Senator Chris Coons noted the following this morning about the other astonishing argument coming from the president’s defense team yesterday.
So – I asked the President’s lawyers a simple question: does the President agree with the statement in your brief, that foreigners’ involvement in American elections is illegal? This is where it gets disturbing.
Patrick Philbin, a member of the President’s legal team, started by dodging the question, but then, he said something that made my jaw drop: he said, effectively, that it’s OK for the President to accept and then use dirt on other candidates that he gets from foreign countries.
Here’s the exact quote: “I think that the idea that any information that happens to come from overseas is necessarily campaign interference is a mistake.”
And: “Information that is credible that potentially shows wrongdoing by someone who happens to be running for office, if it’s credible information, is relevant information for the voters to know about for people to be able to decide on who is the best candidate for an office.”
This is the President’s counsel, on the floor of the United States Senate, saying that it’s OK for the President to use information from foreign governments, including hostile ones, to get elected.
Let’s be clear about what Russia and China just heard – an invitation.
Russia’s listening – they’re hearing loud and clear that they should continue to help the President’s campaign.
China’s listening, too: they’re hearing loud and clear that they can get away with helping President Trump with his re-election campaign, and it might help them in their trade negotiations with us.
Regardless of what happens in this impeachment trial – we can’t let this slide.
To which the Republicans respond, “waddaya gonna do about?”
Everyone needs to think hard about what is happening here. The president’s team isn’t saying that the president was wrong to do what he did but it doesn’t rise to the level of a high crime. That’s ridiculous too but it’s defensible. The definition of a High Crime is purposefully vague. What this Philbin and Dershowitz (which I posted below) are saying is that anything a president does to secure his own election is perfectly legal.
Dershowitz made the broad claim to that effect and Philbin made the narrower one, but it adds up to the same thing.
So, going forward, if Donald Trump wants to ask Vladimir Putin next time he sees him to hack into private emails and disseminate the information in order to bolster his campaign, that would be perfectly fine. In fact, he can do it right out in the open because it’s now ok to do this if the president believes it’s “relevant” for the people to know. As Dershowitz says, a president’s re-election is, by definition, in the national interest in his mind, which means it’s not impeachable.
Imagine the second term now that the Republicans have shown that they are prepared to allow him to do anything, no matter what, because he is a very stable genius whose every thought, whim and impulse is, by definition, in the national interest.
So go for it Trump. The Republican Party celebrates your reign. They are staging a massive cover-up of what you did while at the same time putting forward the argument that what you did is perfectly constitutional. Your acquittal is validation that you have a green light to do anything you choose.