Analysis: The 5 most interesting Q&As from the Senate impeachment trial, so far
Aaron Blake 1 hr ago
Senate trial: Senators grill the House impeachment managers and Trump defense team
The Senate impeachment trial entered a new phase Wednesday, the first of two days in which senators can question President Trump’s legal team or the House impeachment managers in writing.
Below are a few of the most interesting exchanges from the day.
1. Trump legal team says even if Trump was trying to help his reelection bid, that’s okay
© Senate Television via AP In this image from video, Alan Dershowitz, an attorney for President Donald Trump, answers a question during the impeachment trial against Trump in the Senate on Jan. 29, 2020.
The first question came from the all-important triumvirate of Sens. Mitt Romney (Utah), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) — the three most likely GOP votes for new witnesses. It was about what the senators should do if they deduce that Trump had both official and personal motives for his actions regarding Ukraine.
Deputy White House Counsel Patrick Philbin responded with a very broad assertion: that regardless of personal motives, as long as Trump had an official motive, “we think it follows even more clearly that cannot possibly be the basis for an impeachable offense.” Philbin argued that senators would then be put in the position of trying to deduce how much of a motive for a decision was personal vs. official.
Then Philbin added, perhaps more interestingly, that it was impossible to completely separate personal motives from such decisions.
“All elected officials to some extent have in mind how their conduct, how their decisions, their policy decisions, will affect the next election,” Philbin maintained. “There’s always some personal interest in the electoral outcome of policy decisions. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s part of representative democracy.”
There is no doubt this calculation often factors into lawmakers’ decisions. But “always”?
Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz later expanded on that argument, saying that even a president trying to help his own reelection bid could be construed as working in the public interest.
“If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz said.
That’s a remarkable claim.
You could also deduce from the question a possible off-ramp for Romney, Collins and Murkowski to vote to acquit Trump: the idea that he may have been trying to help himself, yes, but that he also had official, legitimate motivations.
2. Philbin says trading information with foreign actors is also okay
© Senate Television via AP In this image from video, White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin answers a question during the impeachment trial on Jan. 29, 2020.
Dershowitz was nabbing headlines for much of the day for the way he broadened Trump’s defense, but Philbin near the end of Wednesday’s proceedings made another bold claim. He responded to a question from Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) about whether Trump considers foreign interference illegal, and Philbin pushed a legal defense we haven’t heard before.
“Mere information is not something that would violate the campaign finance laws,” Philbin said. “And if there is credible information, credible information of wrongdoing by someone who is running for a public office, it’s not campaign interference for credible information about wrongdoing to be brought to light.” At the next break, Democratic senators responded in awe that a White House lawyer just suggested this. Receiving “a thing of value” in a campaign from foreign actors is illegal, and House managers brought it up quickly on the floor after that.
“I’m stunned,” said Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark R. Warner (D-Va.).
“I was stunned to hear that now, apparently, it’s okay for the president to get information from foreign governments in an election,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), one of the House managers. “That’s news to me.”
“We’ve witnessed over the course of the last few days and the long day today, a remarkable lowering of the bar to the point now where everything’s okay as long as the president believes it’s in his reelection interest,” Schiff said.
3. Trump’s team unaware of any early Trump concerns about Bidens in Ukraine
Another interesting exchange — perhaps not coincidentally — also began with a question from Collins and Murkowski.
They asked Trump’s legal defense team whether they had any indication that Trump was concerned about the Bidens’ actions in Ukraine before Biden became a candidate for president. And Trump’s lawyers had nothing.
“It wasn’t thoroughly pursued in the record,” Philbin said. “So I can’t point to something in the record that shows President Trump at an earlier time mentioning specifically something related to Joe or Hunter Biden.”
Philbin added, though, that there was evidence of Trump mentioning corruption in Ukraine before then: “It is in the record that he spoke to [now-former Ukrainian] President [Petro] Poroshenko twice about corruption in the Ukraine, both in June of 2017 and again in September of 2017.”
There has been plenty of evidence that Trump’s interest in corruption is very specific and self-serving; the only two investigations in Ukraine he has called for, for instance, involve his own pet political causes. And the answer Collins and Murkowski elicited drove that home.
If we’re reading the tea leaves again here, it also suggests Collins and Murkowski might be skeptical of the argument that Trump wasn’t looking out only for himself with his actions. The fact that they asked the question sure seems to point in that direction.
4. Manchin’s scorching question for Dershowitz
One of the most likely potential crossover votes on the Democratic side is Sen. Joe Manchin III, who comes from very pro-Trump West Virginia.
But Manchin took his turn, at one point, to offer a question of Trump’s legal team that oozed with sarcasm.
After noting the legal consensus that the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” clause doesn’t require statutory crimes and that this was the case dating back to English common law, he then turned his focus on Dershowitz.
Slide 1 of 50: Lead manager House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) addresses a question from senators during the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump in this frame grab from video shot in the U.S. Senate Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 29, 2020. U.S. Senate TV/Handout via Reuters
1/50 SLIDES © U.S. Senate TV/Handout/Reuters
Lead manager House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff addresses a question from senators during the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump in this frame grab from video shot in the U.S. Senate Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 29.
“Even Mr. Dershowitz said in 1998 that an impeachable offense, quote, certainly doesn’t have to be a crime, end quote,” Manchin wrote, before asking Dershowitz: “What has happened in the past 22 years to change the original intent of the Framers and the historic meaning of the term high crimes and misdemeanors?” Rather than dwell upon Manchin’s shot at him, Dershowitz just addressed his own personal evolution on the subject.
“What happened since 1998 is that I studied more, did more research, read more documents and, like any academic, altered my views,” Dershowitz said. “That’s what happens. That’s what professors ought to do.”
The question by itself was something. That it came from Manchin was something more.
5. Schiff’s quid pro quo analogy using Romney
When Dershowitz said the quote noted above, he was asked — leadingly — about whether it is “true that quid pro quos are often used in foreign policy?” Dershowitz said yes and used an analogy involving Middle East policy. Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager, though, was given a chance to respond to the loaded question and Dershowitz’s response. He pointed to the holes in that line of argument — namely, that not all quid pro quos are created equal. The problem, as Democrats have argued frequently, is when the quid pro quo is a corrupt quid pro quo.
And to make his case, Schiff used an analogy involving, perhaps not coincidentally, Romney. He took the event Republicans have often complained about — President Barack Obama telling then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on a hot mic in 2012 that he would have more “flexibility” to deal with missile defense after the election — and inserted Romney.
Schiff painted the picture: “President Obama on an open mic says to Medvedev: ‘Hey, Medvedev, I know you don’t want me to send this military money to Ukraine because they’re fighting and killing your people. I want you to do me a favor, though. I want you to do an investigation of Mitt Romney, and I want you to announce you’ve found dirt on Mitt Romney. And if you’re willing to do that, quid pro quo, I won’t give Ukraine the money they need to fight you on the front line.’ ”
Schiff added: “Do any of us have any question that Barack Obama would be impeached for that kind of misconduct? Are we really ready to say that would be okay if Barack Obama asked Medvedev to investigate his opponent and would withhold money from an ally that it needed to defend itself to get an investigation of Mitt Romney? That’s the parallel here.”
Schiff is inferring a quid pro quo from Trump’s “do us a favor, though” comment on his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it’s worth noting, and the transcript isn’t totally clear that was Trump’s intent. Still, the use of an analogy involving Romney seemed a clear effort to illustrate the case — perhaps to Romney himself.
Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) later asked Schiff about another Romney hypothetical: If Romney’s son worked for a corrupt Russian company, would it be okay for President Obama to ask Russia to investigate? Schiff responded that the hypothetical was apples and oranges because it didn’t include a potentially corrupt purpose, as he argues exists in the case of Trump.