Democrats should have a slam-dunk case to impeach President Trump. But not one Republican trusts that Democrats are acting in good faith when they decided on Day One that they’d impeach Trump and certainly not with the media helping them go full-speed ahead.
The release of closed-door testimonies from the impeachment investigation gives Democrats an effective way, against all odds, to structure their case against Trump. Savannah Guthrie at NBC News just demonstrated the most obvious way to blow up their case altogether.
While interviewing former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Guthrie didn’t hide the ball from the get-go. Whereas Haley was warm, even-tempered, and coyly careful, Guthrie opened with sneers and smears implicit in her questioning.
“The president has said that this was a perfect call. Do you think this was a perfect call?” Guthrie asked.
“In his mind he thinks it was a perfect call,” Haley noted with the precision of a surgeon. “I think it’s never a good practice for us to ask a foreign country to investigate an American. It’s just not a good practice. Having said that, there’s no insistence on that call. There are no demands on that call. It is a conversation between two presidents that’s casual in nature, and, you know, it’s just hard to find anywhere that the president of Ukraine would have thought funds were being held and that he had to do this.”
Guthrie’s mistake is focusing on the call, which Trump has wisely and wrongly branded as “perfect.” The extortion element is not clear on the call. If the witness testimonies had demonstrated that there were zero behind-the-scenes conversations intended to leverage the aid, the call would have read as typical Trump, freewheeling while asking for aid, which as Haley notes is a bad practice but not an impeachable one.
The damning evidence against Trump is that Sondland did make clear to the Ukrainian government that they would not get military aid without President Volodymyr Zelensky announcing an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. By all available accounts, even though Ukraine had been tipped off that Trump’s backchannel would rope them into the 2020 election, most hard evidence indicates Sondland explained the quid pro quo more than a month after the call.
Later on, Haley uses peak whataboutism to defend Trump, rightly noting that his Ukraine policy had been excellent, which is obviously not a defense of him lapsing in his support to use the powers of the presidency for personal gain. But that’s how the entire GOP will defend Trump, and anchors like Guthrie better have more pointed pushback than “the aid was on hold!”
That’s not good enough. Point out that Zelensky convened his advisers as early as May 7 to plan how to avoid getting mixed up in the 2020 presidential election. Point out that leaked State Department emails show staffers acknowledging that the tardiness of the aid release was notable. Point out that Sondland was forced to amend his testimony to address the much-corroborated notion that the aid was on hold with the explicit purpose of cajoling the Ukrainians to assist Trump in the 2020 election.
Instead of using the opportunity to hold Haley’s feet to the fire with facts, dates, and quotations issued under penalty of perjury, Guthrie then buckled and pulled a cheap but ineffective shot, citing Haley’s “America First” shout-out in her resignation letter.
“How is asking a foreign country to investigate your political rival putting America first?”
Nope, Guthrie didn’t dive into the evidence indicating that Trump attempted to extort Ukraine into investigating Biden. Instead, she resorts to a useless gotcha question.
The rest of the interview consists of Guthrie trying to get Haley to condemn Trump’s temperament and truthfulness, two points that not one person’s opinion is undecided on.
Despite Democrats across the country finally rallying around impeachment, Trump’s support from Republicans remains at record highs. It shouldn’t be, but with media so simultaneously seething at the opportunity to get Trump and equally incompetent in their ability to do so, it’s no wonder why he’s riding out this storm.
