On matters Ukrainian, President Trump’s defenders repeatedly make logically contradictory assertions. Their attempts at spin are dizzying to the point of nausea.
For example, they blast the impeachment case for consisting of only secondhand witnesses, but they refuse to allow firsthand witnesses to testify.
They say that if witnesses are called, they must be deposed first, even after the trial has begun. But they complained when the House deposed witnesses in the pretrial phase, which is when depositions commonly take place. They complained when Trump’s lawyers weren’t allowed to participate in those House depositions, then they refused the invitation for lawyers to participate in open hearings. Then, in the Senate trial, they falsely claimed that the House had shut them out.
They say it’s too close to an election to consider presidential removal, but they blast House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for having conducted the impeachment hearings too quickly. Then they criticize her for having taken too long to send the impeachment articles to the Senate (even though she took only ten days longer than the 18 days House Republicans took under far clearer circumstances in 1998-99), but they caused the delay by not letting her know the rules under which the trial would operate.
They claim Trump had good policy reasons to worry about “corruption” in Ukraine, but they still can’t identify a single element of alleged corruption that interested him, other than one supposedly involving his political rival. And they still can’t identify what that alleged corruption had to do with U.S. policy, or what law was suspected of being violated, or why Ukraine should investigate it if Trump’s Justice Department had no investigation underway. (They also can’t explain why Trump cited corruption, even after his Defense Department had certified there was no corruption involved in the program at hand.)
They say Hunter Biden had been under investigation within Ukraine until his father intervened, but they refuse to say how that’s possible when Biden joined the Burisma Holdings board after the conduct for which Burisma’s head honcho was investigated.
They say there was no quid pro quo involving military aid, even though acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said there was indeed such a consideration and that we should “get over it.” They also won’t allow Mulvaney to be called to testify about this.
They say they’re for “America first,” but they don’t defend American sovereignty when a president sics a foreign government on a U.S. citizen without identifying any U.S. law thought to have been violated.
They say Trump did not tie assistance to his demand for investigations or a White House visit by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. But they must admit that Trump delayed the assistance, that he refused to provide the requested White House meeting, that he repeatedly demanded the investigations, that he referred others to lawyer Rudy Giuliani who directly tied aid or the visit to the investigations, that Trump provided no official reason for delaying the aid, that he did not give Congress legally required notice that he was delaying it, that he released the aid only once the whistle was blown, and, most directly, he specifically asked for the “favor” of the debunked “CrowdStrike server” investigation in direct response to Zelensky’s request for military aid.
Despite all that, we’re asked to believe that each of those activities operated on separate tracks, rather than being interconnected in a quid pro quo.
Those are just some examples of the double standards and logical jiujitsu the president’s defenders employ. They are not acting in good faith. They should not get away with it.
