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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): It certainly has been quite the news cycle, what with five impeachment hearings last week and a Democratic debate, so in light of the Thanksgiving holiday, this week we’re taking a step back to play a good old-fashioned game of buy/sell/hold with PredictIt prop bets (plus some I made up).

We’ll talk where impeachment is headed and our best guesses for what’s happening in the Democratic primary. PredictIt’s prices (given in cents) as of noon Eastern on Tuesday were translated into probabilities. (We know that’s not exactly right, but it’s close enough.)

And in case you forgot how to play buy/sell/hold

Buy means “I think the chances of this happening are higher than indicated.”

Sell means “I think they’re lower.”

Hold means “I’m a coward and am unwilling to take a stand.”

OK, to kick us off. Buy, sell or hold: President Trump will be impeached in his first term. (73 percent).

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): The chances of that happening are much higher than 73 percent. Probably like 95 percent. So I guess I’m buying? (This game always confuses me.)

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I would hold. I still think there is some chance Democrats back down — since the polling suggests support for impeachment remains divided along party lines. (So if you’re a Democrat in a district Trump won, being pro-impeachment is probably a controversial view among your constituents.) The House Judiciary Committee is having a hearing exploring the constitutional grounds for impeachment on Dec. 4, though, so it does suggest that Democrats haven’t gone too wobbly on the impeachment plan.

nrakich: Interesting, Perry!

Wouldn’t it look terrible for Democrats to back down at this stage? The polls haven’t changed much since the Ukraine scandal broke — but they’re much better for impeachment than they were before it broke. And impeachment is still more popular than it is unpopular.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): I think I’ll buy at that price, given that Democrats need 216 of their 233 members to vote yes (considering vacancies), but as Perry says, there are some Democrats who’ve sounded somewhat less certain recently.

For instance, Michigan Democratic Rep. Brenda Lawrence came out in favor of censure instead of impeachment, although she walked that back on Tuesday, saying she still supports impeachment.

nrakich: Hmm. I grant you that there are some Democratic members who might want to vote “no” on impeachment out of self-interest. But the self-interest for the Democratic Party as a whole is obviously not to say, “Our bad, the president we’ve been railing against as a criminal for three years actually isn’t a criminal after all.”

sarahf: We still need some more polls before we understand the effect of the hearings, but as FiveThirtyEight’s editor-in-chief Nate Silver pointed out, support overall is slowly ticking back upward. Now, that might not last, or it might just be noise, but as he says, it pushes back against this idea that what Democrats have done is wildly unpopular.

Finally getting a few more impeachment polls and the notion that the numbers are moving against Democrats isn't looking so hot. +4 spread on supporting impeachment/removal, which is similar to the peak in October.https://t.co/Tj71WyGT4x pic.twitter.com/S7iUHaRdlX

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 26, 2019

So I’d buy, too.

But OK. Buy, sell or hold: The Senate will convict Trump on impeachment in his first term. (13 percent)

perry: Sell. There is just no chance of a removal vote. None. Maybe Trump resigns if somehow impeachment support gets really high, but I don’t see Republicans voting for his removal. I don’t think there is any real chance Trump resigns either.

nrakich: I think the chances that the Senate removes Trump are not literally zero percent, but they aren’t as high as 13 percent. (I’d maybe say 5 percent?) So yeah, sell.

geoffrey.skelley: I would sell at 13 percent. It’s just such a high bar to get 20 Republicans to vote to remove Trump, which would be needed for removal, assuming all Democrats vote in favor. But as FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman wrote, if the GOP starts opposing Trump, it might be hard to predict in advance. It could happen fast and all at once.

sarahf: Right, and there’s not really any signs of congressional Republicans breaking with Trump at this point, right?

Or in other words, is there anything that would make you not sell at this point?

geoffrey.skelley: I mean, GOP Rep. Will Hurd was one of just 13 Republicans in the House to vote to oppose Trump’s national emergency declaration over the U.S.-Mexico border, but he’s on the Intelligence Committee and looks like a “no” on impeachment. If he’s not breaking, I’m not sure who will.

But if someone like Hurd was more open to impeachment, especially because he’s not running for reelection, I’d take that as a sign that a break with Trump might be possible.

nrakich: But even so, Hurd isn’t your average congressional Republican, and I don’t think there’s any sign of those average Republicans breaking with Trump, which is what would need to happen for removal.

geoffrey.skelley: I don’t have a probability, but buy, sell, hold: Two GOP senators vote to remove Trump from office.

perry: Sell. There could be one senator (Trump skeptic Mitt Romney of Utah) who votes for removal. But I think the more likely number is zero Republicans back removal.

nrakich: I agree. It’s more likely that a Democrat (i.e., Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia) votes not to remove than that a Republican votes to remove.

sarahf:

geoffrey.skelley: Oh, I like that take.

nrakich: Removing a president is just such a drastic step. Even if Romney or moderate Sen. Susan Collins disagree with the president, that doesn’t mean they would vote to oust him from office.

perry: I could definitely see Manchin and Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama voting against removal.

nrakich: Jones would be in a tricky place — he is actually not that moderate. But you’d have to think a vote to remove would be political suicide in Alabama.

perry: Exactly.

geoffrey.skelley: Given he’s trying to win reelection in a state Trump will probably carry by 20+ points, voting to remove might make his defeat a done deal.

perry: On the other hand, Jones may know he’s very likely to lose his reelection bid in 2020 anyway, so maybe he votes for removal because that’s his real view. He might assume he has a better chance of being selected as attorney general for a Democratic president in 2021 than winning another term in the Senate from Alabama. (Jones was the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 1997-2001.)

geoffrey.skelley: Maybe a yes vote by Jones is a sign he knows he’s a goner. A no vote signals he’s still in it to win it.

sarahf: But 56 percent of Americans said in our poll with Ipsos that Trump had committed an impeachable offense, and there were some Republicans, too, open to the idea of impeachment. You don’t think if public opinion continues to tick upward, that wouldn’t convince any Republican senator to break?

perry: But in our impeachment tracker, support for impeachment is at 12 percent among Republicans. Why would any Republican in Congress vote for impeachment?

geoffrey.skelley: To Sarah’s point, based on our poll with Ipsos, it looks like about 28 percent of Republicans might be open to impeachment if they come to believe Trump withheld aid or tried to cover it up, compared to the 11 to 12 percent of Republicans supporting impeachment in our tracker. But that still would mean 70 to 75 percent oppose impeachment, and a bunch of GOP senators don’t want to risk Republican voters’ wrath in primaries in 2020 (or in the future).

sarahf: OK, let’s leave impeachment alone for now — looks like there will be plenty more to speculate on soon enough with the first House Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for Dec. 4 — and move on to Democratic primary wagers.

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has been on a bit of an upswing lately. Strong performance in the last debate, some good polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the betting markets currently have him winning the Iowa caucuses (37 percent). Buy, sell or hold?

nrakich: Ooh, that’s a tough one. I guess I’d hold — I just don’t know what will happen, so I don’t have strong evidence to argue one way or another.

perry: Sell. I think Buttigieg is doing very well in Iowa. Perhaps he is the favorite there. But I would say he has a 30 percent chance to win the state, Warren a 25 percent chance, Biden and Sanders both a 20 percent shot and maybe a 5 percent chance for someone who is not one of those four.

geoffrey.skelley: I’m going to sell only because it seems like there are four candidates truly in the mix in Iowa, and I’m not sure anyone’s chances are above 30 percent out of the maybe 95 percent of outcomes that involve one of them winning.

Perry and I are very much on the same page!

sarahf: That’s interesting, Perry, regarding the order you’ve put the candidates in — PredictIt has it has Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren and then Biden in terms of their odds winning Iowa. So a bit more bullish for Sanders than I think the conventional wisdom holds, but right about where you’d expect Biden given his lackluster poll numbers in the state.

So tell me, since you and Geoff seem to be of the same mind, why do you think Sanders stands a chance of winning Iowa?

geoffrey.skelley: I think it mainly comes down to the fact that the vote could be sufficiently fragmented, and that means Sanders could win with 22 to 23 percent or something.

perry: I’m not really bullish on Sanders. I just think Buttigieg’s chances of winning Iowa are less than 37 percent.

geoffrey.skelley: The Democratic caucuses are also difficult to project because if a voter’s candidate isn’t clearing a certain threshold at their caucus site — usually 15 percent — that means a voter has to support another candidate who has cleared it. This is called the viability threshold, and it means that voters’ second-choice picks will be really important in Iowa, which is one reason Sanders could do so well. He is the backup pick for 13 percent of likely caucus goers, according to a CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll earlier this month.

sarahf: On that note, I’m going to go off book and give you all a wager from my ~mind~ (dangerous, I know). Let’s talk about how many candidates win 15 percent or more of the statewide vote in Iowa, which is the mechanism by which candidates win delegates (this is different than the viability threshold Geoff mentioned above, which looks at each caucus site individually — confusing, I know). Since 1992 when the 15 percent threshold was first introduced, there’s never been a primary or caucus (in Iowa or elsewhere) where four or more candidates have earned more than 15 percent of the statewide vote, but there have been many instances where three candidates have cleared it. So, first up — buy, sell, hold: Three candidates win 15 percent of the vote in Iowa this year (45 percent).

nrakich: Yes! I would buy that, Sarah. I think three candidates will win 15 percent or more. In fact, I think there’s a pretty decent chance that four will, which, as you note, would be unprecedented.

perry: I would buy three candidates getting to 15 percent in Iowa, and I think I would buy four candidates getting to 15 percent as well.

sarahf: What would you put those odds at, Nathaniel, for four candidates clearing it?

nrakich: Oh man, totally out of thin air … I’d say there’s like a 75 percent chance that at least three candidates exceed 15 percent, and a 30 percent chance that four candidates do.

sarahf: I don’t know. It’s hard for me to know whether to buy. Every four years as political journalists we go through this whole rigamarole where we salivate over the idea of a brokered convention.

So what makes you all think four candidates is a real possibility this year compared to say, 2016 on the GOP side, when things were also crowded?

nrakich: I mean, who knows if it would lead to a brokered convention. For one thing, a step like this is probably necessary but not sufficient for convention chaos.

But I think 2020 is different from 2016 because the polling shows that four candidates are already at or above 15 percent in Iowa right now — and that’s before the reallocation of all the lower-tier candidates’ supporters.

geoffrey.skelley: I’d argue, though, that we might see more movement before the caucuses that could lead one of the four leading candidates to slump and fall short of 15 percent, leaving us with only three candidates. Right now, that looks like Biden, but maybe it’s actually Warren or one of the others.

sarahf: OK, in the vein of candidates clearing thresholds statewide to win delegates … currently, Michael Bloomberg sits at 12 percent for winning the Democratic nomination, but I’m more interested in wagers on whether he wins a state (any state) on Super Tuesday. Again from my brain — bidders beware. Buy, sell, hold (5 percent).

perry: Buy. I think Bloomberg has the chance to do well. So. Much. Money.

nrakich: But, Perry, trying to buy political office doesn’t always work if voters simply aren’t interested in what you’re selling. That said, I think 5 percent is pretty low, so I’ll buy too.

I just think things are so unpredictable after the first four states.

Maybe Biden wins all four and the primary is effectively over by Super Tuesday, in which case I’d expect Bloomberg to get no traction. But maybe Buttigieg, Warren, Biden and Sanders each wins one early state and it’s a free-for-all!

geoffrey.skelley: I remain very skeptical of Bloomberg’s chances, though I see the case people are making. It’s possible that things are such a mess after the first four states that Bloomberg could swoop in and present himself as the solution to the chaos. But I think it’s far more likely that Bloomberg’s inability to appeal to Democrats keeps him from taking advantage even if that does happen. So I’m going to sell at 5 percent that he wins any Super Tuesday state.

sarahf: It’s just such an odd strategy to me that he’s decided to skip out on the first two early states to make up ground in the other states. You’ve looked at the historical numbers, Geoff — has this ever worked?

geoffrey.skelley: To be fair, there haven’t been that many times when candidates have openly minimized campaigning in the early states — or even skipped Iowa or New Hampshire outright. But it didn’t work for Henry “Scoop” Jackson in 1976, Al Gore in 1988 or Rudy Giuliani in 2008.

sarahf: I rest my case.

nrakich: I also would be more convinced of this if Bloomberg had said he’s going to go all out to win, say, Virginia.

But spreading his efforts across multiple Super Tuesday states might make it more likely that he comes in first place in none of them.

Now, you need to win more than just one Super Tuesday state to win the nomination, so I get why he’s not doing that. But come on, Bloomberg, why won’t you change your campaign strategy to go along with our prop bet???

sarahf: Haha OK, let’s end on where things stand overall in the 2020 primary. Elizabeth Warren has long been a favorite of the betting markets, but Joe Biden is actually in the lead at the moment with a 24 percent shot. So buy, sell or hold: Biden wins the 2020 Democratic nomination?

nrakich: At 24 percent? Buy.

Biden, to me, remains the single most likely Democratic nominee — especially so now that some of the wind has been taken out of Warren’s sails.

It’s still competitive, but to me that’s good enough for Biden to have a 30-40 percent chance.

perry Hold. I’m just confused. He leads nationally but is fairly weak in Iowa and New Hampshire. And I wonder if losing in those states will affect his numbers in subsequent primaries. I just don’t know.

nrakich: My pushback to that, Perry, is that he’s only weak in the first two early states, and there “weak” just means “not in first place.” It would be entirely unsurprising to me if he gains a few points and wins both Iowa and New Hampshire in the end.

geoffrey.skelley: Based on my analysis of early primary polls earlier this year, a candidate polling at about 25 percent nationally in the second half of the year before the primary has around a 25 percent chance of winning the nomination.

I haven’t calculated things yet for the second half of this year — the year isn’t over, after all — but Biden is probably polling somewhere around 25 percent. So I think I would hold at 24 percent based on that historical record.

sarahf: Whoever defined the ground rule of holding as “I’m a coward and am unwilling to take a stand” was shortsighted. Hold confidently, Geoff!

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Sarah Frostenson #Perry Bacon Jr.#Nathaniel Rakic

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Trump and his minions will do whatever it takes to hide his crimes from the American people and change the narrative. WE CANNOT FORGET WHAT HAS HAPPENED OVER THE PAST YEAR. It is more important than ever to STAND UP, be HEARD and VOTE to protect our DEMOCRACY. THE TRUTH WILL COME OUT eventually.

BOLTON FACES POTENTIAL LEGAL BATTLES IN STANDOFF WITH WHITE HOUSE OVER HIS BOOK

By Tom Hamburger, Josh Dawsey and Derek Hawkins | Published January 31 at 7:51 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 1, 2020 |

John Bolton could face legal challenges as he pushes ahead with a book describing conversations he claims to have had with President Trump while serving as his national security adviser, experts said, setting the conservative icon on a potential collision course with the administration he once served.

Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” is still scheduled to be released in March, even after the National Security Council warned his attorney last week that it will have to be revised because it contained “significant amounts” of classified material. Bolton’s lawyer has disputed that.

Amid the standoff, details about the contents of his manuscript are continuing to leak out, with the New York Times reporting Friday that Trump directed Bolton in May to call the Ukrainian president and urge him to meet with Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Trump denied Bolton’s account. “I never instructed John Bolton to set up a meeting for Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the greatest corruption fighters in America and by far the greatest mayor in the history of NYC, to meet with President Zelensky,” the president said in a statement.

As Trump and his GOP allies have lambasted Bolton, the former national security adviser has sounded a defiant note. During a private appearance in Austin on Thursday, he defended administration officials who testified during the impeachment proceedings.

“The idea that somehow testifying to what you think is true is destructive to the system of government we have — I think, is very nearly the reverse — the exact reverse of the truth,” Bolton said, according to Austin’s KXAN television station.

White House officials declined to comment Friday on whether Bolton has been asked to delete certain portions of his manuscript or whether the administration has been in touch with Bolton’s team in recent days. A spokeswoman for Bolton declined to comment.

A representative of Simon and Schuster, which is scheduled to publish the manuscript, declined to comment.

A person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the dispute, said Bolton’s team expects a lengthy fight over the issue but appears determined to see it through.

Legal experts and former government officials said the White House has several tools available to try to halt or delay publication of Bolton’s book, including the pre-publication review process.

“If the administration simply doesn’t want the manuscript to see the light of day, they could just drag it out far beyond the March publication date,” said Guy Snodgrass, who served as a speechwriter to then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

“My biggest concern is the process is too easily corrupted by political designs,” he said.

A book by Snodgrass, “Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis,” was held up for five or six months by the Defense Department last year for a security review — and released only once he filed a suit alleging the department was blocking its publication. One of the people he said who asked him to remove material was Bolton, then the national security adviser, which he agreed to do.

Legal experts said the White House might also challenge Bolton’s account as a violation of executive privilege or national security, subjecting him to possible legal challenges or even criminal prosecution if he proceeds with publication.

“The president has ultimate authority for deciding what is classified and what is not classified, and Mr. Bolton has an uphill battle to convince the president that there’s no classified information in there,” said John Ficklin, former senior director for records and access management at the NSC from 2014 to 2016.

Bolton’s attorney, Charles Cooper, has said his client is confident there is no classified material in his manuscript. Nonetheless, a Jan. 23 White House letter to Cooper warned that the manuscript contained a significant amount of classified material, including some considered top secret.

The letter, written by Ellen J. Knight, the National Security Council’s senior director for records, access and information security management, said Bolton would be breaking his nondisclosure agreement with the U.S. government if he published the book without revisions.

“The manuscript may not be published or otherwise disclosed without the deletion of this classified information,” she wrote.

Cooper had submitted the manuscript to the National Security Council for vetting on Dec. 30.

“Ambassador Bolton has carefully sought to avoid any discussion in the manuscript of . . . classified information, and we accordingly do not believe that prepublication review is required,” Cooper wrote to Knight in a letter accompanying the draft. “We are nonetheless submitting this manuscript out of an abundance of caution.”

In the past, the U.S. government has had mixed success in its attempts to block the publication of books by former officials. Many experts say the system for reviewing manuscripts for potential classified material is dated, opaque and in need of reform.

“The whole prepublication review system is a mess,” said Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School who previously served in the Defense Department.

“Each agency has its own set of rules. . . . There’s a rationale behind the system, but it’s badly managed, it’s not well organized, it’s not centralized, there are no clear rules, and it is very much open to abuse,” Hathaway said.

Nonetheless, she said, the government has a “Damocles sword” hanging over Bolton, noting that “they could sue him if he doesn’t get the government’s permission, and they could make him give up everything he earns on the book.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that employees who evade pre-publication review requirements can suffer serious financial repercussions. The case involved former CIA agent Frank Snepp, who described the CIA’s role in Vietnam but failed to submit the publication for review. The court’s decision effectively permitted the government to seize the profits of his book.

Most writings by former government officials — such as op-eds, law review articles and even books — make it through the National Security Council review relatively smoothly. Smaller issues are often resolved via email or in sit-down meetings with the author, according to people familiar with the process.

But people who violate the procedures can face severe consequences. Courts have allowed the government to seize multimillion-dollar advances and royalties from authors who violated their nondisclosure agreements. The government could also bring charges under the Espionage Act, though that’s rare.

In 2016, the Navy SEAL who wrote a best-selling book, “No Easy Day,” about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, had to pay the federal government at least $6.8 million to avoid prosecution for not getting pre-publication approval for the work.

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Karen DeYoung and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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One thing Trump and his minions are good at is 'FAKE NEWS' and 'HATE'

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

ANATOMY OF A ‘SMEAR’: HOW JOHN BOLTON BECAME A TARGET OF THE PRO-TRUMP INTERNET

By Isaac Stanley-Becker | Published

Jan 28 at 8:14 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 1, 2020 |

The headline drew little notice when it appeared last spring on a blog called “Disobedient Media.”

“John Bolton Took Money From Banks Tied To Cartels, Terrorists, Iran,” it read.

On Monday, the blog entry gained sudden popularity. That’s because its central claim — based only on innuendo and half-truths — proved useful to President Trump’s most fervent online supporters, who rushed to discredit the former United Nations ambassador and national security adviser as news broke that his forthcoming book would corroborate accounts that the president held up aid to Ukraine to advance investigations into his domestic political rivals.

The story quickly gained more than 5,000 interactions on Facebook — meaning shares, likes or other user actions — as it spread across pages and groups devoted to defending Trump. Soon, it became a building block of a campaign to discredit Bolton by impugning his motives and portraying him as a turncoat.

The attacks, which unfolded vividly in the 24 hours after it became clear Bolton had potentially damaging information to share, crescendoed on conservative podcasts and cable television, as individual catchphrases — such as “Book Deal Bolton” — gained currency across the far-right firmament. By Tuesday, they offered a case study in how the pro-Trump Internet targets a perceived enemy, even an archconservative and war hawk.

The vilification of Bolton — branding him as a traitor and member of the “deep state,” a reference to a conspiracy theory favored by the president that a shadow government is working to thwart him — made use of misleading text as well as eye-catching memes. It moved from anonymous Twitter accounts with a few dozen followers to prime-time hosts on Fox News with an audience of hundreds of thousands. Finally, it made its way to Capitol Hill, when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday described the eyewitness to activity at the heart of the president’s impeachment trial as a “disgruntled, fired employee who now has a motive, a multimillion-dollar motive, to inflame the situation.”

Trump himself echoed some of the attacks Monday when he retweeted a post from Lou Dobbs of the Fox Business Network calling Bolton a “Rejected Neocon” and the “Deep State’s Last Desperate Act.”

That move, experts say, showcased how personal insults driven by online conspiracy theories — which Trump harnessed on his path to the presidency — remain fundamental to his hold on his base.

“It only makes sense to keep dancing with the ones who brought you to the prom,” said Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami and co-author of “American Conspiracy Theories.” The attacks are successful, he said, because Trump elevates them, “hitting back fairly strongly with a smear that pushes back on the allegation without really addressing it.”

The path traveled by the “Disobedient Media” entry also illustrated how random nooks and crannies of the Internet can wind up being useful for political propaganda. The blog is written by William Craddick, who has a law degree from Pepperdine University and works in consumer advocacy in Los Angeles. The name of his blog, he said, was based on a “joke with friends, capturing the sentiment of going against the grain.”

The sensational headline mischaracterized the evidence presented in the post, which drew on a Washington Post story about how Bolton had earned speaking fees from Deutsche Bank, the British bank HSBC and a foundation operated by a Ukrainian steel magnate. All nuance was lost, however, when the blog post gained sudden traction on Monday, posted to about two dozen Facebook groups — with a collective membership of more than 300,000. One of them was a group called “Fox News Sean Hannity,” described as a forum for “all Sean Hannity fans.” The blog post primed Fox viewers in the group — which has no official links to the network or the popular Trump-friendly host — for what they would hear when they tuned in that night.

Craddick bluntly assessed the motivations behind the renewed interest in his post, but he had little sympathy for Bolton’s boosters, either.

“Now the Republicans don’t like Bolton, so they’ll take an article that makes him look bad and push it,” he said. “But if the Democrats weren’t getting something useful out of him, they wouldn’t be fans either.”

Efforts to portray Bolton as craven and self-interested got underway simultaneously, seeking to raise doubts about the timing of the revelations, which emerged on the same day that his book became available for preorder on Amazon. A blogger drew up a meme pairing an image of the former national security adviser with the text, “Turned his ‘drug deal’ into a book deal” — a reference to Bolton’s description of the shadow foreign policy pursued in Ukraine, according to the testimony of Fiona Hill, a former top White House adviser on Russia.

The blogger, Craig Weide, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, posted the meme to the Facebook page associated with his blog, which has about 16,000 followers, as well as to a handful of public groups, reaching a combined potential viewership of more than 74,000 within about five minutes on Sunday night. One was a group called “FOX NEWS with Tucker Carlson,” an online assembly for fans of the Fox host, though it also has no formal ties to the network.

The idea captured in the meme was also articulated in a memo from the Republican National Committee’s rapid response team. “How convenient that this leaked info happened to be released at the same time preorders were made available for the book on Amazon,” wrote Steve Guest, the RNC’s rapid-response director. “What a joke.”

Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump’s 2016 campaign and co-host of Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room: Impeachment” podcast, took to Twitter first thing Monday morning to brand the former national security adviser “Book Deal Bolton.” The nickname spread widely on social media during the day, amplified by pro-Trump influencers with tens of thousands of followers.

A joint statement from Bolton, along with his publisher and literary agency, denied any coordination with the media.

Conservative pundits were unconvinced, repackaging Twitter talking points for their prime-time audiences. The epithet “Book Deal Bolton” appeared on screen Monday night on Fox News behind Hannity.

“Good for John,” Hannity said. “He can sell all the books he wants.”

But few went further than Dobbs, the hard-line Fox Business host and Trump whisperer who announced Monday night that Bolton had been “reduced to a tool for the radical Dems and the deep state.”

The accusation of being a “tool for the radical Dems” has been leveled widely on social media in recent months, applied to individuals as disparate as Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, and Univision’s Jorge Ramos. What they have in common is rebutting the president’s claims.

Using the same guilt-by-association logic supporting the blog entry in “Disobedient Media,” Dobbs claimed that major donors to Bolton’s super PAC were “never Trumpers.”

“Do you see the pattern here with Mr. Bolton?” Dobbs said, not stating the pattern but relying on his viewers to put together the pieces of the conspiratorial puzzle.

The notion that Bolton, a longtime bugbear of Democrats who has worked in four Republican administrations, was operating furtively within the White House to advance liberal objectives bemused some who have dealt with him. “I think it’s ridiculous, and if it wasn’t so serious, it’d be humorous,” said Chuck Hagel, the former defense secretary and Republican senator from Nebraska.

“It shows you once again that there’s very little honesty, decency or civility in Trump and the crowd around him,” added Hagel, who was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Bolton’s nomination as U.N. ambassador foundered, leading to a recess appointment by President George W. Bush. “I had my differences with him, but I would say that John Bolton is anything but ‘deep state.’ ”

Bolton’s lawyer, Charles Cooper, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Of the effort to cast Bolton as a disgruntled government holdover, a former aide, Fred Fleitz, said, “He is an honorable man who had some significant achievements with President Trump in the National Security Council.” Fleitz on Monday published an op-ed urging the former White House official to postpone publication of his book until after the election. But he distanced himself from the more strident criticism, saying in an interview, “I’ve never called John Bolton part of the deep state.”

While lacking in evidence, the assertions made by Dobbs rested on a reliable scaffold of misleading claims bolted into place on Twitter over the course of the day.

An account that goes by the name Philip Schuyler — a Revolutionary-era general who went on to become a senator from New York — and describes itself simply as a “Supporter of President Trump” pointed implausibly to the “deep state.”

“Though a Republican, Bolton would’ve fit nicely into Obama’s ultra conceited deep state,” the user wrote Monday morning. By noon, the conservative columnist Todd Starnes, a former Fox News Radio host, was claiming without evidence or explanation that, “These Bolton allegations smell like Deep State swamp gas.”

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Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.

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THE CRINGING ABDICATION OF SENATE REPUBLICANS

By Editorial Board | Published January 31 at 5:50 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 1, 2020 |

REPUBLICAN SENATORS who voted Friday to suppress known but unexamined evidence of President Trump’s wrongdoing at his Senate trial must have calculated that the wrath of a vindictive president is more dangerous than the sensible judgment of the American people, who, polls showed, overwhelmingly favored the summoning of witnesses. That’s almost the only way to understand how the Republicans could have chosen to deny themselves and the public the firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, and perhaps others, on how Mr. Trump sought to extort political favors from Ukraine.

The public explanations the senators offered were so weak and contradictory as to reveal themselves as pretexts. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she weighed supporting “additional witnesses and documents, to cure the shortcomings” of the House’s impeachment process, but decided against doing so. Apparently she preferred a bad trial to a better one — but she did assure us that she felt “sad” that “the Congress has failed.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said the case against Mr. Trump had already been proved, so no further testimony was needed. But he also said, without explanation, that Mr. Trump’s “inappropriate” conduct did not merit removal from office; voters, he said, should render a verdict in the coming presidential election. How could he measure the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing without hearing Mr. Bolton’s firsthand testimony of the president’s motives and intentions, including about whether the president is likely to seek additional improper foreign intervention in that same election?

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) echoed Mr. Alexander’s illogic, only he lacked the courage even to take a position on whether Mr. Trump had, as charged, tried to force Ukraine’s new president to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, or whether that was wrong. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) managed to be even more timorous, telling reporters that “Lamar speaks for lots and lots of us” and refusing to elaborate.

So cowed are most of those “lots and lots” of Republicans that few of them dared to go as far as Mr. Sasse. Some have echoed the president’s indefensible claims that there was nothing wrong with the pressure campaign. Their votes against witnesses have rendered the trial a farce and made conviction the only choice for senators who honor the Constitution.

Americans who object to Mr. Trump’s relentless stonewalling and Republicans’ complicity can take some comfort in the prospect that most or all of the evidence the White House is hiding will eventually come out. A reminder of that came Friday in a New York Times report about Mr. Bolton’s unpublished book, which describes how Mr. Trump ordered him last May to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to meet with his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani said publicly at the time he wanted to induce Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden because it would be “helpful to my client,” Mr. Trump.

That report underlined the cringing shamefulness of the Republican decision to block Mr. Bolton’s testimony — and there will surely be more reminders in the weeks and months ahead. We can hope only that voters who wanted that evidence to be heard in the trial will respond by showing incumbent senators they are a force to be reckoned with, as much as the bully in the White House.

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WHEN THE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL ENDS, THE SENATE’S REPUTATION WILL BE HOPELESSLY IN TATTERS

By Ruth Marcus | Published January 31 at 6:13 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 1, 2020 |

What will be left of the impeachment power after the Senate’s acquittal of President Trump? Not much. What will be left of the Senate’s reputation as the world’s greatest deliberative body? Same answer.

SAME SCARY ANSWER.

The two are interconnected, of course, but my point is not that the Senate was obligated to convict the president. Conviction and removal from office are warranted, but that was never a realistic possibility. And a reasonable senator with an eye on the electoral calendar could have concluded that it would be better for the country to let voters decide.

What a reasonable senator could not do was what happened here: wholesale shirking of the Senate’s constitutional responsibility to assess — which includes a responsibility to obtain — all the evidence of potential wrongdoing. Senators offered up an unconvincing grab bag of excuses for this dereliction of duty:

That the House didn’t do its homework and it wasn’t the Senate’s job to make up for that — as if the Senate had not been entrusted with the “sole power to try” impeachments. That it would take too long and distract the Senate from its other pressing work — as if there were anything more important, and as if the Senate were actually doing anything beyond ramming through judicial nominees.

As bad an argument, and perhaps even more dangerous as precedent, was Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander’s (Tenn.) assessment that the Senate didn’t have to pursue the evidence because, although Trump’s behavior was, to use Alexander’s milquetoast phrase, “inappropriate,” it wouldn’t justify removal. That may be a legitimate basis for acquittal. But how can the Senate decide how bad the president’s behavior was if it doesn’t know the facts?

Most dangerous of all were the constitutional arguments made by the president’s lawyers, which would render the impeachment clause meaningless: A president cannot be impeached except for criminal conduct. A president cannot be impeached for abuse of power. A president cannot be impeached if he believes his quid pro quo arrangement was in the nation’s interest.

That combination of jaw-dropping audacity and constitutional illiteracy now leaves a toxic residue: the impeachment clause neutered and the country in dangerous constitutional territory.

It would have been one thing if the president’s lawyers, rather than doubling down on his “perfect” conversation approach, had acknowledged that Trump’s behavior was wrong. Instead, they slavishly lauded his good works and proceeded to drain all meaning out of the impeachment clause. The Senate’s acquittal in the face of their extreme positions risks complicity with this constitutional mischief. It is not hard to imagine a future Senate being confronted with the arguments of Alan Dershowitz and the Trump outcome, and being lectured on the significance of this precedent.

There are two risks inherent in any impeachment. One, which Trump’s lawyers repeatedly invoked, is that lawmakers will set the impeachment bar so low that it will become a regular tool to seek to remove presidents on the basis of policy disagreements and as an exercise in partisan mischief.

The other, which Trump’s lawyers resolutely ignored, is that impeachment and removal will be made even more difficult than the constitutional structure already entails — such as the requirement that conviction be by a two-thirds majority — and that presidents will therefore feel unconstrained by the implicit threat presented by the impeachment clause.

That strikes me as the bigger risk. Extremists on either side have bellowed about it on occasion, but the country has witnessed very few serious attempts to remove a president precisely because impeachment is such a drastic and unwieldy remedy. There was lots of chatter after the Bill Clinton impeachment that the mechanism would become just another weapon in the political arsenal. That didn’t happen.

Indeed, even with all of Trump’s outrages, and even with a Democratic majority in the House after the 2018 election, impeachment did not become a reality until the disclosures about his dealings with Ukraine essentially forced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to take that step.

The impeachment power isn’t needed to keep most presidents from engaging in impeachable conduct, just as homicide statutes aren’t necessary to keep most of us from committing murder. Presidents face other constraints, moral and political, on their behavior. The reason the Framers wrote the impeachment clause into the Constitution was that they recognized the risk, even within the span of a four-year term, of an outlier, renegade president, and one so dangerous that they needed to take desperate measures. In such cases, impeachment isn’t overturning the will of the electorate; it’s effectuating the wisdom of the Framers.

They put their faith in checks and balances. We are left with a president unchecked and a system dangerously unbalanced.

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‘THE CENTER OF THE ORBIT’: ENDANGERED REPUBLICANS GO ALL-IN ON TRUMP

By Robert Costa and Ashley Parker | Published January 31 at 4:55 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted Feb. 1, 2020 |

Many of the most endangered Republicans have concluded that fully embracing President Trump is their only credible path to victory in November, rallying to his side in the final days of the Senate impeachment fight and indulging his most controversial actions and statements.

At-risk Republicans — including those in battlegrounds such as Arizona, Colorado and Georgia — are calculating that a strong economy and an energized pro-Trump base will be enough to carry the party as it works to retain the White House and its Senate majority in 2020, according to interviews and private discussions with more than a dozen Republican senators, Senate aides and veteran strategists and officials.

More broadly, most Republicans have also largely jettisoned plans to break ranks with Trump to woo independents and suburban women, who turned on the party in 2018 and helped hand the House to the Democrats. This political positioning is driven in part by their view that Democrats are again poised to nominate a uniquely vulnerable presidential standard-bearer weighed down with ideological or establishment baggage.

“There’s nothing in the middle of the road other than dead possums and yellow lines,” said Will Ritter, co-founder of Poolhouse, a center-right ad agency. “Like no other president before, Republican voters want you to wrap yourself around Trump. There is no upside to doing any distancing.”

Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) has concentrated in recent weeks on rallying base Republicans rather than appealing to moderates for her tough reelection fight, pushing for a swift acquittal in Trump’s impeachment trial while raising money off a feud with a CNN reporter she called “a liberal hack.” Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who is running for reelection in a state Hillary Clinton won by five points in 2016, came under attack by his likely Democratic opponent, former governor John Hickenlooper, after deciding against calling for impeachment witnesses and evidence this week.

And Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), facing a tough intraparty primary fight from Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), has gone all-in on supporting Trump in a state that Democrats are targeting for its growing diversity and booming Atlanta suburbs, including an attack this week on fellow Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) for supporting the call for witnesses.

Loeffler, who has been personally friendly with Romney and who has donated to him in the past, accused him in a tweet of trying to “appease the left” and concluded: “The circus is over. It’s time to move on!”

Trump’s uncontested grip over his party came into focus again Friday as two key Republican senators — Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who is retiring, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who is not up for reelection — supported the president by blocking Democratic attempts to extend the trial, couching their positions as driven by frustrations with Democrats. It will mark the first time in U.S. history that no witnesses will be called in a Senate impeachment proceeding.

“There is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense,” Alexander said in a statement, arguing that while Trump had taken “actions that are inappropriate,” they did not merit his removal from office.

It was the most significant political move made by Senate Republicans this week: Their refusal to join Democrats in calling for additional evidence or witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial, ensuring that it could wrap up in the coming days.

At the center of the calculation was Trump himself, and just how much Republicans feel they can distance themselves from a president who, in just over three years, has traveled from troublesome outsider to Republican Party standard-bearer.

Ritter said some vulnerable Republicans running in swing states and House districts may be able to differentiate themselves from Trump and appeal to the center on specific policy issues, but on something hyper-politicized like impeachment, they cannot afford to cross the president.

“On Trump, it’s binary,” Ritter said. “You’re either a treacherous Democrat or you’re with the president.”

The 2018 midterm elections did provide a flashing alarm for Republicans about the risks of being inextricably bound with Trump. Democrats retook the House majority after toppling Republican incumbents in many suburban districts and in state and local races — a takeover that laid the groundwork for impeachment.

Former Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania said challenges in suburbs, such as those surrounding Philadelphia, remain troubling for the party. But he said opposing Trump on impeachment is seen by most at-risk Republicans as the “wrong way to try to win over those voters.”

“You won’t get seen as playing to the suburbs,” Santorum said. “You’ll be seen as playing to the angry leftists who hate the president.”

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee worked to keep the probe of Russian election interference as bipartisan as possible, said he fully supports Trump and is surprised that anyone might be surprised.

“He’s a Republican, he’s president and we support his agenda,” Burr said. “The media, of course, tries to drive a wedge and wonder, but every poll today shows the president actually stronger today than he was four years ago.”

For Trump, Republican unity on impeachment is the fruit of the ultimate pressure campaign in a short political career defined by them. The president has upended so many norms that he has simply become the norm, with everyone else in the party scrambling to adjust.

That doesn’t mean Republicans all personally like Trump or cheer his conduct, either on foreign policy or other matters — in fact, many Republican lawmakers still complain loudly about him behind closed doors, sometimes mocking him as incompetent and undisciplined.

But many also privately acknowledge that Trump dominates the party in a potent and visceral way and say they are operating out of the partisan reality of an intensely divided nation.

Democrats, they add, should stop expecting a Republican establishment to stand up and block Trump, since Trump himself is now the establishment.

“I regularly talk to five or six Republicans who I feel some closeness to,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “I’ve heard for months that they know the president lies a lot. . . . They worry about his character. But they aren’t willing to come forward and say that publicly. That’s one of the tragedies of this era.”

Former Republican Georgia congressman Jack Kingston said he once had reservations about Trump but has since become an ardent admirer and booster. He explained his transformation with a shrug, saying his party and Washington “needed a shake-up.”

“I accept it,” he said.

The Georgia primary fight brewing between Loeffler and Collins is a classic Trump-era standoff, he added.

“Any GOP candidate is going to want to show he or she is close to Trump,” Kingston said. “If you think about the Republican Party, he’s the center of the orbit. You don’t want him to say something bad about you.”

The impulse for Republicans to link themselves tightly to the president spans the country, and includes some lawmakers not even currently up for reelection. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who doesn’t face reelection for four years, released a 30-second ad in Iowa that sided with Trump and attacked former vice president Joe Biden and other Democrats.

“I’d like to thank the Democrats for badly botching this impeachment charade and for spending so much time in a coverup for Joe Biden,” says Scott, who introduces himself as a juror in the Senate trial. “The real story here is the corruption Joe Biden got away with.”

The ad goes on to levy a series of factually problematic charges against Biden and his son Hunter, but its mere existence is sure to delight Trump — and sparked speculation that Scott is eyeing a 2024 presidential bid, seeking to cast himself as the torchbearer of Trump’s brand.

Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general under Trump who is now running to retake the Alabama Senate seat he vacated to join the administration, is also pushing to prove his fealty to the president — despite the fact that Trump, furious at Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, publicly and privately berated and humiliated his attorney general for the majority of his tenure.

Nonetheless, on Wednesday, Sessions touted his loyalty to Trump in a trio of tweets focused on former national security adviser John Bolton, whose forthcoming book directly ties Trump to the Ukraine decision at the heart of his impeachment trial. Sessions emphasized that he never publicly criticized the president and dismissed Bolton’s memoir as “an act of disloyalty.”

Former senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said he understands if Republicans poke holes in the Democrats’ case against Trump and vote for acquittal but cannot accept Republicans insisting that Trump did nothing wrong. Those who do the latter, he said, are willfully taking a position they know is false.

“That’s the difference. Vote to acquit? Okay. You can make that argument. But to say this wasn’t an egregious abuse of his presidential duty? That’s where this party has problems,” Flake said. “To suggest otherwise signals complete subservience to the president.”

But Scott Reed, senior strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pointed to Trump’s “unprecedented high approval ratings with the GOP rank and file.”

“It’s Trump’s party now — there’s no way around that,” Reed said. “You may not agree with the boxes, but he’s checking all the boxes.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have had their own challenges holding their ranks together as Trump voters in red states have made clear to Democratic senators that they will pay a price for opposing the president.

Two centrists who won election last year — Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — as well as Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who will face voters this year after a long-shot win in a special election in 2017, have been coy about how they will vote on acquittal, giving hope to Trump’s allies that the president could win bipartisan support.

Many Republicans also believe that Trump stands a strong chance of reelection against a flawed Democratic opponent, whether a nominee from the left like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), or a longtime politician like Biden.

Dick Wadhams, a longtime Republican strategist based in Colorado, said the specific choice between Trump and the eventual Democratic nominee will help Republicans who have tacked to the right to appease the party’s base win over moderates, as well.

“It’s going to be a choice on the ballot and not a referendum in 2020, and that’s what makes this very different than 2018,” Wadhams said. He added that he was a begrudging Trump voter in 2016 but now is fully supportive. He pointed to Trump accomplishments like passing a tax cut and appointing conservative judicial nominees, as well as his concern about where the Democrats would take the country.

“I still have concerns about the way he behaves, his tweets drive me nuts, and a lot of Republicans feel that way, but at the same time — Medicare-for-all, Green New Deal, killing fracking — spare me,” he said, rattling off a list of liberal proposals. “Democrats are driving people who might want to vote for them back to Trump.

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REPUBLICANS AGREE IT WAS NO ‘PERFECT CALL’ — BUT WILL VOTE TO ACQUIT TRUMP ANYWAY

By Josh Dawsey | Published January 31 at 7:20 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 1, 2020 |

IT WAS NOT A PERFECT PHONE CALL.

That was the message to President Trump from a range of Republican senators on Friday — even as they voted to block witnesses from the Senate impeachment trial and signaled they would vote to acquit him on charges that he sought to tie foreign aid to Ukraine launching an investigation into a political foe.

In sparing the president a continued spectacle, the senators pointedly offered the defense that many GOP senators wished to make all along: That Trump’s actions, while odious, were not deserving of the political death sentence.

As more revelations from former national security adviser John Bolton’s book flowed, senators shrugged. They knew what he’d done, they said. It was not great, they added, but not that bad. They were ready to move on.

“It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.

He then explained why he would not vote against the president. “The Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate,” Alexander said.

While the terms were entirely different, it was in one respect similar to former president Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial: Democratic senators impugned Clinton’s conduct and questioned his morals for lying about sex in the White House — but did not believe it rose to the level of impeachable offenses.

A number of Republican senators agreed that Trump should not have asked Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, former vice president Joe Biden’s son, during the phone call while raising a debunked theory about a Democratic National Committee server and Ukrainian interference in the election.

That Trump should not have withheld foreign aid to Ukraine for months, raising questions about the United States’ support for the country at war with Russia and sending Congress and the foreign policy firmament into a perplexed tizzy.

That Trump should not have involved his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani in an irregular foreign policy channel to “attempt to interfere in an investigation,” in Giuliani’s own words.

And that Trump should not have ousted career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine after a smear campaign that even some of his own administration officials admitted was filled with erroneous information.

Many of the senators did not try to justify or explain the president’s conduct. Some mentioned an election in nine months or other Trump accomplishments. “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a president from office,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said.

Alexander said the case had been proved. Trump was guilty. He was just not going to convict.

“Wrong and inappropriate,” said Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican who repeatedly asked the administration to release the aid to Ukraine. That was in a statement when he declared he wanted to hear no more.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a moderate Republican who delivered the death blow for a Democrat-led bid to hear from more witnesses, instead attacked Congress for not doing its job.

The terrible-but-not-impeachable defense rang hollow to some of the president’s critics. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the House impeachment managers, talked of the “Dershowitz Principle of Constitutional Lawlessness,” referring to Alan Dershowitz, one of Trump’s attorneys, and his expansive legal arguments.

Trump was unlikely to enjoy the statements, even if he liked the votes. He had repeatedly told lawmakers that he did not want to give an inch, and wanted lawmakers, surrogates and allies to reiterate his oft-said statement that the call was “perfect.”

“I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL,” he posted, in all caps, on Jan. 16. “What I said on the phone call with the Ukrainian President is ‘perfectly’ stated,” Trump tweeted in November.

“READ THE TRANSCRIPTS!” he said, turning what some advisers believed was the most damning piece of evidence into his cri de coeur of innocence.

He told senators and allies that he did not want to distance himself from Giuliani when they suggested the lawyer’s actions were potentially an albatross. In a statement Friday, he called Giuliani “one of the greatest corruption fighters in America and by far the greatest mayor in the history of N.Y.C.”

He never conceded — as some lawmakers did — that his treatment of Yovanovitch was poor, instead taunting her on Twitter as she testified in the House about her abrupt firing and the threats she received.

“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go?” he wrote as she spoke. “. . . It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”

As he stepped out of the White House one week after the impeachment inquiry was launched, he did not back down from calling for political investigations into his opponent. Instead, he called for China to investigate the Biden family as well — doubling down on the original sin with a new country.

Even in private, advisers say Trump has repeatedly stated it was a perfect phone call, that he does not understand, or at least will not admit, the impropriety of what he did.

“He genuinely believes he did nothing wrong,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said in a recent interview.

Dershowitz said he was pleased with the statements from the senators who criticized the president’s conduct but said they would not remove him.

“That’s right,” he said, asked if that was the point of his argument. “My argument was whether or not you think he did anything wrong, it was it did not

rise to the level of impeachment.”

Dershowitz declined to comment when asked if he thought the president did anything wrong, or whether the call was perfect.

“That’s something we should all take into account when we vote in nine months,” he said.

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THE SENATE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL WAS RIGGED!

By Dana Milbank | Published January 31 at 8:11 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 1, 2020 |

In the end, they DIDN’T EVEN PRETEND to take their OATHS SERIOUSLY.

Senators were instructed “to be in attendance at all times” during President Trump’s impeachment trial. But as the Democratic House managers made their last, fruitless appeals Friday for the Senate to bring witnesses and documents, several of the body’s 53 Republican senators didn’t even bother to show up.

“A trial is supposed to be a quest for the truth,” lead manager Adam Schiff pleaded.

Thirteen GOP senators were missing as he said this. Sens. Kevin Cramer (N.D.), Joni Ernst (Iowa) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) chewed gum.

Manager Val Demings (Fla.) reminded them that this would be the “only time in history” that an impeachment trial was held without witnesses or relevant documents.

Twelve Republican senators were missing. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Dan Sullivan (Alaska) and Tom Cotton (Ark.) joined in the chewing.

“The American people deserve to hear the truth,” insisted manager Sylvia Garcia (Tex.). By now, 15 Republican senators were missing.

Manager Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) spoke from the well. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), wearing cotton chinos for the occasion, perused a magazine.

“Please don’t give up,” manager Zoe Lofgren (Calif.) urged. “This is too important.”

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) stuck a finger in his left nostril. Johnson waved a hand dismissively and shared a chuckle with Cramer. Fully 20 Republican senators were missing.

At the start of the impeachment trial, Trump’s Senate allies limited media coverage to hide from public scrutiny. Then they made sure the trial would end without a single witness called or a single document requested. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the clinching vote against witnesses, declared before Friday’s session began, “I don’t believe the continuation of this process will change anything.”

It was all over but the shouting. And now several of those who had rushed Trump toward acquittal wouldn’t even grant the courtesy of listening to the House managers. (They returned, curiously, when Trump’s defenders had their turn in the well; Paul put away his magazine.)

This was an ugly end to an ugly trial. It began with bold promises by the president’s lawyers to prove there was no quid pro quo in his dealings with Ukraine. When former national security adviser John Bolton’s manuscript, with firsthand evidence of the quid pro quo, made that impossible, key Republicans fell back to a new position: Trump’s guilt doesn’t matter.

“There is no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; the House managers have proved this,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) declared late Thursday. But the choice of “what to do about what he did,” Alexander said, should be “in the presidential election.”

What an elegant solution! He accepts that Trump is guilty of cheating in the election — and, therefore, his fate should be determined by the very election in which he has cheated.

It’s like a sprinter, caught doping before a competition, being told his fate would be determined by having him run the race.

RIGGED!

Shortly before Alexander declared Trump guilty but unimpeachable, Trump lawyer Patrick Philbin made the same argument. “Even if John Bolton would say it is true, that is not an impeachable offense,” he told the senators.

Now that the Senate has accepted the White House argument that Trump’s cheating in the election is “perfectly permissible,” why wouldn’t Trump continue to cheat? Why would anybody have faith that the 2020 election will be on the level?

Democrats now take their case to the voters, unsure of who might be helping Trump’s campaign. Putin? Erdogan? Xi? MBS?

Republicans, poised to benefit from foreign help, expressed no such alarm. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Friday that “just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a president.” Rubio thought it “difficult to conceive of any scheme Putin could undertake that would undermine confidence in our democracy more than removal would.”

NOW, VLADIMIR PUTIN GETS TO PUT THAT LOGIC TO THE TEST.

“Senators, there is a storm blowing through this Capitol,” Schiff warned on Friday. “Its winds are strong and they move us into uncertain and dangerous directions.”

But on the Senate floor, those on the GOP side who bothered to attend (the Democratic side was largely full throughout the day) were tranquil. Cory Gardner (Colo.) edited some text. John Neely Kennedy (La.) looked at news clippings and a bar graph. Mike Lee (Utah) tapped his watch and studied its glowing screen. John Barrasso (Wyo.) struck up a chat. Others busied themselves with reading.

At the start of Friday’s session, Senate Chaplain Barry Black reminded the senators that “we reap what we sow.”.

In their cowardly, 51-to-49 vote Friday evening to speed a guilty president on his way to a hasty acquittal while suppressing the evidence, Trump’s protectors planted the seeds of a poisonous harvest in November.

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