January 22, 2020 – The White House fired back at President Trump’s impeachers Monday, taking aim at their far-fetched legal arguments and blatant dishonesty. Trump’s lawyers called the Democrats’ grounds for impeachment a “made-up theory.” They singled out House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff for “lying,” violating “basic fairness” and “concocting” the whistleblower complaint.
The White House brief is Trump’s battle plan for his trial, which begins in earnest Wednesday. It also warns Dems that if they force the Senate to call witnesses, Schiff will have to testify about his role in engineering the “whistleblower” complaint and then denying it, and Joe and Hunter Biden will be grilled about their Ukraine dealings.
Schiff is already playing tricks, excluding the whistleblower’s complaint from the trial documents the House transmitted, as if senators shouldn’t probe how this impeachment got started.
Trump’s lawyers show the Framers intended impeachment only for the most serious crimes. Yet House Democrats are insisting they can impeach a president even “for doing something he’s allowed to do,” if he’s motivated by “private self-interest” rather than the national interest.
Such “an amorphous and undefined standard” would make every president a target of impeachment, Trump’s lawyers warn. It would spell the end of an independent presidency and undermine the US Constitution.
The pretext for impeachment is Trump’s July call with the president of Ukraine, in which Trump asked him to “do us a favor” by investigating rumors of corruption involving Joe Biden’s dealings there as vice president.
The Democrats’ articles of impeachment accuse Trump of withholding military aid to pressure Kiev and benefit himself politically. But Trump’s lawyers show there is no evidence of that: It was Trump who authorized military aid to Ukraine in the first place, and the Ukrainians did get their aid.
And, Team Trump asks, why should Biden be inoculated from investigations just because he is running for president? In dealing with Ukraine, asking about corruption is legitimate.
Biden was the Obama administration’s point person on Ukraine. His son Hunter, with no energy expertise, held a fat-cat board position with a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation. In 2018, Joe Biden bragged that he got Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees.
Back then, The New York Times cautioned that Biden’s anti-corruption message “may have been undermined” by Hunter’s lucrative arrangement. The Washington Post said it looked “nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst.” Now, these papers call these concerns “discredited.”
For House Democrats, impeachment has two goals: taint Trump — but also whitewash Biden. Their trial plan released Saturday insists “there is no evidence that Vice President Biden acted improperly.”
That’s because no one has looked. Until now. White House lawyers are raising questions about how Biden ousted the Ukrainian prosecutor. That’s got Biden worried. On Monday, his campaign demanded that “any media organization referencing” claims that Biden engaged in wrongdoing in Ukraine “must state clearly and unambiguously that they have been discredited.” Sorry, but they haven’t.
The Senate trial could uncover damaging truths. That explains why Schiff is pushing for a new witness, Lev Parnas, a US citizen born in Ukraine who brags about his ties to Trump. How did Parnas get to Schiff?
Parnas has been indicted for violating federal election law and faces jail time if convicted. In a bid for leniency, Parnas is cooperating with House Democrats, according to his lawyer. He is singing whatever they want to hear. On the Rachel Maddow show last week, he said: “I don’t think Vice President Biden did anything wrong.”
Why should senators believe that? In September, before he was under pressure to save his own neck, Parnas told The Miami Herald that “Ukraine’s government has information on alleged wrongdoing by the Bidens.” Biden’s conduct in Ukraine raises questions. What’s wrong with investigating? Asking for an investigation isn’t an impeachable offense.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.