This past week, House Democrats leading an impeachment investigation heard from an array of witnesses to Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo plot — and the Trump administration is seemingly going with the attempted “defense” of refusing to acknowledge a word of it. This weekend on Face The Nation, longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway insisted that not a single witness had provided details confirming presidential bribery, extortion, or even a quid pro quo covering military aid for Ukraine — but that is, quite simply, a gross mischaracterization of the situation. She didn’t stop there, though — she also made up that there’s some widespread unease among Dems as to the solidness of their case.
Conway said:
‘If it does go a trial in the Senate — and that’s not certain right now, you’ve got a lot of Democrats wringing their hands that they did not see, as Will Hurd, a moderate Republican who’s retiring this year, said he did not see overwhelming, compelling, clear, and convincing evidence. Many of those Democrats, especially the ones who represent the 31 Trump-Pence districts from ’16 — they have to go back home and say, I know I promised to lower to… keep this great economy going on… but we’re busy impeaching a president, and they’re getting blowback for that.’
Watch:
NEWS: @KellyannePolls tells @margbrennan the White House is preparing for a Senate trial, but doesn’t rule out that House Democrats may not vote on articles of impeachment. “We’re preparing for both eventualities,” she says. https://t.co/91kl5Jy5W6 pic.twitter.com/FgHq39qwSK
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) November 24, 2019
To be clear, no matter how many times that Conway and those around her claim there’s some kind of mounting opposition to the impeachment inquiry — around one out of every two Americans supports it. One out of every two!
Conway’s latest attempted defense of just completely ignoring the reality of the situation comes as Trump and those closest to him are preparing for the reality of a trial in the Senate following the approval of articles of impeachment by the House. She added to host Margaret Brennan:
‘We know what they didn’t see… they didn’t hear anybody say, when they were asked: bribery, no. Extortion, no. Quid pro quo for the aid, no. Preconditions for meeting — did the president commit a crime? No, no, no, every time. The closest they got to it was Sondland in his prepared remarks saying he thought there was a quid pro quo for a meeting… They got their aid.’
To be clear — Sondland, who says he has spoken with the president almost two dozen times, included the military aid in his account of the quid pro quo exchange scheme that hinged on Ukraine producing dirt on Trump’s domestic political opponents.
At other points in the testimony, when committee members demanded that witnesses provide a simple yes or no answer to complicated legal questions like whether the president is guilty of bribery, they said they weren’t lawyers — not that the president was innocent and they had nothing.
That didn’t stop Conway from seizing on the smallest details and inflating them with mountains of lies. Trump has already spent plenty of his own time responding to the inquiry. On the day that Sondland testified, he shouted at reporters outside the White House for minutes on end, insisting that he was innocent because of a phone conversation he supposedly had with Sondland in which Trump said he was innocent. In other words, Trump wants us to believe he didn’t do it just because he said so.
