Keen to undermine House Republicans’s entire impeachment strategy, President Trump took to Twitter to attack Marie Yovanovitch for not single-handedly saving Somalia, a failed state in its third decade of civil war, and Ukraine, from which he expunged her. Crucially, he did this as Yovanovitch was publicly testifying to the House Intelligence Committee as a part of the impeachment proceedings against Trump.
….They call it “serving at the pleasure of the President.” The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2019
There’s no question that Trump’s personal advisers and attorneys ought to lock his phone in a vault for the duration of the impeachment proceedings, if not for the rest of his presidency. But contrary to Chairman Adam Schiff’s assertions, Trump’s tacky tweets don’t constitute witness intimidation, not by any true legal standard and certainly not by any metric the public cares about.
For starters, the entire nation has known for the better part of a year that Trump disdained Yovanovitch. He berated her publicly for months before pulling her from her post in Ukraine, and Trump going on an incoherent rant is obviously not a threat.
But most importantly, Democrats falling in line with Schiff and branding Trump’s tweet as witness intimidation just goes to show the likely death knell for their impeachment dreams: They’ve learned absolutely nothing from the Mueller catastrophe.
Unlike in the Ukraine case, Mueller found no compelling evidence that Trump intentionally engaged in illicit contact with the Russian government. There was no underlying collusion crime, and he punted on the obstruction question. Trump obviously tried to obstruct Mueller’s investigation, but his associates stopped him from doing so. More importantly, without any underlying crime, the public just didn’t care that the implication of Mueller’s punt was that he did believe Trump obstructed justice. Polling for impeachment simply plummeted after the release of the report.
Now Democrats have an actual case to prove to the public on their hands, and instead of maintaining laser focus on the central question (Did Trump abuse the powers of the presidency to extort a foreign government into harming his domestic political foe?), they’re wasting a precious day of public testimony fulminating about a fake process crime.
Republicans should care if the president committed an impeachable abuse of power. But with Democrats melting down over yet another one of Trump’s tacky tweets, can you blame them for being a bit cynical about this clown show?
