Impeachment transcripts are an embarrassment

Andrew Feinberg, The Independent

As Donald Trump strode onstage to deliver remarks at a Lexington, Kentucky “Keep America Great” rally on Monday night, home viewers might have noticed that his campaign made good on his plan to introduce “Read the Transcript” T-shirts into America’s politico-sartorial discourse.

It’s a move that GOP ad-man Rick Wilson said could be attributed to the 45th president, or, as one more generous GOP source put it, “proof that Donald Trump will turn anything and everything into something he can sell.”

But it’s also proof of his imperviousness to reality.

Nearly six weeks into the House-led impeachment inquiry, aides say Trump remains convinced that Americans will absolve him of anything untoward if they’d just “read the transcript” of his self-described “perfect call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (which is not a verbatim transcript and may, according to one witness, have been altered to omit key details).

Of course, polls taken over the last eight weeks show that as more and more Americans read the “transcript” that inspired the shirts, more and more Americans have become increasingly supportive of Democrats’ investigation.

However, it’s no longer the only “transcript” Americans can read if they want to judge President Trump’s actions for themselves.

Over the past 24 hours, House Democrats have released four transcripts — yes, actual verbatim transcripts — of interviews with numerous administration officials, conducted by both Republican and Democratic members and staff on the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight Committees.

In over 1,200 pages, the transcripts document depositions by former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, State Department Senior Adviser Michael McKinley, former Ukraine Special Envoy Kurt Volker, and Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland.

And if Americans study these new transcripts closely, it’s unlikely they’ll be as convinced as Trump thinks they’ll be that the president never did anything wrong. Under questioning from Democratic interlocutors, witnesses like Sondland — a wealthy hotelier who Trump named as ambassador to Brussels after a million-dollar donation to his inaugural committee — first denied discussing any sort of “quid pro quo” with Ukrainian officials. But on Monday, Sondland’s attorneys submitted a sworn statement by which he corrected the record to specify that he had, in fact, delivered such a message (and by doing so, avoided a perjury charge).

Yovanovitch’s testimony told a chilling tale of a career foreign service officer being awakened in the dead of night by her boss, who insisted that she get on the next plane home for her own safety. And the transcript of McKinley’s deposition showed how another State Department veteran tried and tried to keep anything from happening to Yovanovitch, only to resign in disgust after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thrice ignored his entreaties.

A former deputy Watergate special prosecutor told me that Republican complaints about witnesses not being allowed to be accompanied by government lawyers brought back memories of the scandal surrounding Nixon.

“This is exactly what happened in Watergate,” he told me, “…that (White House Counsel) John Dean was actually present for every single FBI interview — so they could coordinate the cover-up basically, so they could make sure that people weren’t off the reservation and were sticking with the party line that the White House had nothing to do with the break-in at the Democratic National Committee.

“It just reeks of Watergate and what Nixon did with John Dean in terms of coordinating White House witnesses so that they could keep everybody in line so that they would all lie about what was going on.”

Akerman, a veteran federal prosecutor, was decidedly not impressed with Republicans’ performances in the last couple of weeks as shown in the transcripts.

“The Republicans didn’t even go at the actual crime itself and what occurred. They were either focused on the same old conspiracy theories that somehow Ukraine was involved (in 2016) or that somehow (Joe) Biden did something wrong, or on the process itself, even though all of them had the right to cross-examine on the actual subject matter,” he said. “They didn’t come close to doing anything that advanced any claim that Trump did something that wasn’t extortion or bribery. None of them touched that, because they couldn’t — these people are asking just the craziest questions.

“The idea that the President of the United States is relying on this kind of conspiracy theory, non-fact-based sort of stuff is pretty scary.”

Akerman added that even just the first two transcripts could give Democrats enough evidence to present a compelling case for impeachment.

“They’ve already got pretty amazing evidence that shows bribery and extortion — what more do you need at this point?” he asked. ”Now they’ve got this whole other crazy defence about there’s no corrupt intent, but these guys haven’t done their legal researching and corrupt intent under the law means improper purpose. And when you’re using the levers of government and monies appropriated by Congress to further your own re-election effort and use it to try and bribe and extort a foreign government, I mean, what more improper purpose can you get? My God, I wish I had this case in a regular criminal court. I could go crazy with it.”

Another person with experience conducting Congressional investigations — former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh — was equally unimpressed with his former colleagues’ performance, which he said demonstrated “an utter lack of seriousness on the part of the Republicans.”

But the “lack of seriousness” wasn’t necessarily their fault, Walsh said, since the overwhelming volume of evidence and the number of credible witnesses means they really don’t have much to defend Trump with.

“Upon reflection, I thought, what could they have asked? What lines of questioning could they have gone down? For both of those witnesses, what they had to say was fairly clear and fairly damning,” he said. “I think Republicans are going to have this problem...in every transcript. There isn’t really anything, which is why their lines of questioning come off as just silly and comical.”

When I asked Walsh, a current GOP presidential candidate who served on the House Oversight Committee during his time in the House, if Republicans’ plans to augment the Intelligence Committee with Oversight Committee ranking member Jim Jordan would help them make a case for Trump’s innocence in public hearings, he just laughed.

“It is an admission — by the Republicans — that Devin Nunes is an utter joke and so far in over his head,” he said, adding that Nunes is “not serious” and would “utterly embarrass” the GOP in public hearings.

But Walsh wasn’t sure adding Jordan, a favourite of the President who is known for his aggressive questioning of witnesses and never wearing a jacket, would make a difference.