Former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman advocates making Donald J. Trump, private citizen, the star witness in his impeachment trial for inciting an insurrection. Akerman made the case on CNN last weekend.
This morning Akerman takes that case to the New York Daily News. To have any hope of getting enough Republicans to vote to convict, House managers need to be compelling and succinct in making their case. They should shake up the trial immediately and enlist Trump to make it for them:
The House prosecutors would be able to confront Trump with videos and tweets of his lies claiming widespread fraud in the election. Trump will be forced to admit that he made those statements. In response to each lie, the prosecutors can then present Trump with the many court decisions that found there was in fact no widespread fraud. As to those court decisions decided by a Trump appointee, Trump can be asked if he is aware that he had appointed the judge who wrote the opinion.
Trump can also be examined on his efforts to change the vote in Georgia, using his recorded conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In that conversation, Trump in veiled threats implored him to find 11,780 votes to make Trump the winner of Georgia’s electoral votes. Trump will have to admit that the recording accurately reflects what he said, including his statement that Raffensperger was taking a “big risk” by not finding those extra votes.
For an ordinary defendant and an ordinary jury that might make sense.
Akerman’s strategy assumes, of course, that Trump would actually honor a subpoena and not order his ragtag band of attorney-supplicants to fight it, pointlessly or not. It assumes that if Trump shows up to testify that he would not make an impossibly hostile witness, that he would not either refuse to cooperate or use the platform to make his own case that he was horribly treated. By Democrats. By Bill Barr. By the “fake news” media. By Twitter. By state officials he could not bend to his will.
Then consider Republicans among the jury. Many of the same senators in Trump’s first impeachment trial took a solemn oath before the chief justice of the Supreme Court to render impartial judgment. Senator-supplicants like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Here is Graham on Tuesday commenting on the controversy surrounding Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
David Neiwert of Daily Kos (formerly with the Southern Poverty Law Center) on Tuesday reposted an account of the trial of Elizabeth and Marc Hokoana for felony assault with a deadly weapon. At a Seattle protest against Milo Yiannopoulos on January 20, 2017, Elizabeth Hokoana had shot and seriously wounded a 34-year-old antifascist named Joshua Dukes who, Neiwert observed, was engaged in peacekeeping. Dukes was standing feet away from Neiwert, there to report on the event. Neiwert became a key witness.
The judge declared a mistrial after it became clear that three jurors refused to acknowledge clear evidence of guilt and would not budge:
“The jury was biased,” its foreman, a man named Luke, told The Seattle Times. He said that, during deliberations, he had requested a repeat viewing for the entire jury of an informational video about bringing bias into the jury chambers, but “it didn’t do any good” for a small handful of jurors who “sympathized and held similar views” to those of the Hokoanas.
[…]
One of the jurors approached Raam Wong afterward in an effort to set the record straight. She told him that the jury’s deliberations were tainted from the outset by the three Trumpites, led by one particularly bellicose male: “I guess from the very first moment he just kind of sunk his heels in, and said there’s no way in hell I’m going to ruin this woman’s life because of some antifa ringleader who he thought he was human trash and probably deserved to be shot.”
What would it take to move Republican senators who already proved they can ignore or explain away compelling evidence and convict in Trump’s second impeachment trial? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke Monday night of her ordeal during the Capitol assault. One of the men arrested for the Capitol assault threatened to assassinate her. Republican members must fear the AOC treatment from Trump supporters. Insurrectionists wanted to hang then-vice president Mike Pence on Jan. 6.
The Republican Party that once regularly accused the left of moral relativism has for years practiced it. Truth is situational. They long ago abandoned any claimed moral high ground and American principles for whatever it takes to retain power, including pledging fealty to the Seven Deadly Sins on two legs. That man cannot tell the truth, especially if conflicts with his need to armor his fragile ego against the label of loser.
I wish Akerman’s strategy could work, but I am not hopeful.