Will They Impeach Trump?
Disregard all the dramatic accusations in and around the whistleblower’s complaint; they’re just guff. The whole thing hinges on Trump’s own words in the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president — is he demanding foreign interference in the 2020 election or is he asking an ally to run down unethical actions by a man who might become president (here’s a 2018 letter from the Dems asking Ukraine to help them investigate Trump to compare it to)? Or is it mostly just Trump running his mouth off in a rambling, often disconnected stream-of-consciousness phone call that means very little?
If you read Trump’s words as impeachable you are asking to impeach on something that was talked about but never happened. Ukraine never handed over dirt on Biden. Trump never even asked Attorney General Barr to contact Ukraine. Rudy Giuliani may or may not have had meetings with someone but no one is claiming anything of substance happened. There is no evidence military aid was withheld in return for anything. If nothing happened then nothing happened. You need a body on the ground for a smoking gun to matter.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice already adjudicated the whistleblower complaint before the thing was leaked to the Washington Post. The original complaint was passed from the Intelligence Community Inspector General to DOJ, who determined there was no crime and closed the case. Officials found the transcript did not show Trump violated campaign finance laws by soliciting a thing of value, such as the investigation, from a foreign national. Even as Democrats bleat DOJ is corrupt, at some point during any impeachment they will need to make clear what evidence they found to find crime where DOJ did not. No one is above the law, sure, but which law exactly are we talking about please?
Trump is apparently not any better at cover-ups than he is at extortion. He got no dirt on Biden even as the Ukraine pocketed its aid money (Ukraine in fact knew nothing about the aid being frozen while Trump supposedly was shaking them down), and his so-called cover-up concluded with him releasing in unprecedented fashion both the complaint and the transcript. For a cover up to even begin you have to have something to cover, and a phone call that led nowhere doesn’t need to be covered up. In fact, it was not. It’s on the internet now.
But the complaint says the transcript was moved from one secure computer server inside the White House to an even more secure server. That’s a cover-up! Not discussed is Congress had no more access to the first server than the second. Exactly who was blocked from seeing the transcript when it was on the more secure system who would have had access to it otherwise? It seems the main person who suddenly couldn’t grab the transcript was the whistleblower. To make this all work, Democrats have to argue for less cybersecurity, or impeach for over-classification. And of course the Obama administration also stored records of select presidential phone calls on the exact same server.
Bottom line: Trump asked the Ukrainian president to take calls from Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani to talk about corruption, a bilateral issue since the Obama administration with or without Hunter Biden. There was no quid pro quo. Maybe a good scolding is deserved, but sloppy statesmanship is not high crimes and misdemeanors.
Something else is wrong. The whistleblower is a member of the intel community (NYT says CIA), but the text does not read the way government people write. It sounds instead like an Op-Ed, or a mediocre journalist “connecting the dots,” a Maddow exclusive combining anonymous sources with dramatic conclusions. Sure, maybe the whistleblower had help writing it, that’s not the point. The point is the complaint was written for the media. It was written to be leaked. It wasn’t even about an intelligence matter. Maybe that’s why DOJ quickly rejected its accusations, and why at the same time both the NYT and HuffPo praised the writing, commenting on how much clearer the complaint was compared to Mueller’s legalese.
And that’s a problem. A whistleblower complaint is meant to point out violations of law or regulation in the language of prosecutors. It is legalese. A complaint requires data and references; having written such a thing myself, the evidence I needed to explain waste in Iraq reconstruction ended up over 230 published pages. Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers originally ran into multiple volumes to prove the government lied about Vietnam. Ed Snowden needed terabytes of data to demonstrate NSA illegality.
If the whistleblower really is an analyst he is not a very good one, mixing second hand sources with public ones to mimic a weary Dem narrative of foreign election help much like the Steele Dossier. The complainant witnessed nothing himself and produced no primary documents. The sourcing is as vague as “more than half a dozen officials have informed me of various facts.” No law is cited because none applied; the whistleblower simply recorded his interpretation into bullet points, like the punchlines from Russiagate no one laughed at.
The whistleblower’s expected testimony will be played as high drama but actually is meaningless; he has an opinion but his accusations were made without hearing the call or reading the transcript. At least he’s in good company: Nancy Pelosi declared her support for impeachment before she had heard the call or seen the transcript.
Something suspicious also underlies the complaint. Had the whistleblower filed a week earlier there would be no impeachment inquiry as we have it now. The intelligence community whistleblower rules under which all this is taking place were significantly amended only days before the Ukraine complaint to allow the second hand information the complaint was entirely based on. As of the date of the call itself such a complaint would have been rejected; see the old intake form which required first-hand information. Then, just days before the complaint was filed, the form and rules were changed to allow second hand information (here’s the new form) and thus give the writer whistleblower protections, including anonymity. The rules changed concurrent with this case to actually allow it to reach national prominence.
Here’s where things stand. After three years of trying to keep Trump from assuming office, then cycling through ways to throw him out this plops onto the field. If an impeachment vote comes, it will literally be with Trump having only a few months left in his term. This is no longer about overturning 2016, it is about circumventing 2020, fear by the Democrats of what will happen if they let the deplorables vote again. Is the Dem slate that weak? They are acting as if they have nothing to lose by trying impeachment.
Pity Nancy Pelosi, who tried to hold back her colleagues. Now instead of answering the needs of constituents, Democrats will instead exploit their majority in the House to hold hearings likely leading to a show vote that would have embarrassed Stalin. History will remember Pelosi as the mom who, after putting up with the kids’ tantrums for hours demanding ice cream, finally gives in only a few blocks from home. She’ll regret spoiling dinner later that night over a hefty glass of white wine but what could she do, they just wouldn’t shut up and her nerves were shot. Have you had to listen to AOC complain from the back seat for two hours in traffic?
The last thing Joe Biden needed was more baggage; it’ll take awhile for him to realize it but he’s done, doomed by kompromat never actually found. Impeachment will so dominate the media no one will listen to whatever the other primary Dems have to say; Kamala Harris in the midst of all this was so desperate for attention she was still trying to drum up support for impeaching Brett Kavanaugh. Warren will emerge as the nominee. Goodbye then to all the minor Dems, see you in 2024, perhaps running against Mike Pence after Trump’s second term.
The case is weak, though with their House majority the Dems may indeed impeach the president just months ahead of an election, based on a partisan interpretation of a few words to a minor world leader. Impeachment didn’t even come up in the last Democratic debate, yet heading into the early caucuses the faces of the party will be Adam Schiff and the agita-driven Hillary. Democrats are taking that road instead of talking about jobs, health care, immigration or any of the other issues voters do care about.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent.
