House Democrats are crushing Republicans with the use of testimony to frame the impeachment of President Trump for American voters, weaponizing selective leaks from closed-door depositions to portray a commander in chief that abused his power.
Democrats heading into Thursday’s floor vote formalizing impeachment proceedings have used favorable testimony from hand-picked witnesses to bolster allegations Trump threatened to withhold U.S. military aid from Ukraine unless Kyiv investigated political rival Joe Biden. This strategy has coincided with an uptick in public support for impeachment after deep initial skepticism, with Republicans complaining about a manipulated process and out-of-context leaks while offering little in the way of a compelling counternarrative.
“I’m confined to a large degree in what I can say,” said Republican Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, the panel with jurisdiction over the impeachment proceedings. “It’s extraordinarily frustrating.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin, a New York Republican also on hand for the depositions, said he and his colleagues are constrained by House rules barring lawmakers from revealing testimony — rules that have not stopped Democrats in the room from anonymously publicizing information that suggests Trump, personally and through intermediaries, committed impeachable offenses in dealings with Ukraine.
“I wish I could tell you about every single question and every single answer. I wish I didn’t have to tell you. I wish you were watching live,” Zeldin said, conceding that the Democrats have capitalized and that there is no guarantee voter opinion will shift once the full transcripts of the depositions are released and the truth is known. “The public is absolutely being misled about every single deposition that takes place.”
Republicans are calling the impeachment process established by House Democrats “Soviet-style justice” that precludes the GOP from calling witnesses and questioning them without interference from the Democrats, who are using their majority to dictate procedure. The Republicans also take issue with House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff’s handling of the closed-door depositions, arguing the California Democrat is blocking questions of witnesses that might undercut the case for impeachment.
But even when offered the cloak of anonymity to reveal testimony from the secret hearings, Republicans are declining to elaborate or otherwise provide competing information that might cast doubt on the story the Democrats are telling. That suggests to some Republican operatives that the depositions might indeed be very damning for Trump and offer little for the GOP to use — unless the president’s allies are simply being negligent in his defense, which appears unlikely.
“House Republicans are almost-certainly sticking largely with process arguments to defend the president because they can’t defend him on substance,” said Michael Steel, a former House Republican leadership aide. “There is still a smart, safe, defensible argument to make — that what he did was wrong but doesn’t merit removal from office less than a year before an election. It’s unclear if President Trump will let Republicans make it.”
Some of Trump’s allies are not buying that explanation, and they want to see Republicans on Capitol Hill get more aggressive.
Jason Miller, an adviser to Trump during his 2016 campaign and now co-host of a new pro-Trump podcast with former White House aide Steve Bannon, said House Republicans should research the lives of “tainted” impeachment witnesses to expose their biases and motivations for targeting the president.
“Democrats are biting, scratching, and gouging our eyeballs out while Republicans are playing by the rules. It’s time we beat the Democrats at their own game by creatively exposing their unconstitutional antics,” said Miller, whose daily podcast, War Room, aims to boost Trump in the impeachment process.
Meanwhile, Democrats are insisting that Trump is only going to find himself worse off once transcripts of the depositions are released and hearings are made public.
Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat who has been listening to witnesses behind closed doors, said somewhat sympathetically that his Republican colleagues are not holding back or hanging Trump out to dry. There simply is no information for them to leak that would counter the Democrats’ message of a president that is corrupt.
“There is no counternarrative,” Lieu said. “It will be worse for Republicans.”
