How the Republicans aided and abetted Donald Trump
I think we more or less knew this. But it’s good to see the details anyway:
Republican senators were more deeply involved in orchestrating President Donald Trump’s defense in his first impeachment trial than previously known, according to excerpts from a forthcoming book shared exclusively with HuffPost.
In “Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump,” due out Oct. 18, Politico’s Rachael Bade and The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian offer a behind-the-scenes look at the two failed efforts to remove Trump from political power.
The first attempt, which began in 2019 and culminated in an early-2020 Senate trial, dealt with Trump’s withholding of aid to Ukraine on the condition that the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The House impeached Trump for abuse of power, but the GOP-controlled Senate acquitted the president with just one Republican dissent: Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah.
Trump and his defense team maintained he did nothing wrong throughout the January 2020 trial and that no “quid pro quo” had taken place, even though he was caught on tape telling Zelenskyy to “do us a favor” by launching a probe of Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Former law professor Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer for Trump, went so far as to argue before the entire Senate that Trump could have done whatever he wanted to get himself reelected if he believed that his own reelection would be in the public interest, a sweeping claim of executive power.
The outlandish line of defense alarmed a number of Republican senators who sat in the chamber for weeks as “jurors” in the impeachment trial, according to “Unchecked.”
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told Trump’s team afterward to fire Dershowitz on the spot, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned them to switch tactics.
“Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one,” Cruz reportedly said at one point, contradicting what Republicans were saying publicly about the charges at the time.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also fumed at Trump’s legal team after they fumbled responding to a senator’s question about calling new witnesses. Trump’s attorneys said that it was simply too late to do so, a line Graham worried would lose Republican votes.
“We are FUCKED. We are FUCKED!” Graham, a top Trump ally, reportedly said afterward as he walked into the GOP cloakroom, a private chamber adjacent to the Senate floor.
Publicly, many GOP senators refrained from commenting on the substance of the proceedings, telling reporters doing so would be inappropriate because of their responsibility to remain neutral as jurors. But privately, the ineptitude of Trump’s legal team forced them to take matters into their own hands, Bade and Demirjian report.
Their goal was to convince a small group of moderate GOP senators to vote against hearing testimony from witnesses like Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who had claimed in a book that Trump specifically told him that he withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to obtain an investigation into Biden and his son. The book’s release had rattled the entire GOP conference.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell played a pivotal role in convincing GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to vote against hearing from witnesses in the trial ― an outcome he feared would split the caucus and cost it control of the Senate, but which ended up happening anyway in large part due to the man he was working to protect.
“This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” McConnell told his caucus, according to the book. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
Mitch McConnell literally cares about nothing but power. Nothing. Being Senate Majority Leader is his raison d’etre and he will do anything to accomplish it. He hates Trump and had many chances to put the final nail in his coffin but he always chose not to. Because he cares about nothing but power. And he would do it again.
I used to think that we might have some breathing room when all these old reactionaries shuffled off their mortal coils. But just look at what’s waiting in the wings.