What Comes Next, and Then After That

Everything might change by the time you read this, but as we write there’s no telling what happens next in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

The very unofficial whip counts of at least two major newspapers and a former Republican Senator say that only three sitting Republican Senators will join with all 47 Democratic and Democratic-aligned Senators to vote to allow witnesses to testify. That would result in a tie, but without any precedents to go on nobody seems to know if Vice President Mike Pence would cast the tie-breaking vote in his constitutional role as President of the Senate or if the honor goes to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in his constitutional role as presiding judge in the trial. A fourth Republican Senator who’s not running for reelection and has nothing to lose is currently being very coy about his vote, and Roberts is a famously unpredictable fellow, so we’re not making any bets with real money about how today goes.

Go ahead and bet the farm that the trial ends with Trump’s acquittal, if you have a farm, as there’s scant chance that enough Republican Senators will defy their party’s president and his loyal supporters in their states to vote for Trump’s conviction and removal to comprise the needed supermajority of the Senate. As to how that works for the two parties in the aftermath, that’s a dicier bet for both parties.

If the Senate allows the Democrats to call witnesses there will surely be some damning testimony, which is why Trump and the Republicans would rather not hear from them, but if it doesn’t that will also look pretty damned suspicious to every single Democrat and a majority of independents and even a stubborn few of us who have been Republicans far longer tan Trump has been. The Republicans can assert all of those witnesses are a bunch of lying left-wing tools of a “deep state” conspiracy who were through no fault of Trump’s hired as Trump administration officials, including that Ambassador to the European who gave a million dollars to Trump’s campaign and inauguration committees, but they don’t seem eager to swear in the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Energy or the White Chief of Staff and part-time Office of Management and Budget director who might clear all of this up. They’re even less eager to hear from Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and and his two recently indicted associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Forman, who have all forthrightly explained for their own personal reasons to the national news media how they’re tied up in all this.

The Republicans might also call for the testimony of former Vice President and current Democratic nominee contender Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who once worked without any apparent credentials but very great compensation on a Ukrainian energy company while his father was given responsibility by President Barack Obama to oversee Ukrainian policy. Which looks pretty damned suspicious, as all of our Democratic friends freely admit. They’ve got some convincing exculpatory evidence about just how bad it was, though, and it’s not as if the Trump kids aren’t doing pretty well for themselves, and neither Biden has any personal knowledge of anything to do with the charges against Trump, unless they give up that “Perry Mason” moment in this tele-drama and tearfully confess that they were guilty all along, and Trump was acting heroically when he pressured Ukraine with congressionaly-approved public money to expose their venal corruption.

We wouldn’t bet on that, though, because that’s just crazy. Even so, for now it seems to us an even-money bet that the Democrats lose this winning hand.

The Republicans don’t offer many arguments, but they lots of assertions about this being a witch hunt and a farce and a travesty and a mockery pf justice against an obviously blameless man, and although they have little evidence there’s great invective against anyone who’d like to hear the available and relevant evidence. For now that should suffice, at least with the hard-core fans, given that according to most of the polls somewhere between 42 and 47 percent of the country approves of Trump, and last time around his 46.1 percent of the popular vote was sufficiently spread the states to win a victory in the Electoral College. We’re not a six-times bankrupt casino mogul like Trump, but we’d already bet good money Trump will lose yet another popular vote in the coming election, and still say his odds of once again defying the Electoral College odds are about even money.

Especially if the damned Democrats go crazy left with their nominee, which they seem likely to do. If they don’t they’ll most likely wind up with Biden as the nominee, and he’ll have a harder time pressing the case against Trump’s obviously impeachable offenses, given that his son was also getting rich, just like Trump’s. By next November both affairs might be largely forgotten, which would be a shame, as someone should be held accountable, but that’s how it usually works out. Any Republicans wishing for a far-left Democratic nominee should be careful what they wish for or bet ob, though.

<div style=”text-indent:20px;” At this point we figure it’s probable that whatever crazy-ass leftist or relatively centrist nominee the Democrats come up with will win either a majority or plurality of the popular vote in the next election, but it’s well within the realm of possibility he or she would also win the more crucial Electoral College vote. However that works out we can’t see it working out well for the commonweal. Our constitutional order is hard to maintain, and for the time being nobody seems to be helping out.

— Bud Norman

The Impeachment Show Commences

The House of Representatives has formally forwarded articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate, and there’s no way of knowing comes next, except that it will be complicated and divisive and inconclusive and ultimately harmful to America’s international reputation.

At this point the betting line is that the slim Republican majority in the Senate, which includes some sometimes principled members in iffy states, won’t vote to summarily dismiss the charges when it comes up in a week or so, and even if they did it probably wouldn’t be the smart political play. Only so much of the viewing public is paying any attention, but most of those unwashed masses want to hear the story told by sworn witnesses and any e-mails or text massages or hand-written notes or other verifiable documents that might flesh out this fascinating tale.

There’s already enough of it in the press and sworn testimony before the House and other public records to make for a prima facie case to the Senate, and if Trump succeeds in not offering any defense he’ll look bad to objective observers, which currently seem to be a majority of the electorate. Since Trump was indicted by the House one of his personal lawyer’s currently indicted clients and associates has gone on cable television to further implicate Trump in the charges of impeachment, and even though he’s under indictment and there all sorts of other a reasons to doubt his credibility he’s also a a client and associate of Trump’s personal lawyer, who also seems tied up in this mess, and given his current legal situation he has good reason to be forthcoming and truthful under oath, which makes for another interesting plot twist in this ongoing Trump reality show.

If there’s going to be a trial with all those pesky witnesses, Trump and his Senate allies are hoping they’ll include Hunter Biden, the son of currently front Democratic presidential presidential frontrunner who was apparently cashing in on Ukrainian corruption, will be among them, along with any other witnesses who can be culled from the “deep state” conspiracy against Trump, The charges facing the Senate jury are that Trump and his administration withheld congressionally authorized aid to our ally Ukraine in exchange for damning charges against the Bidens, then obstructed Congress and the justice system at large from finding about it, but on that point of law both Bidens and any other “deep state” conspirators can believably testify they know nothing about it.

Trump will either be convicted or more likely be acquitted by a Senate trial, but in any case it won’t look good in the international or historical courts of opinion.

— Bud Norman

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A Russia to Judgment

Ever since the special counsel investigation into the “Russia thing” ended without any indictments of President Donald Trump, with  just his campaign manager and deputy campaign manager and and personal lawyer and national security advisor facing prison time,  Trump and his allies have been gloating about complete exoneration regarding everything they’ve ever been accused of. Alas, it’s starting to look like yet another case of Trump starting his end zone celebration a few yards short of the goal line.

Even the four-page summary of the nearly 400-page report on the investigation by Trump’s own Attorney General explicitly states that “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Now several of the investigators are telling The New York Times that the summary excluded evidence of actions by Trump and his associates that might not rise to the level of a indictable crime but are pretty embarrassing nonetheless, which seems not only plausible but downright probable to us.

The Democrats in Congress are naturally calling for the public to see the report in its entirety, and even as the Republicans claim the report utterly vindicates Trump they’re trying to keep the report under wraps. Our guess is that the Democrats will eventually prevail, either through court decisions or press leaks, and even if they don’t the Republicans will look bad for withholding information from the public. Perhaps the best argument for keeping the report secret is that it includes grand jury findings regarding investigations that are now ongoing in various state and federal jurisdictions, but that’s bound to come out eventually in some court or another, so the Republicans might as well start spinning it as no big deal right now.

Meanwhile, the Democratic majority on the House Ways and Means Committee is requesting six years of Trump’s tax returns, which he kept under wraps and will surely prove interesting, the Democratic majority on the House Oversight Committee is looking into why presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner was granted a top secret security clearance despite the concerns of the national intelligence agencies about his business interests and personal conduct, and they’re both likely to get that information. Even if they don’t, Trump and the Republicans will once again be in the awkward position position of arguing that the public doesn’t have a right to know about a report they assure us exonerates them of everything..

There’s also an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York about Trump’s hush-money payments to a pornographic video performer and and a Playboy Playmate, which is already sending Trump’s longtime lawyer to prison and clearly identifies Trump as the un-indicted co-conspirator “Individual One.” It’s also a sure bet the pesky press will continue to come up with something or another about Trump’s private businesses and presidential administration that’s hard to explain. That four-page summary of a nearly four-hundred page report clearly excludes something that Trump doesn’t want the public to know about, so a certain suspicion should linger past the 2020 elections.

At this point we don’t have any rooting interest in either the Democrats or the Republicans, but we’d advise our once-Grand Old Party to go right ahead and let it all hang out. The damned Democrats are going to believe the worst about Trump in any case, and the damned Republicans don’t much care what laws Trump might have broken so long as he cuts taxes and appoints conservative Supreme Court Justices and otherwise upholds law and order. The Democrats will probably come up with someone who’s y crazy left yet squeaky-clean on taxes and foreign-business dealings and porn star dalliances and the campaign finance laws concerning such affairs.

How that turns out is anyone’s guess, but we don’t see it working out well for anyone in any case.

— Bud Norman

Our Monday Answer to Thursday’s News

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the “Russia thing” will be a year old on Thursday, and we can already guess how almost everybody will mark the anniversary.

President Donald Trump’s die-hard defenders on talk radio and other right-wing media will loudly argue that if a year of dogged digging hasn’t produced a iron-clad case that the Trump campaign aided the Russian government’s efforts to meddle in the past presidential and the Trump administration then attempted to obstruct the various investigations into the matter, they might as well concede defeat and close up shop.

These are the same pundits who cheered on the special prosecutors’ investigations into President Bill Clinton as they veered from the Whitewater land deal to an affair with a White House intern and stretched out over four years and wound up with a semen-stained blue dress. They also spent three years defending congressional investigations of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s role in the deadly fiasco at Benghazi, Libya, and it’s a sure bet that if Clinton had won the last presidential election they’d be eager to let the inevitable investigations into her e-mail practices and family foundation and various other matters take as long they required. Indeed, those same pundits are still chanting “lock her up” and don’t seem to care how long that might take.

There’s likely to be the same hypocrisy on the left, of course, as many of the same pundits and politicians who once decried the ever-widening scope and plodding pace of the many Clinton investigations will surely be insisting on Thursday that the Mueller investigation be granted wide latitude about hush money payments to porno performers and president’s personal lawyer’s receipt of big bucks from a Russian-linked firm and other matters as well as plenty of time to get the bottom of it all. Such is the nature of punditry and politics these days.

We didn’t care much for either of the Clintons, and were willing to be patient with whatever legal scrutiny they were subjected to, but neither do we care much for Trump, so without fear of accusations of hypocrisy we’re willing to grant Mueller wide latitude and as much time as he needs.

In this case, the wheels of justice seem to be grinding far faster than these political investigations usually proceed. Mueller’s investigation has already yielded 19 indictments of people and three companies associated with the Trump campaign and administration, including some high-profile guilty pleas including a campaign and administration national security advisor and jail time for some foreign lawyer you’ve never heard of, and several of the countless witnesses they’ve interviewed describe a team that already seems to know all the answers. The only people they haven’t yet interviewed are the ones a shrewd prosecutor such as Mueller would surely save for last, and someone who’s not on Mueller’s leak-proof ship has leaked an outline of 49 very hard-to-answer questions they intend to ask Trump himself in an interview they’re already negotiating with his ever-changing team of lawyers.

Which is not bad for a “witch hunt,” as Trump and his die-hard defenders continually describe Mueller’s investigation. Even without subpoena power the “fake news” media have forced the president’s namesake son to release an e-mail chain documenting his and his brother-in-law and the campaign manager’s meeting with a Russian-linked lawyer they understood to be acting on the Russian government’s behalf, the porno performer’s surprisingly shrewd lawyer has forced that Russian-linked company to admit that they did indeed make a huge payment to Trump’s surprisingly inept and defenestrated and under-investigation lawyer, and there are those high-profile indictments and guilty pleas, and by now enough of the “fake news” has been verified that only a hypocrite wouldn’t allow another few months to get the bottom of it.

In a few months a third of the Senate and all of the House of Representatives will be up for reelection, and we can already guess what a mess of hypocritical punditry and politics that will be. If the Mueller investigation comes up with an iron-clad case of conspiracy and obstruction by then the right will claim vindication for its conspiracy that it’s all a “deep state” plot to overthrow the president, and if it doesn’t the left will surely be plenty angry about it.

Although there’s no telling what time it will take, we expect that as always the truth will come out. At this point in time, we expect the truth will be embarrassing to Trump.

At the end of the long investigations of Bill he had to admit to an “improper relationship” with that White House intern, and although he escaped conviction in an impeachment trial he temporarily lost his law license and so tarnished his awful wife with her own thoroughly investigated scandals that wound up losing to the likes of Trump, but the same left that now has a zero-tolerance policy about sexual impropriety decided that it really didn’t care if the President of the United States was doing tawdry cigar tricks with a 25-year-old intern. If the end of the Trump investigations prove just as clearly that he conspired with a hostile foreign power to meddle in an American election we expect his ardent defenders and erstwhile cold warriors and champions of law and order to proclaim that’s no big deal.

Such is the state of American punditry and politics these days. We came of age during the two long years of the Watergate scandal before Nixon resigned, and have lived through similar outrages from both the left and right, so we’re resigned to a longer wait for the conclusion of this.

— Bud Norman