Impeachment Should Focus on Actions, Not Motives
House Democrats need to be careful about how they frame any extortion/bribery allegation against Donald Trump.
President Trumpās congressional defenders, as buffoonish as they have looked throughout the impeachment proceedings, have laid a trap for the pro-impeachment forces. They have focused much of their questioning of witnesses on Trumpās motives and intentions at the time he decided to freeze military aid to Ukraine.
If House Democrats fall into this trap and make the debate about Trumpās initial motives for withholding the aid, they will weaken their case. Perhaps fatally.
Instead of fighting on the battlefield of Trumpās initial intentions, pro-impeachment lawmakers should concede that it is at least plausible that Trumpās decision to freeze the aid was made out of an ugly brew of ignorance, spite, and angerābut not necessarily out of a preconceived scheme to use the withheld aid as leverage to extort Ukraine into interfering with our 2020 presidential election.
The GOP smorgasbord of possible explanations for Trumpās initial decision to withhold aid to Ukraine goes something like this:
Trump hates all foreign aid.
Trump thinks our allies arenāt paying their fair share and doesnāt want the U.S. to be played as a sucker.
Trump hates Ukraine.
Trump thinks Ukraine was āout to get himā in the 2016 election.
Trump believes the Putin/Giuliani conspiracy theory about Ukraine being at the center of the origins of the Russia āwitch hunt.ā
Ukraine has a long, sordid history of corruption.
Ukraine had just elected a new government, and Trump wanted proof that it would be less corrupt than the last one.
Trump often acts impulsively out of spite and anger.
While none of these arguments reflects well on Trump, all of them are plausible.
The narrative that Trump made an ad hoc decision to withhold aid is at least as plausible as a narrative that Trump, with careful planning and malice aforethought, hatched a fully-formed scheme to withhold aid for the precise purpose of using it to extort Ukraine into assisting his 2020 bid for reelection.
To date, the only evidence that the extortion scheme was already fully-formed and in place when Trump decided to freeze the aid comes from Mick Mulvaney.
Other evidence may emerge from a confidential White House review reported over the weekend, but itās not likely. According to the Washington Post, the White House review turned up āhundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justificationā for Trumpās initial decision to withhold aid. But the review appears to have been focused on internal discussions in August, well after Trump put the freeze in place, regarding the legal question of the extent to which congressionally-mandated aid could be withheld by the executive branch. None of this is likely to shed light on exactly what Trump had in mind at the time he ordered the freeze.
Mulvaney, however, is a different story. His importance as a witness derives from his direct, first-hand exposure to Trump and his role in implementing Trumpās decisions.
In his disastrous October 17 āget over itā news conference, Mulvaney admitted that āthe look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing he was worried about in corruption in [Ukraine].ā He also conceded that demanding something in return for aid was something āwe do all the timeā with foreign policy, citing the use of a freeze on aid to Northern Triangle countries to get them to change their policies on immigration.
And then the blockbuster: āAnd I have news for everybody. Get over it. There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.ā
Bad as this sounds, thereās enough plausible deniability in Mulvaneyās press conference to keep it from being a fatal admission. For starters, Trumpās defenders can point to Mulvaneyās insistence that āthe money held up had absolutely nothing to do with Biden.ā
Rather, Mulvaney cited three factors: (1) corruption in Ukraine; (2) whether other countries were participating in the support of Ukraine; and (3) whether Ukraine was cooperating āin an ongoing investigation with our Department of Justice.ā The ādeliverable,ā according to Mulvaney, was āhow they were going to deal with corruption.ā
Mulvaneyās statements skirted along the edges of an admission of a preconceived extortion plot, but left enough ambiguity to fall short of conclusive proof. His statements about Ukrainian corruption and Trumpās obsession with other countries paying their fair share align well with Republican anti-impeachment arguments. And his insistence that the lookback to the 2016 election was related to a larger issue of corruption in the Ukraine, and had nothing to do with the Bidens, makes his press conference, however ugly, insufficient to definitively blow up the GOPās narrative about what Trump had in mind when he froze the aid.
Also, Mulvaney almost immediately backed away from what he said at that press conference. And, most importantly, Mulvaney isnāt Trump.
Which brings us to another problem with focusing on the initial decision, rather than the later activities: Knowing how Trump makes impulsive decisions without process or expert advice, there may be only one person who has first-hand knowledge about what Trump was thinking when he froze Ukraineās aid.
And thatās Trump himself.
By contrast, the implementation of Trumpās conditions for releasing the aid necessarily required participation by numerous career officials who have no political axe to grind.
Long story short: Whereas evidence of the origin story may be confined to a single hostile witness, there will be no shortage of credible post-freeze witnesses.
All of this means that there is nothing to be gained by Democrats framing the debate in terms of Trumpās initial intentions and motivations. At best, this will lead to a stalemate. And whatever the burden of proof is for impeachment, a stalemate doesnāt clear the bar.
A better approach would be to concede that while there may be room for debate about Trumpās initial motivations, there is no doubt that he later tumbled onto the idea that he could achieve a personal political benefit by conditioning the release of the aid on a public announcement that Ukraine was investigating his political rival.
By taking the question of initial motivation off the table and focusing on what came later, the pro-impeachment forces would not have to overstate the importance of Mulvaneyās press conference. Instead, they could rely a mountain of credible testimony about what happened after the freeze was put in place from the likes of William Taylor, Alexander Vindman, Jennifer Williams, Gordon Sondland, Kurt Volker, David Holmes, and Fiona Hill.
Not only that, but focusing on post-freeze actions also elevates the importance of Trumpās own statements. The summary of Trumpās July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky conclusively establishes that Trump requested Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. If there were any doubt about what Trump was asking Zelensky to do, it was erased when Trump stated unequivocally that what he wanted from Ukraine was āa major investigation into the Bidens.ā
These statements were made by Trump in the context of the way things stood at the time of the July 25 phone call, not on his state of mind when he made the initial decision. Thereās no reason for Democrats to tie themselves in knots trying push back Trumpās guilty motives to an earlier date.
So forget about Trumpās initial state of mind. It doesnāt matter. Focus on the key facts:
(1) Trump withheld crucial military aid from Ukraine;
(2) Ukraine knew it;
(3) While the aid was being withheld, Trump asked Ukraine for a āfavorāāinvestigations into the 2016 election and the Bidens;
(4) The request for investigations morphed into a demand for a public statement;
(5) Ukraine agreed to make the public announcement, was working with U.S. government officials on a script for the announcement, and was scheduled to deliver it in a CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria;
(6) Ukraine canceled the CNN interview only when Trump released the aid after the scheme was exposed by the whistleblower report.
Case closed.
Thereās no need to get drawn into an irrelevant debate about why Trump froze the aid in the first place.
