Does John Bolton Have the Goods on Trump?

I have never liked John Bolton who I have long considered a dangerous foreign policy hawk who has learned nothing from America's previous disastrous wars, particularly in Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan. Yet between Bolton's huge ego and perhaps desire for revenge after his firing by Der Trumpenführer, now seems poised to derail Senate Republicans - think Mitch McConnell - to hold a sham trial and not even hear from witnesses or review additional evidence.  Of course, Bolton also is likely to make a fortune on his tell-all book of his time with Trump. Whatever Bolton's ultimate motivation, as the New York Times stresses in a column, Bolton just might force enough Senate Republicans to do the right thing that McConnell's planned Soviet style trial may fall apart.  Anything that will dash McConnell's scheme and make Lindsey Graham look like an ass will be most welcome.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

It’s just possible that common sense and reality have a shot at prying open the doors to the Senate chamber after all. After Republican senators claimed that it was perfectly reasonable to put a United States president on trial without hearing from any witnesses, a few of them are showing signs of recognizing that the truth matters. Or, at least, that the American people believe it does.

What’s changed? Shocking but not surprising revelations from John Bolton’s book manuscript, which The New York Times reported over the weekend, have made impossible to ignore what everyone has known for months: President Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine to benefit himself politically, and against the strenuous objections of his top aides and both parties in Congress.

On Monday morning, Mitt Romney, of Utah, said, “I think it’s increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton.”

It’s refreshing to hear those words. And yet the fact that such a statement is noteworthy at all tells you how far from responsible governance Republicans have strayed. They hold 53 seats in the Senate, and yet the nation is waiting on just four — four!— to do the right thing and agree to call Mr. Bolton, the former national security adviser, and other key witnesses to testify in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial.

A far more representative attitude in the Republican caucus was expressed by Roy Blunt, of Missouri, who said on Monday, “Unless there’s a witness that’s going to change the outcome, I can’t imagine why we’d want to stretch this out for weeks and months.” With this tautology Senator Blunt gives away the game: All witness testimony to date — all presented as part of the House impeachment proceedings — has only strengthened the case against Mr. Trump, but Republicans will not vote to convict him under any circumstances. By definition, then, no witness in the Senate could possibly change the outcome.

The reporting on Mr. Bolton’s manuscript, which is scheduled for publication in March, has scrambled that strategy. Mr. Bolton’s foreign-policy disagreements with Mr. Trump have been public knowledge for months. Last fall, Fiona Hill, a Russia expert and former Bolton aide, testified in the House that Mr. Bolton was alarmed by Mr. Trump’s aid-for-investigations scheme, which Mr. Bolton characterized as a “drug deal.”

In the manuscript, detailed descriptions of which were leaked to The Times, he recounts nearly a dozen instances in which he and other top administration officials pleaded with Mr. Trump to release the aid, to no avail.

Mr. Bolton, a hard-line conservative with decades of service in Republican administrations, is no anti-Trump zealot, which makes his allegations against the president that much more devastating. And his decision to tell these stories publicly nearly certainly waives any claims of executive privilege Mr. Trump might try to assert over their communications.

Let’s not forget the newly revealed evidence that came to light on Saturday, in the form of a tape recording released by the lawyer for Lev Parnas, who had worked for Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, in the Ukraine scheme. Mr. Trump has denied even knowing Mr. Parnas, but on the tape the two men can be heard in conversation at a dinner in April 2018. “Get rid of her,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Yovanovitch. “Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. O.K.? Do it.”

You know what would be a good way to figure out who’s telling the truth? Subpoena Mr. Bolton to testify under oath.

This isn’t a close call. A majority of Americans of all political stripes want to hear from Mr. Bolton, at the least. They believe, as do congressional Democrats, that you can’t vote on whether to remove a president from office without getting the fullest possible account of his alleged offenses.

But Senate Republicans have so far refused to hear from any witnesses or to demand any documents, following the lead of Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, who has never hesitated to undermine the country’s institutions if he thinks doing so will help his party.
This is a risky strategy. One reason good lawyers insist on deposing witnesses and subpoenaing documentary evidence is to avoid any unwelcome surprises at trial. Mr. Bolton has now provided the latest of those surprises. It is surely not the last. Back in September, Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders, said: “What would’ve been wrong is if the president had suggested to the Ukrainian government that if you don’t do what I want you to do regarding the Bidens, we’re not going to give you the aid. That was the accusation; that did not remotely happen.”

Except that it did, as Mr. Bolton is apparently willing to say under oath. Republicans don’t want him to do that because they don’t want Americans to exercise the simple good judgment that Mr. Graham once did.

Joe Biden's Ukraine and Age Problems

Like I suspect many, I have real concerns over Joe Biden's age not to mention my fears that he is not up to defeating Donald Trump - the same fears apply to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  Add to this Biden's Ukraine/Hunter Biden problem that one article in New York Magazine notes will become the equivalent of Hillary Clinton's email server if Biden wins the Democrat nomination.  Biden has now compounded his age problem by indicating that he would be a one term president should he win the 2020 election. A second piece in New York Magazine looks at this problem and argues that if Biden himself has worries about his age, then so should the rest of us. All of this suggests that the Democrats need to desperately find a candidate who isn't too old, yet who can beat Trump in the critical handful of Mid-West states that will likely decide the 2020 election in the Electoral College (a system that needs to be abolished in my view since it failed it purpose by not refusing to certify Trump in 2016).  First highlights from the piece on Biden's Ukraine/Hunter Biden problem:  

In the waning years of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden, whose life was in a downward spiral, took a job with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was transparently attempting to gain influence with Hunter’s father. The maneuver was unsuccessful for Burisma (which received no favorable treatment from the vice-president), fairly successful for Hunter (who received a hefty paycheck for minimal work), and has left a residue of low-grade sleaze that Joe Biden’s campaign has proven unable to scrape away. The dilemma this poses for Biden, and his party, is what — if anything — they can do about this problem.

So far, Biden’s responses to questioning on his son’s role, which range from challenging his interlocutor to a push-up contest to trailing off awkwardly, have hardly allayed the concern. But it’s difficult to think of a better response, since a true answer is extremely difficult for a politician to communicate. And the true answer is: Yeah, I screwed up, but it’s actually not that big of a deal.

Biden’s error is that he created what used to be called “the appearance of impropriety,” a phrase that was common back before actual impropriety rendered it into a quaint anachronism. The appearance of impropriety is that Hunter Biden made money from Burisma, a Ukrainian firm, at a time when Joe Biden was directing the administration’s Ukraine policy, creating the appearance that Burisma bought Joe Biden’s favor. Indeed, President Trump has relentlessly charged that Burisma did in fact buy Biden’s favor. This is false.

His [Biden’s] error was allowing his son to cash in on the false perception that he could sell access to his father. And by all accounts, Biden was too distracted by his job and distraught by the death of his other son to intervene in Hunter’s actions. It’s not nothing, but it is a small thing.

Democrats have bitter experience with this sort of flaw. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of State is an eerily similar precursor. It was a small error borne of neglect . . . . And Trump turned the small error into a gigantic scandal, accusing her of heinous crimes and ludicrously insisting she ought to be imprisoned over them.

The email scandal was not just a Fox News narrative. It dominated mainstream news coverage of Clinton’s campaign, because it was a real issue, albeit a small one. Mainstream reporters made a historic blunder by devoting far more attention to the email issue than it deserved, but this is an inevitable result of the incentive system in the mainstream press, which prioritizes critical coverage over passive transmission of a candidate’s chosen message.

[O]ne of the retrospective ironies of the email scandal is that even by the narrow standards of handling government information security, ignoring every other avenue of potential misconduct, Clinton was the superior candidate. Trump’s administration has committed numerous security mishaps. As Philip Bump noted in March, the ranks of Trump officials who used private email to conduct official business include Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller, Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, K.T. McFarland, and Reince Priebus. Since then, Nikki Haley has been found to have done the same.

Reporters aren’t going to stop asking Biden tough questions about a legitimate ethical shortcoming just because his opponent’s sins dwarf Biden’s a thousandfold. Clinton’s example suggests that an apology wouldn’t do Biden much good. Maybe the solution is not to nominate Biden at all — though that strategy assumes Democrats can find somebody so pure nothing in their past can be turned into a Clinton email or Burisma level story.

We are hurtling toward a recurrence of the 2016 nightmare.

The second piece looks at Biden's age problem.  Here are highlights:

Joe Biden’s top political priority is to make Joe Biden a one-term president.

The 77-year-old Democratic front-runner has reportedly informed his closest advisers that if he is elected in 2020, he will not seek reelection in 2024. As Politico reports: According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for re-election in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.

Some in the Democratic front-runner’s camp believe his limited ambitions are an asset worth advertising. After all, younger voters have evinced little enthusiasm for Biden, with only 11 percent of Democrats under 35 backing him in a recent Quinnipiac poll. Perhaps Biden would be best able to unite his party by selling himself as a kind of rusty old wedge for prying Donald Trump from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: In this economy, the only thing that can stop a bad old white man with a penchant for incoherent rambling is a mediocre old white man with a penchant for incoherent rambling. But don’t worry — Great Uncle Joe won’t linger too long after solving the White House’s pest problem.

This pitch has its attractions, though its appeal is somewhat contingent upon the identity of Biden’s heir apparent. And the moment he actually names a specific individual, the gambit becomes less broadly appealing. But even if we stipulate that Biden’s plans for an early retirement would mitigate millennial dissatisfaction with his nomination, those plans would still do more to indict his candidacy than enhance it.

In the immediate term, leaking word that you expect to be unable or unwilling to fulfill the duties of the presidency in five years raises the question of how you can be sure you’ll be up to the job in four. Which is to say, by letting his plans slip to Politico, Biden’s campaign has accentuated the candidate’s core weakness: that he is 77, but doesn’t sound a day over 86.

If Biden wins the nomination, he will have to combat the perception that his age has rendered him unfit (or, in our spritely 73-year-old president’s phrasing, too “sleepy”) for the presidency. That’s going to be harder to do when you’ve already signaled that you’re so concerned about your own stamina, you’ve resigned yourself to being a lame-duck president from the day you take office.

Given the Democratic Party’s myriad alternative options, picking a 2020 standard-bearer who won’t run in 2024 would be the opposite of pragmatic. It would needlessly increase the GOP’s chances of reclaiming the White House after a short hiatus.

Biden has built up a lot of goodwill among Democratic voters. And as of this writing, he appears well on his way to winning the party’s nomination. But if he knows he doesn’t have eight years of public service left in him, he should do the right thing for his party and country and stop trying to serve four.

America Starts to Feel a Little More Soviet

NYC's St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Many historians and columnists - as well as this blog - have lamented the drift of America towards an authoritarian regime where actions once expected only from dictatorships and the so-called banana republics of the past are now common place among the Trump/Pence regime and Republican sycophants. America's decline is being noticed abroad as well where other NATO leaders whisper about Trump - America's version of Kim Jong-un. It is also being noticed by those who immigrated to America seeking a better life and a political system that supposedly held to ideals embodied in the U.S. Constitution who now, as noted in a piece in The Atlantic, feel as if they are witnessing a Soviet/Putin form of corrupt authoritarian rule.   The world is watching to see if Congress steps up to defend America's supposed ideals by impeaching and removing Trump from office or if we are witnessing the first major step in the death of the American republic.  Here are excerpts from the Atlantic piece: 

Walk down a barely marked stairway into a basement in New York’s East Village on a Sunday morning, and you may find yourself in a hub of Ukrainian American life. Members of the vast Ukrainian diaspora regularly gather here, at a church-run restaurant called Streecha, trading the latest on Ukrainian politics over plates of pierogi and bowls of borscht. As formal impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump were finally getting under way recently, several of the patrons here told me that America had lately been feeling more like home—and not in a good way.

Diplomats and officials as prominent as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have attempted to revive Ronald Reagan–style rhetoric about America’s role as the world’s foremost defender of liberty and freedom, including signaling support for Ukrainian self-determination. Meanwhile, [Trump] the president and his associates appear to be more invested in courting power and personal gain, from Trump’s cozy press conferences with Russian President Vladimir Putin to his attempt to get the Ukrainian government to investigate the family of former Vice President Joe Biden.

The Ukrainians I met here weren’t surprised by this Trumpian mode of politics, in part because it’s very similar to the status quo in the part of the world they come from. The impeachment inquiry is a test not just of Trump’s character, but of the country’s: Is a pitch for America’s exceptionalism still plausible, or is corruption the only true universal principle any government will ever embrace?

“I used to think that American politicians and politics is much more nice than Ukrainian,” Natalie, a short, chatty woman who gave her age as “in her 30s or 40s,” told me. “Come on. It’s even worse.” . . . . The United States government is just as corrupt as Ukraine’s, Natalie said, comparing political leaders here to squabbling seventh graders. This realization has been disappointing, she said, because she is an American by choice: She came to the U.S. a little less than a decade ago, after feeling pushed out of Ukraine by instability and lack of opportunity.

[Trump’s] The president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his business associates have come under fire for trying to coordinate a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens. And Trump, of course, is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry focused on his apparent attempt to pressure Ukrianian President Volodymyr Zelensky into a similar investigation.

As this unlikely series of events has unfolded, Trump and his allies have taken to casually demonizing Ukraine as suspicious and untrustworthy, calling back to Cold War–era stereotypes of Soviet spies and no-goodniks. Leaders ranging from Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana to [Trump] the president himself have promoted the false claim that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Kennedy later walked back his statement.)

The portrait of his [Trump’s] behavior that has emerged in news reports and congressional testimony is one of using his office for personal gain: He sought to leverage military aid to a vulnerable ally in order to damage a major political opponent. This move had real consequences for Ukraine, where millions of people are currently living under Russian occupation in the eastern part of the country and soldiers fighting Russian troops are underarmed and strapped for resources. The message of his actions was clear, said Natalie, the woman I met at Streecha: “Trump has no idea where is Ukraine, what is Ukraine, and what’s going on in Ukraine.”

Iwan Kinal, a 35-year-old who grew up in New Jersey and wore a furry black Cossack hat as we stood outside St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church in the cold, told me he’s a lifelong Republican and even likes some of Trump’s policies. But he’s been disturbed to hear the president echo what he described as Russian propaganda about Crimea, Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula, which Russia seized in 2014. “I’m disappointed in his treatment and his opinion of Ukraine from the start,” Kinal said of Trump.

As the impeachment inquiry and other investigations have revealed, Russian propaganda has in fact infiltrated American political discourse, sometimes at the very highest levels of government. Fiona Hill, who served for two years on Trump’s National Security Council, said during November’s impeachment hearings that members of the House Intelligence Committee itself were perpetrating “a fictional narrative” created by Russian security services that Russia did not, in fact, interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and that Ukraine may have done so instead. The truth has become subservient to political expediency, and the American government has become a little more similar to any other strongman regime.

Just as Ukraine has long been a football in Russia’s regional schemes, it has now become a Rorschach test in America’s partisan feuds, consequences be damned. “Ukrainian people have been dying for five years in that territory, and they still do,” said Natalie, referring to the Donbas region, where Ukraine is attempting to fight off a Russian incursion. But in America, all that seems to matter are politicians’ personal fortunes and the next domestic elections, reminiscent of so many strongman regimes. As people die in her home country, Natalie said, all of this “is just a game, unfortunately.”

An irony is that the church referenced in the article is where my father was baptized.  His parents fled Austria-Hungry shortly before WWI and settled in New York City.  My paternal grand parents fled a monarchy for political freedom.  Now, I find myself living in a country drifting towards Trump's self-styled monarchy if Congress fails to act and stop the cancer.

Dedicated Public Servants: the Antidote to Trump

The Trump/Pence regime and its entourage of grifters and crooks is a huge malignancy on America.  It is like watching a crime syndicate writ large except that even in "The Godfather,"  Don Vito Corleone had some shred of principles.  Trump has none.   This past week in sharp contrast, Americans got to witness the testimony of career diplomats and public servants who  take their jobs and duties seriously and adhere to a code of duty, honor, country. The contrast between these individuals and Trump - and Devin Nunes based on the new CNN reporting - could not be more stark.  We need more of these people in government and in politics if we are to save the nation and its soul.  Andrew Sullivan notes this in column in New York Magazine that focuses in particular on Fiona Hill who dismantled the lies and obfuscation being put worth by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.  Here are excerpts: 

I’ve been in Britain, so it was tough to give this week’s impeachment hearings the attention they deserve. But one obvious theme has emerged: the imperturbability, professionalism, and courage of the women who have testified. When I sat down last night and watched some of the footage of Fiona Hill online, I was gobsmacked.

One of the wretched things about the last few years has been following and staying sane in the blizzard of bluster, misinformation, gaslighting, conspiracy theories, and the actual empirical, complex reality we have been confronted with. To keep one’s focus while enduring this torrent of deliberate confusion and competing narratives has been extremely hard.

But not for Hill.

Watching her listen carefully to Castor and Nunes’s questions and arguments, and then just as carefully, methodically dismantle them was a kind of cleansing shower in an impossibly humid summer. Her clear distinction between national security and a “domestic errand” is at the heart of the profound corruption in this presidency, and I have simply never seen it expressed so coherently and plainly.

This is why we needed impeachment hearings. We can see this “deep state” for the patriotic professionals so many of them are. We can pierce through the propaganda and see the Washington that many of us who live there have always seen: countless quiet, principled public servants, usually genuinely seeking the public good. Yes, there are many, many cronies and lobbyists and swamp-dwellers as well. But they are outnumbered.

And to see how these people have had to endure a president this deranged, this indifferent to the truth, this craven toward the enemies of the United States because they can be assets for his domestic political purposes is to experience the appropriate amount of anger toward the damage he has done. It feels like a moment to me.

And it is right and just that it has been women who have faced down this belligerent, blustering tyrant. And not just women but immigrant women, whose commitment to this country and its ideals can often be more intense than those of the native born.

She knows what’s at stake. And she has done her part. It gives me hope, I guess. Hope that we can, in fact, expose and defeat this malignancy at the heart of our democracy.

If we see Trump as the poison he truly is, we have now also seen something else. We have seen the antidote. 

Sondland Leaves No Other Option Than Impeachment

Yesterday's testimony of Gordon Sondland, a Trump $1 million contributor and hardly one to be labeled a Never Trumper, has set the stage for a moment of truth for the Republican Party as a whole and Congressional Republicans in particular.  Either they support the U.S. Constitution and the concept that no one is above the law or they don't.  Indeed, if they do not impeach and vote to convict Trump, they will be violating the oaths of office that each one of them took and will be confirming that the GOP is now the party of corruption and lawlessness.  If the GOP still was the party that I had once belonged to, a delegation would be preparing to visit the White House and tell Trump that he needs to resign - the same may end up applying to Mike Pence as well who seems to have been a co-conspirator despite his game of amnesia and denial. Sadly, today's GOP is no longer that party and its base is controlled by racists, white supremacists, religious extremist and greed driven multi-millionaires and billionaires. If Republicans refuse to do their constitutional duty, they need to be voted out of office  at every level by the public who must now demonstrate that the rule of law still matters.  A column in the New York Times neatly lays out why their is no option but impeachment and removal of Trump from office.  Here are highlights:

History will remember Wednesday as the day a United States ambassador testified under oath before Congress and laid out a clear, simple and damning case that President Trump abused the power of his office and committed bribery, an act for which the Constitution leaves but one outcome.

The evidence was already overwhelming, but now there can be no question about it: Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony was the smoking gun.

This is largely because the facts presented are simple. At the direction of Mr. Trump and Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, United States officials communicated to the government of Ukraine that a White House visit for the new Ukrainian president was contingent on the Ukrainian president publicly announcing investigations into the dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory about the 2016 elections. Later, a congressionally appropriated $391 million military aid package was added to the leverage.

Mr. Sondland, a Trump appointee and million-dollar Trump inauguration donor, testified under oath that there was an explicit quid pro quo at the direction of President Trump, through Mr. Giuliani. The facts are not meaningfully in dispute, because Mr. Sondland’s testimony corroborates the accounts of multiple strong and reliable witnesses. Mr. Sondland made clear that there are even more people and additional documents that could corroborate his testimony, but the White House is blocking their release. The absence of these additional documents and witnesses makes it abundantly clear that the administration is obstructing Congress. In a few bombshell exchanges, Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and the committee’s Democratic counsel, Daniel Goldman, had Mr. Sondland walk the public through each element of the federal bribery statute. Mr. Trump corruptly demanded something of value — the announcement of investigations into his political rivals — for his personal benefit, in exchange for President Trump’s performance of official acts: both hosting a White House meeting and, as Mr. Sondland came to believe, releasing the security aid. Mr. Sondland noted, “We worked with Mr. Giuliani because the president directed us to do so” and “Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States.” In fact, Mr. Trump’s insistence on using his lawyer to obtain a personal benefit at the expense of official United States policy is powerful evidence of the president’s corrupt intent. Bribery is one of the Constitution’s specific prohibitions on executive conduct, second only to treason as a reason for impeaching a president. And constitutional bribery is defined more broadly than the statute — the Constitution was written well before the federal bribery statute and was meant to capture a host of executive malfeasance that might not be captured within the narrow confines of our specific federal laws.

If we are to be, in the words of John Adams, “a government of laws, not of men,” then there is no other option after today’s testimony than the impeachment, conviction and removal from office of President Trump.

It really is that simple and my Republican "friends" have no maneuvering room around it if they are honest and moral people. Trump must go.

Republicans Try to Ignore Sondland's Devastating Testimony

As The Hill notes, Kenneth Starr of Bill Clinton impeachment fame - or infamy depending on one's views - said that Ambassador Sondland's testimony today confirmed that (i) there was a quid pro quo between Trump's administration and the Ukrainian government — which would be "bribery," in the jargon of impeachment, and (ii) the orders to push Kyiv to open an investigation into Trump's political rivals had come directly from the Oval Office.  In the Watergate era, that would likely have been enough for Senate Republicans  of yesteryear to make a trip up Pennsylvania Avenue and tell Trump that it is time to resign.  Sadly, that was then and we are living in the now where the Republican Party of today is willing to run cover for and protect an occupant of the White House who operates as a crime boss and is only too willing to use bribery of a foreign power for his political gain.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the moral bankruptcy and willful blindness of Congressional Republicans.  Here are column excerpts:

Former White House counsel John Dean’s testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee beginning in June 1973 is widely seen as the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency. Dean testified that he had told President Richard M. Nixon that Watergate was a “cancer growing on the presidency” and that the president had proceeded with the coverup nevertheless. Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony on Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee has been likened to Dean’s — and there is even a closer comparison, for good and ill, than most of those offering the analogy realize.

“Was there a ‘quid pro quo’?” Sondland said under oath. “With regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes.” The sound you hear is Republican denials of a quid pro quo exploding. Sondland went on to say he was acting on “the president’s orders” in demanding that Ukraine announce an investigation of the company that employed Hunter Biden — although not to actually carry out the investigation. The distinction is significant because it undercuts the Republican conceit that Trump was genuinely interested in fighting corruption. In fact, he was only interested in damaging a potential political foe.

Sondland also destroyed the Republican cover story that he, former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry (the so-called three amigos), were acting on their own to blackmail Ukraine. “Everyone was in the loop,” Sondland said, and he made clear that by “everyone” he meant not only the president but also Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton.
 If this were a movie, the next scene would be Trump resigning the presidency in disgrace. But real life doesn’t work like reel life. There was no sign of Republicans abandoning the president after Sondland’s blockbuster revelations. Republicans took great comfort in Sondland’s admission that “Trump never told me directly that the aid was conditioned on meetings,” even though he also said “it was abundantly clear there was a link” and no other credible explanation for the aid holdup has ever emerged. Republicans also continued to pretend that Trump did nothing wrong because, after the whistleblower came forward, Trump said, “I want nothing” and the aid to Ukraine — though not a White House meeting — was finally delivered. Republicans are convinced that 2+2=22. It was as though Republicans had demanded of Dean: Did you hear Nixon order the Watergate break-in? Did Nixon ever explicitly say that he wanted you to commit “obstruction of justice”? Did Nixon succeed in stopping the investigation? And then used Dean’s negative answers to exonerate Nixon. What we are learning is that it’s much easier to document a president’s crimes than to get his party to give a damn. Republican leaders finally told Nixon to resign in August 1974 only after the release of the “smoking gun” tape on which Nixon could be heard directing the coverup. This was an indirect result of Dean’s testimony: Dean had told lawmakers that Nixon might have tapes of his conversations and White House aide Alexander Butterfield had subsequently confirmed the existence of the taping system. Trump is almost entirely ignorant of history but knows enough not to tape his incriminating conversations — and he is wily enough not to flat-out tell his aides “I want you to break the law.” As Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen told Congress, Trump communicates in “code” like a mob boss to make his criminal intent clear.

In a sane world, Sondland’s testimony would have ended the Trump presidency. But Republicans have made clear that their devotion to Trump is irrational and, like other religious faiths, not subject to rational refutation.

The Belated Conversion of Former Republicans

While the increase of the number of Never Trumpers has been encouraging to watch, one thing that most of them are not quick to confess is that for far too long, most were apologists for toxic elements of the GOP base and GOP policies aimed at benefiting the few at the expense of the many as symbolized by both the GOP efforts to destroy the Affordable Health Care Act and the Trump/GOP tax cuts that did nothing other than provide a huge windfall to the very wealthy and large corporations while exploding the federal debt in the process.  And then there was the dishonesty and endless lies of the GOP that long preceded the rise of Trump.  The GOP has now become synonymous with lying and not just due to the endless lies emanating from the White House. The current impeachment inquiry has brought the dishonesty of the GOP to the forefront as laid out in a column in the Washington Post by a former Republican conservative who is among the Never Trump ranks.  Here are highlights:

When listening to President Trump and fellow Republicans throw around accusations against Democrats and the media or advance defenses for Trump’s impeachable conduct, there is a better than even chance they are misleading if not downright lying. In some cases, we discover the lies because other individuals are caught lying.

Roger Stone was convicted, among other things, of lying to Congress about his conversations with WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange. He falsely claimed: He had no emails, documents or texts relating to WikiLeaks; he never sought damaging information (i.e., emails) about Hillary Clinton; never contacted WikiLeaks through intermediaries; and never contacted the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks. The last lie — denying contacts with the Trump campaign — raises the question as to whether President Trump lied in responses to Robert S. Mueller II.

At the trial we learned about Stone’s numerous contacts with the campaign: Rick Gates, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, testified Tuesday that Stone began discussing Clinton leaks with the campaign in April 2016 and that from May onward Gates understood Stone to be the campaign’s intermediary with WikiLeaks. By July 2016, Gates testified, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said he was updating Trump and others regularly and directed Gates to keep following up with Stone. After Trump ended one phone call from Stone at the end of that month, Gates testified, the future president said to Gates that “more information would be coming.”

In his written answers, however, Trump claimed he had “no recollection” of conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks nor did he recall knowing Stone had discussed WikiLeaks’s email drops with the campaign. Perhaps Trump’s memory is addled; if not, it appears he lied to Mueller.

Likewise, in the Ukraine matter multiple witnesses gave testimony that suggests that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland has been telling falsehoods under oath. Some he has remedied, . . . However, we now know from at least one other witness that Sondland’s denial that he spoke to the president or to the State Department was false. (He spoke to both.) One wonders if he’ll share a similar fate as Stone, the former Trump confidant who this week was found guilty on charges of lying to Congress, obstruction of justice and witness tampering. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale has documented 45 Trump lies concerning Ukraine . . . . Other Trump lies include his denial that United States military aid was held up, his bizarre accusations that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) was the whistleblower’s source and his unfounded allegations that former vice president Joe Biden “stole” millions of dollars from foreign countries and pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor when Hunter Biden was still under investigation.

House Republicans continually traffic in lies — e.g., Ukraine interfered with our election, Joe Biden’s conduct pressuring removal of a delinquent prosecutor was illegal or corrupt, Trump was concerned about Ukraine’s corruption in general.

On procedure, they’ve lied about the depositions (routinely used in investigations), claiming they violate “due process” or amount to a “Soviet-style” star chamber.

At times, Republicans deliberately ignore evidence in front of their eyes. They seem to have settled on the theory that Trump never communicated to Zelensky that aid was tied to investigations of Biden, Burisma and Trump’s crackpot Ukraine interference conspiracy. Trump, however, raised these items in the phone call. . . . .
 Republicans’ lies are so numerous and obvious that one requires only a minimal amount of fact-checking to see that they lie because they have no truthful factual defenses nor valid constitutional argument. The facts are the facts: Trump conditioned aid to an ally in a war for its sovereignty on production of dirt to smear a political rival. He has refused to allow key witnesses to produce documents or to testify, thereby obstructing Congress. He has sought to intimidate and threaten witnesses including the whistleblower and Marie Yovanovitch, sending out the message you will be targeted and smeared if you provide evidence against him.

As for the Constitution, we know that “bribery,” enumerated as one of the grounds for impeachment in the parlance of the Framers, includes asking for or giving personal favors in exchange for political acts. That is precisely what occurred here. Obstruction and witness intimidation are obviously "high crimes."

House Republicans have become so invested in crackpot theories, bogus procedural complains and constitutional illiteracy that they will never recognize the president’s wrongdoing. They are as incapable of upholding their oath, which requires impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors or bribery, as he is. Both Trump and his House enablers are unfit to serve since personal and political considerations obliterate their ability to detect the truth and thereby to uphold their public obligations.

It remains an open question as to whether Senate Republicans are willing to ignore and distort reality so as to avoid voting to convict a president of their own party. Unfortunately, we find it highly unlikely that more than a few (if that many) would concede that Trump and the right-wing echo chamber that protects him have been spinning a web of lies for nearly three years.

The GOP web of lies goes back much further in time.  It is a shame that the Never Trumpers did not begin speaking out one to two decades ago.  Trump is the culmination of a pattern of lies that has stretched out for years. 

Biden and Warren Can’t Avoid Their Weaknesses Forever

While both remain in the lead in various polls on the Democrat presidential nomination contest, both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren leave me with a sense of unease and a continued fear that neither can defeat Trump in a general election.  On Biden's part - if one overlooks his constant gaffes and age - the albatross of his son Hunter hangs over him and he refuses to fully and properly address the issue - something that plays directly into the hands of Trump and Fox News, the GOP state news channel.  On Warren's part, her refusal to admit that her health care plan would raise taxes in a very visible way is an Achilles heel that will not go away.  This, combined with her liberalism in general could likewise play to Trump's advantage. As a piece in New York Magazine notes, neither one of these candidates appears willing to address these liabilities and prepare for an onslaught by Trump should they win the nomination.  Here are article highlights:

If you paid close attention to the Democratic presidential debate this week, you noticed something that Democrats might find disturbing. The two leading candidates — Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, probably in that order — both faced tough questions that could damage them in the general election. And neither appears prepared to defend themselves against what is coming.

Begin with Biden, who has a simple problem with no clear solution. His son, Hunter, traded on his father’s name. In Ukraine, Hunter Biden accepted a lucrative position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Burisma surely believed hiring the vice-president’s son would give it political juice with the United States government. It did not. . . . Yet this does not fully absolve either Joe or Hunter. . . . At minimum, the arrangement marginally spent down the moral capital of the American government and economy by promoting the perception that official favor can be purchased through family members of powerful officials.

Trump, of course, has degraded that moral capital a million times over with his open nepotism and self-dealing. The problem Biden faces is that it is difficult to communicate the nuance of his position. . . . . Biden’s response to this dilemma was to elide it completely. At the debate, Biden simply insisted he and Hunter did nothing wrong while deflecting the inquiry.

For human and understandable reasons, Biden is obviously reluctant to scold his troubled son in public. Yet the fact is that his son’s behavior is an albatross for the father, and all indications suggest that, if Biden wins the nomination, the damage from this relationship will only grow.

Warren, for her part, faced yet another round of criticism over her refusal to acknowledge the financing mechanism of the health-care plan she has endorsed. The political weak point of the Sanders plan is that it would move 157 million Americans off of employer-sponsored insurance and onto Medicare. In theory, this should work out great. (I would be happy to trade my employer insurance for Medicare.) In practice, this requires convincing half the country to swap their current insurance for a government plan, and to convert their health-care premiums (which are nontransparent and remitted directly by their employer, reducing their wages only indirectly) into taxes (which are paid directly). Poll after poll shows both these changes turn the abstractly popular notion of broader coverage upside down.

Warren’s strategy is to dodge both objections. She has, in the past, avoided the question of people losing their employer insurance by saying nobody likes their insurance company. . . . On taxes, she changes the question to total cost and refuses to acknowledge that taxes will go up in the swap.

Warren’s admirers consider this dodge to be clever, but the last debate shows just how politically corrosive it could become. The problem is that Sanders, who wrote the damn bill, openly admits taxes would go up.  . . . The contrast between one Medicare for All supporter honestly admitting how the plan would work, and the other one refusing to admit it, did not make her look good. It gave her opponents an opening to cast her as shady, which they seized.

Pete Buttigieg pointed out that Warren’s response was “a yes or no question that didn’t get a yes or no answer.” Biden said, “it’s important to be straightforward with them,” and Amy Klobuchar added, “at least Bernie’s being honest here.” This is not merely a problem of Warren being associated with an unpopular policy. It is a question that is corroding her reputation for honesty, which is a foundation of her outsider, truth-telling brand.

As with Biden, Warren will find the reality that Trump is orders of magnitude worse to be of little value. Republicans have a party-controlled mass-media apparatus that has trained its rank and file to support liars, but the Democrats do not.

If Biden wants to beat Trump, he needs to put more distance between himself and his son. If Warren wants to beat Trump, she needs to ditch Bernie’s health-care plan and come up with one that doesn’t have political poison pills. The question with both candidates is, what steps are they willing to take to win?

John Bolton: A Portrait of GOP Foolishness About Trump

Parallels between German conservatives in the early 1930's who thought they could control Hitler and today's Republicans who viewed Trump as a manageable route to furthering their agenda continue to compound.  Like their German counterparts, Republicans are discovering that their hopes of controlling Trump were mere delusions. Like Hitler, Trump is mentally unstable and views himself as accountable to no one.   In both instances, conservative idiocy has brought severe damage to their respective countries and their institutions.  Former National Security Adviser - of whom I am no fan - is an example of GOP foolishness and the reality that Trump is a dangerous loose canon focused only on himself and his narcissistic delusions of grandeur.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Bolton's belated realization of his own folly.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump’s explicitly declared position in the scandal consuming his presidency is that pressuring a foreign power to “investigate” a leading domestic political opponent absolutely falls within his rightfully exercised authority. Trump has said this, and so has his White House counsel, making this the White House’s official political, substantive and legal position.

But this defense is cracking up. That’s because we’re now learning, one after another, that all of the people around him knew that it was grievously wrong — that is, all except for those who were carrying out Trump’s corrupt scheme.

As this becomes more public, Trump’s position will grow increasingly unsustainable — not just as a rhetorical matter but also in terms of whether he’ll be able to keep the support of Senate Republicans, his final line of defense.

The latest domino to fall is John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser. The New York Times reports that in July, Bolton grew so alarmed by efforts to pressure Ukraine to launch “investigations” into Joe Biden and his son that he instructed an aide to alert White House lawyers.

That aide is Fiona Hill, a former senior White House adviser on Russia and Europe. Hill testified about this exchange with Bolton to House investigators as part of their impeachment inquiry. Hill told them that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney had run what The Post calls a “shadow” campaign to pressure Ukraine to do Trump’s political bidding.

“I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Bolton reportedly told Hill to tell White House lawyers.

Crucially, this eruption came after a meeting in early July at which Sondland made it clear that the goal of this shadow campaign was to get Ukraine to revive investigations into Burisma, the company on whose board Biden’s son Hunter sat. This confirmed for Bolton that the goal was to leverage Ukraine into acting as Trump’s weapon against Biden — that is, by manufacturing smears designed to debilitate him in the 2020 election.

That made Bolton go “ballistic.” And on another occasion, Bolton described Giuliani, one of the scheme’s ringleaders, as “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”

This long-running plot, of course, culminated in Trump’s July 25 call in which he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to undertake investigations that would undercut the idea that Russia interfered on Trump’s behalf in 2016, and again help him rig the election in 2020.

Trump’s stance continues to be that this pressure was entirely within his legitimate authority. The White House counsel’s letter, which we now know was largely dictated by Trump, declares that there was “nothing wrong” with the July 25 call . . . .

Ultimately, Hitler ignored his advisers thinking he knew better than everyone else.  Things ultimately ended badly for not only Hitler but also his sycophants and millions of Germans.  Republicans truly need a lesson in history.

America's Beacon Has Gone Out

Despite the many ugly aspects of its history - the genocide of Native Americans and slavery and then Jim Crow being some of the ugliest - America has for generations held up in theory democracy and the rule of law and, if you will, the American dream where anyone had a chance to make a success of their lives.  Now, in less than three years, the Trump/Pence regime has extinguished that beacon of promise and, instead replaced it with authoritarianism, a betrayal of long time allies, pandering to outright racists who want to disenfranchise anyone they deem "other" - which likely includes gays - and rule by a malignant narcissist who has loyal to no one and who embodies what every decent parent - Christian or not - should never want the child to be.  No one should be surprised by the damage Trump and his simpering sycophant Mike Pence have wrought.  Trump long ran his real estate empire like a crime boss - a reason New Yorkers despise him so much - and now that cancer has spread to both America's domestic and foreign policy.  An op-ed in the New York Times looks at what has happened in Ukraine which is a microcosm of what is being wrought large by this toxic and dangerous regime.  Here are highlights:

In 2014, Ukraine’s wildly corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia after mass protests on the Maidan, Kiev’s central square. During what Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, police snipers killed dozens of demonstrators. In the revolution’s aftermath, a number of young idealists decided to plunge into politics, hoping to reform their troubled country from the inside. One of them was Serhiy Leshchenko, at the time perhaps the country’s most famous investigative journalist.

The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama had encouraged Leshchenko and some of his friends to run for Parliament. He’d met Leshchenko in 2013, when the journalist took part in a three-week summer course run by Fukuyama at Stanford that aims to teach activists from around the world about building democratic institutions. “After the Maidan revolution, I thought that it was particularly important that all these people in civil society actually go into the government,” Fukuyama said.

Many of them did. That October, Leshchenko, a lanky, bearded hipster with a passion for rave culture, became part of a cadre of Western-oriented newcomers elected to Parliament, even as he continued to work as a journalist exposing corruption. This year, after Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidential election, Leshchenko advised him during the transition.

Then Rudy Giuliani began attacking Leshchenko as a conspirator against America.

In 2016, Leshchenko had helped expose the “black ledger,” an accounting book of hundreds of pages found in Yanukovych’s former party headquarters. Among its many entries, it showed $12.7 million in secret payments to Paul Manafort. At the time, Manafort was running Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but before that, he was one of Yanukovych’s most important advisers.

One of the reasons Manafort is in federal prison is that he failed to disclose or pay taxes on millions of dollars from Ukraine. But if you believe Giuliani, the black ledger was part of a plot to damage Trump.

Last month, in an epic, ranting interview on CNN, he accused Ukraine’s leading anti-corruption organization, the Anti-Corruption Action Center, or AntAC, of developing “all of the dirty information that ended up being a false document that was created in order to incriminate Manafort.”

In Giuliani’s fevered alternative reality, Ukraine’s most stalwart foes of corruption are actually corruption’s embodiment. Deeply compromised figures with vendettas against the activists — particularly the ex-prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko — are transformed into heroes.

This addled, through-the-looking glass fantasy came to drive American foreign policy in Ukraine. Trump withdrew the American ambassador to the country, Marie Yovanovitch, whom reformers saw as their champion. He withheld military aid that Ukraine desperately needed, while asking Zelensky to do him a “favor” and investigate deranged fictions about Ukrainian interference in American elections, as well as Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Given how much Ukraine depends on American support, Giuliani’s smears made it politically impossible for Leshchenko, who left Parliament in August, to continue advising Zelensky. Now, with Ukraine at the center of a world-historical international scandal, he is stupefied to find himself defamed by powerful forces in the United States, once the world’s strongest backer of those fighting for democracy in his country.

If America can be said to have a foreign policy at this debased stage of the Trump administration, it mostly consists of sucking up to strongmen while betraying everyone who ever believed in America’s putative ideals. Trump has given Turkey his blessing to assault the Syrian Kurds, America’s crucial allies against ISIS. In June, he reportedly promised China that he wouldn’t speak out in favor of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, some of whom have been carrying American flags, as long as trade talks progressed.

Here in Ukraine, a country locked in a proxy war with Russia, coping with a deluge of disinformation and propaganda and struggling to transcend a history of corruption, reformers are trying to figure out what it means when the American president sides against them.

[Pro-Western reformers] had seen the United States as a “a perfect democracy functioning very well,” with an admirable system of checks and balances. “And now this image is crumbling and that’s very dangerous.”

[T]here was a time when America at least viewed the projection of democratic values as being in its self-interest. That gave liberals in countries like Ukraine leverage against recalcitrant officials.

“The majority of the reforms, especially on anti-corruption, were passed because there was a very strong demand from civil society, and there was the I.M.F. and the U.S. Embassy pushing it hard,” said Oleksandra Ustinova, a former board member of AntAC who was elected to Parliament this year.

Now that’s all changed. As The New York Times reported, after Trump recalled the U.S. ambassador, Lutsenko gloated to the head of AntAC that he had “eliminated your roof,” using Russian mafia slang for guardian.

“We’ve been exporting our corruption to them, rather than trying to export good governance,” said Fukuyama.

[T]wo Ukrainian-born clients of Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, had been arrested on charges of campaign finance crimes as they were preparing to leave the United States with one-way tickets.

According to an indictment, the two “sought to advance their personal financial interests and the political interests of at least one Ukrainian government official with whom they were working.” . . . . Sure enough, on Saturday NBC News reported that Lutsenko was the official in the indictment. Yovanovitch might have been referring to Lutsenko when she said, in her Friday congressional testimony, that “individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”

Federal prosecutors are now investigating whether Giuliani himself broke the law.

Throughout our history, America has committed many sins against democracy around the world, but we used to be on the right side in Ukraine. Not anymore. As one former U.S. diplomat said to me recently, “The beacon has gone out.” We’re with the oligarchs now.

Witnessing what is happening makes one long even for the bad old days of George W. Bush.  Despite his many sins, Bush was not tantamount to a Mafia don running the nation and its foreign policy solely for his own personal financial and political gain.   And yes, I still want to know what Turkish President Erdogan offered Trump in exchange for betraying the Kurds.

The Growing Popularity of Impeaching Trump

Loyalty can be fleeting in the political realm, especially among Republicans who have to date shown they will happily sell their souls to Donald Trump in exchange for avoiding a primary challenge from someone even more tawdry who is willing to stir up Trump's putrid core base of support. Thus, the minute allegiance to Trump becomes a political liability, the spineless congressional Republicans may decide it is in their best interests to throw Trump overboard. As noted in a previous post, anti-Trump animus appears to be powering Virginians to favor a Democrat takeover of control of the Virginia General Assembly. If the Virginia GOP suffers another electoral defeat next months, some Republicans with the spine of a jellyfish might be ready to re-calibrate their allegiance to the liar-in-chief,  Add to this the growing support for impeachment and Trump becoming a liability may become a reality sooner than some of his current sycophants think.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at what may be fueling the growing support for both impeachment and the removal of Trump from office.  Here are excerpts: 

In the first few days after House Democrats announced impeachment proceedings against President Trump, a series of anti-Trump conservatives published columns arguing that they were making a giant tactical error. Bret Stephens (“Pelosi’s Bad Impeachment Call”), David Brooks (“Yes, Trump Is Guilty, But Impeachment Is a Mistake”), and George Will (“The best antidote for a bad election is a better election”) all produced the same argument. Trump has done awful things, but impeachment will repel the public. Only an election can remove him.

The flaws in that argument have already become apparent. Impeachment is growing steadily more popular. . . . A commanding majority, 58 versus 38 percent, support the House’s impeachment inquiry. The fear that Trump somehow desired impeachment has been belied by essentially all the White House reporting, which shows the president alternating between depression and raging and flailing for a strategy.

The fear that impeachment would backfire was not crazy, but almost every piece of evidence so far has vindicated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s strategy. There are several reasons why the politics of impeachment have turned in the Democrats’ favor:

This isn’t Russia. The anticlimactic denouement of the Russia investigation weighed heavily on the impeachment skeptics. But the political impact of the Russia probe was smothered both by its dependence on Robert Mueller, . . . . and the sheer complexity of the affair. If the only important facts in the Russia story were Donald Trump negotiating for a several-hundred-million-dollar payoff from Vladimir Putin during the campaign and then lying about it, the outcry might have toppled him.

The Ukraine scandal is much simpler. There is a lot of evidence of wrongdoing, but it all revolves around a single narrative of Trump pressuring a foreign country to investigate his domestic rivals. And the narrative is controlled by Congress, which is willing to charge the president with a high crime, not a reclusive prosecutor who has decided it is improper for him to make any such accusation.

Even Republicans have trouble defending it. For all the public affirmations of support from Trump’s fervent base in the party and party-controlled media, even his supporters are harboring some qualms.

Anita Kumar has a revealing story quoting hard-core Trumpists — ones who stood behind him throughout the Russia scandal — expressing their belief that this time he went too far. “Russia was never real,” an outside Trump adviser says, “Ukraine is.”

The story can get worse. One thing that ought to have been apparent at the outset of this scandal, but which many people missed, is that a lot of people were involved. Turning American foreign policy into an episode of The Sopranos isn’t easy. You have a whole bureaucracy that’s used to operating along established channels, and distorting its functions in such a gross fashion sends ripples throughout the system.

There are going to be more witnesses and more records of communication. Trump is going to keep lying and saying crazy things. It’s not going to be easy to deprive the story of oxygen.

The politics can get worse, too. Republican support for Trump may be louder than the criticism. But the silence of many Republicans, not just the handful of quasi-independent voices, speaks volumes. Many Republicans are withholding judgment, perhaps criticizing impeachment as hasty, but not defending Trump’s behavior or ruling out removal if more evidence emerges.

Mitt Romney is planning to rally Republicans for impeachment in the Senate. Romney has a lot of respect in his caucus, and a lot of fame among the public. Can he get enough senators to remove Trump? Probably not. (Though “probably” is a lot different than “absolutely.”) But some measure of bipartisan support for impeachment is going to strengthen the message that Trump has done something seriously wrong.

This will hurt Trump’s reelection. The biggest mistake the impeachment skeptics made is their assumption that impeaching Trump are unrelated to, or at cross-purposes with, defeating him in 2020. “An election can save the country. An inside-the-Beltway political brawl will not,” predicted Brooks.

Most voters are locked in to one of the parties. The swing vote tends to be low-information voters with a hazy grasp of the issues. Impeachment is a signal to those voters that Trump has done something seriously wrong. It’s not a magic trick that works against every president — there needs to be misconduct people can easily understand, and which the news media covers as a serious scandal. This easily qualifies.

There’s no real political magic here. Having the news dominated by a scandal even many Republicans can’t defend, with a constant drip of damning new details, is extremely unhelpful for [Trump] the president.

I personally hope the momentum of growing support for impeachment continues.  Another wild card Republicans need to be gin worrying about too is how involved was Mike Pence?  I suspect Pence was up to his ears in the operation.