ALSO SEE: Final Vote on Articles of Impeachment Planned for Wednesday

Here's What We've Learned From Trump's Impeachment Trial

By Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

01 February 20

 

wo key Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander, decided Friday to vote against hearing witnesses and seeking new evidence in President Donald Trump's impeachment trial. The final tally: 51 no, 49 for.

That means the Republican majority in the Senate will acquit Trump on a mostly party line vote. Following some negotiation among Senate leaders on Friday, that vote has been set for 4 p.m. ET next Wednesday, which is after both the Iowa caucuses -- where Trump will be on the ballot -- and after the State of the Union, where Trump will deliver his annual address to Congress with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi presiding.

But what we do know is that the Senate will never hear from John Bolton, whose book, if it is published, will allege that Trump directed him to help with the pressure campaign on Ukraine back in May.

We also know that the government that emerges from this has changed. Here's what we've learned so far from the impeachment by Democrats and presumptive acquittal by Republicans of Donald John Trump.

Trump has changed the balance of power in the United States

New separation of powers - Every American kid learns about the three co-equal branches of government envisioned and enacted by the framers of the Constitution, an ingenious invention to ward against the abuse of power and keep any one person from gaining too much control.

Trump did not act perfectly - People are welcome to debate whether Trump has too much power and whether he abused power by using tax dollars to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden over unfounded and false claims of corruption. Republican senators like Alexander, Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey admit that Trump didn't act perfectly, although they elected to stick with him rather than remove him from office.

A newly empowered Presidency - But what's absolutely clear from this impeachment is that the presidency has risen far above the other branches of government, freeing the occupant of the White House from the system of checks and balances designed to constrain him.

The Senate ceded power by declining to call witnesses or hear evidence against Trump. His attorney Alan Dershowitz claimed new and expansive power for the President by arguing the President's personal interest in reelection can be synonymous with the national interest. The Senate granted that power to the President by acquitting him.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager, called this "a descent into constitutional madness."

More power - But Schiff's warnings didn't matter, since Republicans frustrated by Trump's behavior decided not to act against him.

The President now has new power until a President, in the future, is checked. If you don't think Bernie Sanders, were he elected, would use executive authority seized by Trump, you should give it some thought. Also read this story about his campaign assembling a list of things he could do via executive action -- just as Trump did in his first 100 days back in 2017.

There are new rules for US politics

New precedent set -- There's a second way this impeachment, and Trump's ability to stay in office afterward, has changed the country. It is now presumably OK, in the eyes of the Senate, for a President to use his office and US foreign policy to do political harm to his rivals. Trump has argued it was absolutely above board for him to seek political help from Ukraine. And he's asked China for the same kind of help. Democrats continue to howl about it and some few Republicans complained in statements on their way to acquit him. But there is, as Mitch McConnell would say, now precedent for it.

A pattern of asking foreign governments for help -- You might argue the precedent came in 2016, when Trump publicly asked Russians to hack Democrats. Plenty of Democrats wanted to impeach him after the Mueller report was released. But it wasn't until he more actively sought help from Ukraine and used taxpayer dollars to do it, that impeachment reached a tipping point. That impeachment failed could mean he will feel no compunction about asking foreign governments for more help in the future.

Trump tainted Biden

When Donald Trump picked up the phone to call the Ukrainian President, his goal was to push in the American public the idea that there wasn't something quite right about Biden's son being hired by a foreign natural gas company. That call caused his own impeachment. But it also unleashed the Biden/Burisma conspiracy theory more effectively than Trump could ever have imagined. His attorneys dedicated a good portion of his impeachment trial defense to it. Democrats would ignore at their own peril Trump's ability to politically slime his opponents.

Donald Trump will stop at nothing

Trump has now faced and survived impeachment. The man who once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose political support now knows that no matter what he does in office, his party will rally behind him. That's not an overstatement. Trump sees nothing wrong with pushing a foreign government to help him politically. So he'll do it. Trump has tested the Constitution and survived. The only way to end his presidency is at the ballot box.

Trump owns the GOP

Some few Republicans have criticized Trump's behavior -- Lamar Alexander called it inappropriate in the statement where he announced he'd vote to acquit Trump and let Americans decide who should be President in November.

"The question then is not whether the President did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did," Alexander said. "I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday."

Of course, the Constitution doesn't give that duty to the people, exactly, but instead to the Electoral College, which favors red states.

Two choices: acquit or remove -- Marco Rubio said in a mind-bending statement that he assumed all the allegations were true and still decided to acquit Trump because, in part, it would further divide the nation.

"For me, the question would not just be whether the President's actions were wrong, but ultimately whether what he did was removable," Rubio said. "The two are not the same. Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office."

He didn't need to hear witnesses confirming the story because he was assuming it was true. And he said there are other ways for Congress to contain the President, rejecting the binary choice offered by the impeachment trial.

Those are nuanced arguments from thoughtful lawmakers. But they're likely to be lost as Americans, either groaning in despair or whooping in triumph, look to the bottom line: Trump's party protected him from the ultimate accountability for his conduct.

Democrats are in a state of denial

Asked about Trump's likely acquittal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quibbled with language.

"Well, he will not be acquitted," she told reporters. "You cannot be acquitted if you don't have a trial. And you don't have a trial if you don't have witnesses and documentation."

In other words, what we just watched wasn't a trial, so Trump wasn't acquitted in the meaningful sense of being found not guilty.

The coverup argument -- Democrats will try to argue Senate Republicans and the White House covered up Trump's wrongdoing. That may be correct and it may be a winning political argument in November.

CNN's John King explained, I think very well, what Pelosi is up to.

"She's trying to speak to the Democratic base, which ultimately actually pushed her to do this," he said on CNN. "Remember, if we rewind the tape a few months, Nancy Pelosi did not want to do impeachment because she was worried it would be partisan, and she was worried if it was all partisan, it would backfire in the Democratic party. Now she's trying to tell the base, we impeached him, the Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell, sham trial. That will be the democratic argument."

Trump will also have an argument.

"He's going to say I was acquitted by the US Senate," King said. "And if a couple of Democrats vote for that, even on one count, he's going to say I was acquitted on a bipartisan basis by the United States Senate. That will be the blaring conversation for the next week or so. It's actually an interesting question, will it be the blaring question all the way through November?"

Democrats are unsure how to stop Trump

You might not have been paying much attention if you've been all-in on watching this impeachment trial, but there is a Democratic primary going on. While every Democratic candidate agrees that defeating Trump is their number one priority, there are many miles that separate them in how to go about it.

There's a middle lane, embodied by Joe Biden, offering a relic of the Obama era to undo what Trump has wrought.

But there's also a left lane, embodied by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, that would serve up a nearly socialist agenda of government programs as the antidote to Trump's nationalist populism.

If their organizing principle as a party is to defeat a President who they say is threatening the fiber that holds the country together, they have not yet done a very good job agreeing how to go about it.

Trump has generated a political gravity that leaves no room for dissent against him in the GOP. Democrats are still trying to find their feet.

Democrats had to impeach Trump

Even as Trump is it was always pretty clear Trump would be acquitted, it should be equally obvious that Democrats had to impeach him. If they are to argue that he is a danger to the Constitution and to the Republic and prove that the GOP will do anything he asks, they had to reveal that fact.

It's now up to American voters and the Electoral College to use that information in November.

Trump's paranoia about a deep state is only going to grow

Trump survived impeachment, but he's not likely to be more comfortable with the government he leads as a result of the ordeal. He was convinced, after talking to business-seeking GOP donors and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that his ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was out to get him. So he recalled her.

His political appointees all followed his lead and refused to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. But career civil servants at the Pentagon, the State Department and on the National Security Council all did, providing testimony that backed up the allegations of the whistleblower, the bureaucrat who raised a flag to Congress about Trump's behavior.

Republicans and supporters of Trump have continued to vilify the whistleblower, who should be protected by law. Roberts refused to read the name of a person thought by some to be the whistleblower during the Senate trial, but it's clear from the repeated efforts to unmask the whistleblower that Trump's allies will not let this go.

We will learn the truth about all of this

Arguing they had to act before the election, Democrats didn't wait for the courts to force cooperation by the White House. They just impeached Trump for what they knew at the time -- in December -- and took the case to the Senate, where the Republican majority voted its political interest and acquitted him.

But John Bolton's book will ultimately come out, despite this latest attempt by the White House to stop it. All of the documents that likely confirm the storyline still exist. They will ultimately come out. All the people who refused to testify will ultimately answer questions. And then we'll be left to figure out what to do with whatever else we learn.

The Atlantic Made Rahm Emanuel a Contributing Editor, Then Fired Him After Pushback Over the Police Killing of Laquan McDonald

By Erik Wemple, The Washington Post

01 February 20

 

ast May, the Atlantic announced that Rahm Emanuel, who’d just left his post as Chicago mayor, would be joining the magazine as a contributing editor. “The Atlantic will be the primary home for Emanuel’s writing, with the former mayor contributing frequent essays to The Atlantic’s Ideas section,” read the announcement on Emanuel’s accession. He had already written for the magazine while serving as mayor, opining on such topics as beating Trump and education reform.

Then his archive runs dry. His last piece for the Atlantic is the one that kicked off his contributing editorship: “It’s Time to Hold American Elites Accountable for Their Abuses,” in which he points to the importance and righteousness of middle-class anger over elites skating away from consequences.

What happened?

A strongly worded letter happened, that’s what. A group of black staffers at the Atlantic sent objections to Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg and other Atlantic leaders. The letter made clear that the staffers’ objections were in no way partisan, nor were they lodging a wider complaint about the organization’s leadership. “Rather, the unique circumstances of Mr. Emanuel’s conduct and hiring demand a response,” it read.

Those unique circumstances relate to Emanuel’s handling of the murder of black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by white Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke on Oct. 20, 2014. Just after the shooting, Chicago police described a scene of menace: “An officer shot him in the chest when the teen didn’t drop the knife and continued to walk toward officers, police said,” read a breaking-news account from a Chicago TV station.

A different story — the truth, that is — would eventually emerge, but only after a fight. It was a “cover-up,” in the words of Columbia University professor Bernard E. Harcourt, who in a 2015 New York Times op-ed blasted Chicago leaders for blocking from public examination the incriminating cruiser dashboard footage of the McDonald killing, among other acts of suppression. A settlement with McDonald’s family included a clause to keep the video under wraps. It took a ruling by a Cook County judge to force the video’s release. Van Dyke would later be convicted of second-degree murder.

In a December 2015 address to the Chicago city council, Emanuel apologized. “I am the mayor. As I said the other day, I own it,” he said. “I take responsibility for what happened because it happened on my watch. … If we are going to fix it I want you to understand it’s my responsibility.”

The letter from Atlantic staffers took issue with Emanuel’s mea culpa: “This passive language obscures the extent of Mr. Emanuel’s responsibility for what occurred. It did not simply ‘happen on his watch;’ as mayor, he consciously used his authority to prevent the public from knowing what occurred.” More from the staffers:

The proper bounds of free inquiry and racial justice are subjects of constant contention in a free society, and we do not hope to settle those questions here. What is plainly true is that Mr. Emanuel used the conditions of a financial settlement with a grieving family to cover up the details of murder of a black teenager by a white police officer. Mr. Emanuel’s conduct defiles both principles beyond recognition and is the kind of behavior that news organizations of any ideological stripe expose rather than reward.

The staffers weren’t attempting to smother any freelance contributions from Emanuel, but rather to secure his removal from the masthead. “The status of contributing editor is conferred with the honor accrued by an august institution such as this one, and, to the public, it is not distinguishable from staff positions,” the letter read. “The Atlantic’s own description of its 162-year history states that ‘honest reporting and analysis, and the integrity they represent, are what matter most to us.’ The Atlantic can either uphold this standard or it can hire Mr. Emanuel, a former government official who used his power and authority to bury evidence of the murder of a teenager by a police officer. It cannot do both.”

The letter reads a bit like the Atlantic’s powerful pieces of recent years on race. Former Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2014 wrote the national-brain-stretching “The Case for Reparations.” Jemele Hill has blanketed the fertile ground where race and sports hang out.Vann R. Newkirk III has covered voter suppression and the theft of land from black farmers. Adam Serwer has penned perhaps the most devastating portrait of Trump as white nationalist.

Working swiftly on the logic before him, Goldberg ended the contributing editor arrangement, according to sources. Along the way, the Atlantic ended the prestige farm that was the “contributing editor” entry on the masthead, which last May featured the following names: Marc Ambinder, Peter Beinart, Ian Bogost, Kate Bolick, Bianca Bosker, Mark Bowden, David Brooks, Eliot A. Cohen, Michelle Cottle, John Dickerson, Ross Douthat, Gregg Easterbrook, Garrett Epps, Caitlin Flanagan, David H. Freedman, Lori Gottlieb, Rosie Gray, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Shadi Hamid, Robert D. Kaplan, Mary Louise Kelly, Ibram X. Kendi, Toby Lester, Charles C. Mann, Moisés Naím, Jonathan Rauch, Jeffrey Rosen, Hanna Rosin, Reihan Salam, Kori Schake, Eric Schlosser, Jeffrey Selingo, Burt Solomon, James Somers, Alison Stewart, Sage Stossel, Jeffrey Tayler, Matt Thompson, Dominic Tierney, Chuck Todd, Jerry Useem, Robert Vare, Alex Wagner, Emily Yoffe, Ben Zimmer.

Those dozens of contributing editors were doing an uneven amount of contributing and no editing to speak of. They weren’t on the payroll, nor was Emanuel. (Padding the masthead with big names who do little for the publication is an old trick in the magazine business, one expressed quite ably by the Washington Monthly.) So Goldberg & Co. changed the entry to a smaller list of “contributing writers.”

In a statement, Goldberg said:

Last spring, several of our colleagues came to us with concerns about this appointment. We met and discussed their concerns, and I thought that a number of their arguments were persuasive. This conversation quickly led us to a broader discussion about the confusing masthead category of “contributing editor" — who qualifies for the title, what it actually means, and whether the title (which is unsalaried) should even exist. In September, we replaced that title across the board with “contributing writer," to more accurately convey to readers the nature of the role, and we decided to examine carefully to whom we were granting that title. One of the persuasive arguments I heard concerned the appropriateness of granting masthead titles to former elected officials. I agreed with my colleagues that this is something we should rarely, if ever, do.

I’m glad that, from the outset, our colleagues recognized that The Atlantic is meant to be a big tent for ideas and opinion, and that the issue was not whether Rahm Emanuel or other former and current elected officials should have their work considered for publication, but whether they should be granted titles on the masthead. Emanuel remains free to pitch us ideas for publication like any non-staff contributor.

Following his departure from office, Emanuel had no trouble finding journalistic homes. It was just days after his last day as mayor that ABC News and the Atlantic announced arrangements with him. In addition to his time as Chicago mayor, Emanuel served in the House and as an aide in the Obama and Clinton White Houses. His work as Chicago mayor, however, drove criticism of his accession to the world of punditry:

Discussion of Emanuel’s suitability for the Atlantic masthead tilts at a broader issue in journalism. The news has become inseparable from former politicos opining on it, especially on television: Take your pick of Joe Scarborough (former congressman, now MSNBC morning host and Post contributor), Jason Chaffetz (former congressman, now Fox News contributor), Paul Begala (former Clinton aide, longtime CNN voice), John Dean (former Nixon White House counsel, now CNN contributor), Jen Psaki (former Obama aide, now CNN contributor), Jennifer Granholm (former Michigan governor, now CNN contributor) or tens — hundreds? — of other folks who’ve either made the jump or continue straddling the fence between politics and commentating. Roles can blur in unproductive and scandalous ways, as when it emerged that longtime Democratic operative/CNN contributor Donna Brazile had shared debate/town hall questions with the Hillary Clinton campaign. (She’s now with Fox News.)

Two considerations account for this trend: First, TV news has expanded from a nightly 15-minute affair in the early 1960s to a 24-hour grind-a-thon with the rise of cable. Second, news outlets discovered that partisan debates translate into good ratings.

The drawbacks are too heavy for a flatbed truck: Investigative reporting gets crowded out, facts get shrouded by partisan talking points and real journalists have to share quarters with the people they’re charged with covering. If only journalists at more news organizations had the success of the Atlantic staffers in resisting this trend.

As a matter of disclosure: Following Emanuel’s flirtation with the Atlantic masthead, he has done some freelance opinion columns for The Post, including a Wednesday piece on the politics of impeachment. Wesley Lowery, a reporter on the news side, raised concerns last July with Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt about allowing Emanuel a platform in The Post’s pages. “I appreciated Wes coming to me, and I take his concerns seriously,” notes Hiatt in an email. “I also think that our readers have benefited and will continue to benefit from Emanuel’s political and policy insights, informed by his years in Congress, the White House, and beyond.”