November 3, 2019

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH

Trump has implicitly thrown down the gauntlet to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats: Impeach me or I’ll steal the 2020 election. It is such an audacious and corrupt implied threat that it defies the imagination. But a public challenge it is.

After all, Trump has publicly asked for foreign powers to interfere in the US election. His defenders are now admitting that his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky was indeed a quid pro quo request for “a favor” to investigate the Bidens. But they are trying out a new line of defense on behalf of Trump, as noted in a MEDIAite email:

After varied attempts sway public opinion on the impeachment inquiry, Trump's surrogates are trying out a new argument: what President Trump did on the call with Zelenksy may have been unseemly, but it wasn't a crime and therefore not an impeachable offense.

Trump publicly told the DC press corps, and the world, that he might ask the Chinese for help in investigating the Bidens, something he reportedly did in a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping prior to his public announcement.

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Then, of course, there is the intervention of the Russians on his behalf in the 2016 election, which Trump is seeking to debunk through a Bill Barr “investigation.” The CIA, the FBI, the National Security Council and Senate and House committees have all confirmed and documented Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump. Robert Mueller concluded in his report that the Russians did interfere in the 2016 election and expressed concern that they will do it again.

In short, whatever Trump’s cynical denials, he has made it clear that he welcomes foreign interference if it helps him get elected again in 2020.

What’s new and could be devastating to the Democratic effort to influence Americans to support impeachment, as open hearings unfold, is the GOP talking point that Trump’s use of foreign assistance in elections is not a crime.

Take for example the closed-door testimony of President Donald Trump’s top Russia aide Timothy Morrison last week. On the one hand, he stated that he believed that Trump had engaged with a quid pro quo with Ukraine.

However, according to Politico:

But Morrison, a former longtime GOP congressional aide, was careful to not directly criticize the president’s actions, according to another person familiar with his closed-door testimony….Morrison also said he did not believe Trump did anything “illegal.”

This new tactic of claiming that Trump’s actions in regards to setting up the extortion of Ukraine was not a crime and therefore not impeachable will be a major potential roadblock for the Democrats in their effort to move the dial toward public support of impeachment.

This is compounded by the ruthless, unscrupulous and merciless Republican tactics that will be employed during the public hearings.

As BuzzFlash noted in an editor’s commentary on October 27:

The Thomas and Kavanaugh hearings are representative of how the Republicans view public committee hearings that receive widespread media coverage as theater in which they can influence how the story line unfolds by using brass knuckle tactics and defamatory questioning. This is backed up by smear campaigns that are amplified by coordination with right-wing media to become message points that even influence outlets such as The New York Times and the The Washington Post. The Democrats, on the other hand, appear to be more concerned about acting civilly than calling out the Republicans for their underhanded, merciless and unrelenting tactics….

Adam Schiff appears to be a firm chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, but will he step up to the plate to keep the Republicans from creating chaos instead of illumination during public hearings? Will he push back against Ad Hominem attacks by the GOP? Will he stifle GOP attempts to create message points for the right-wing media that will distract from Trump’s crimes?

The record of Democrats in Congress stepping up their game to call out and control aggressive GOP hijackings of high-stakes hearings is not good. That is a key reason that House Republicans and Trump want open hearings as soon as possible. The Republicans generally control the tenor of these hearings and turn clarity into disinformation.

As noted above, the Democrats are looking to persuade undecided or wavering Americans to support impeachment given that Trump violated the Constitution by extorting the Ukrainians to “dig up” or fabricate dirt on Biden. If they didn’t agree, they would not receive military aid from the US. The Republicans, on the other hand, have, as also noted above, begun acknowledging the quid pro quo but arguing that it is not a serious violation that merits impeachment.

If the Republicans are successful in influencing enough Americans to believe that as Mick Mulvaney stated in his startling news conference that this is just business as usual in US foreign policy, it will be very difficult to move impeachment along beyond the House. Given that many, if not most Americans, believe that politics and US foreign policy often engage in corrupt practices, the GOP may succeed in keeping, according to the latest poll, 47 percent of Americans opposed to impeachment.

As The Washington Post noted:

The political imperatives for Democrats are clear: A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted last week found that Americans are almost split on whether Trump should be impeached and removed from office, with 49 percent in support and 47 percent opposed. Democrats are overwhelmingly for Trump’s removal, Republicans are overwhelmingly opposed, and independents are split almost identically to the country at large.

What has been worrisome for some Democrats is that while there was initial public shift toward impeachment after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) backed a formal inquiry in late September, largely reflecting new unity among Democrats, opinion has remained stagnant since — suggesting that the drumbeat of revelations emerging from the closed interviews have done little to convince skeptical Americans that impeachment is warranted.

If the “no crime was committed” mantra begins to resonate with the near half of the nation that opposes impeachment (there are just a few percentage points of undecideds), it won’t matter what evidence the Dems comes up with because Trump has already, to a great degree, normalized the call as '“perfect.” Now, he has his Trumpster allies reinforcing that the call was just business as usual.

Of course, this leaves Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in the extremely fraught position of having exposed enough evidence against Trump, but being left with perhaps almost half the electorate believing that whatever sordid actions Trump and Giuliani carried out in Ukraine do not amount to a crime.

If, in the end, what seems likely occurs — Trump is impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate — then the Democrats are faced with the horrifying reality that the Dem presidential nominee and down ticket Dems will be running against an incumbent president who has openly acknowledged that he is willing to steal the election through extortion and foreign assistance. Trump will see exoneration as a license to openly seek foreign assistance in helping him get elected.

Already Facebook has announced the discovery and banning of Russian pro-Republican trolls on Instagram, beginning a wave of such interference in the months up to the 2020 election. According to an October 29 Daily Kos article:

The Democratic presidential candidates have been targeted by Russia in disinformation campaigns on Facebook's Instagram say they didn't know that had happened until Facebook announced it publicly.

Facebook and Instagram didn't give advanced notice to the campaigns that these highly sophisticated attacks had happened. The posts from the Russia-based operation seemed targeted to battleground states and played on specific themes in the 2020 race tailored to damage the individual candidates, showing a nuanced understanding of the dynamics at play." Ali Soufan, a former longtime FBI agent who has investigated election interference said that it was evidence the "Russians are repeating the same tactics they used during the 2016 election, but only growing more strategic in identifying divides and capitalizing on those divides to create fault lines in society and distrust between people and institutions."

That’s not to mention all the other voter suppression tactics that Republicans continue to use to lower the Democratic vote count.

All this indeed mounts to Trump’s implicit challenge: Impeach me or I’ll steal the 2020 election, after being acquitted by the Senate.

If half the public accepts that it is no crime to corruptly win an election, prospects for battling Trump, GOP voter suppression and electoral assistance from the likes of Putin may prove indomitable.

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