid pro quo in place, and, in fact, “everyone was in the loop” about it. He had communication records to back him up implicating figures from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to now former Trump national security adviser John Bolton. Trump is not innocent just because he says so.
