Trump impeachment (2021)

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      Mitch McConnell proposes delaying Trump's impeachment trial

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      The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, is proposing to push back the start of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial by a week or more to give the former president time to review the case.House Democrats who voted to impeach Trump last week for inciting the 6 January Capitol attack have signaled they want a quick trial as President Joe Biden begins his term, saying a full reckoning is necessary before the country – and the Congress – can move on.But McConnell told his fellow GOP senators on a call Thursday that a short delay would give Trump time to prepare and stand up his legal team, ensuring due process.The Indiana senator Mike Braun said after the call that the trial might not begin “until sometime mid-February”. He said that was “due to the fact that the process as it occurred in the House evolved so quickly, and that it is not in line with the time you need to prepare for a defense in a Senate trial”.The timing will be set by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who can trigger the start of the trial when she sends the House charges for “incitement of insurrection” to the Senate, and also by McConnell and the new Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who are in negotiations over how to set up a 50-50 partisan divide in the Senate and the short-term agenda.Schumer is in charge of the Senate, assuming the majority leader post after Democrats won two new Senate seats in Georgia and Vice-President Kamala Harris was sworn in on Wednesday. But with such a narrow divide, Republicans will have some say over the trial’s procedure.Democrats are hoping to conduct the proceedings while also passing legislation that is a priority for Biden, including coronavirus relief, but they would need some cooperation from Senate Republicans to do that, as well.Schumer told reporters on Thursday that he was still negotiating with McConnell on how to conduct the trial, “but make no mistake about it. There will be a trial, there will be a vote, up or down or whether to convict the president.”Pelosi could send the article to the Senate as soon as Friday. Democrats say the proceedings should move quickly because they were all witnesses to the siege, many of them fleeing for safety as the rioters descended on the Capitol.“It will be soon, I don’t think it will be long, but we must do it,” Pelosi said on Thursday. She said Trump did not deserve a “get out of jail card” for his historic second impeachment just because he has left office and Biden and others are calling for national unity.[embedded content]Without the White House counsel’s office to defend him – as it did in his first trial last year – Trump’s allies have been searching for lawyers to argue the former president’s case. Members of his past legal teams have indicated they do not plan to join the effort, but the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham told GOP colleagues on Thursday that Trump was hiring the South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers, according to a person familiar with the call who was granted anonymity to discuss it. Bowers did not immediately respond to a message Thursday.Prosecuting the House case will be Pelosi’s nine impeachment managers, who have been regularly meeting to discuss strategy. Pelosi said she would talk to them “in the next few days” about when the Senate might be ready for a trial, indicating the decision could stretch into next week.Trump told thousands of supporters to “fight like hell” against the election results that Congress was certifying on 6 January just before an angry mob invaded the Capitol and interrupted the count. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in the mayhem, and the House impeached the outgoing president a week later, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in support.Pelosi said it would be “harmful to unity” to forget that “people died here on January 6, the attempt to undermine our election, to undermine our democracy, to dishonor our Constitution”. Following his first impeachment, Trump was acquitted by the Senate in February after his White House legal team, aided by his personal lawyers, aggressively fought the House charges that he had encouraged the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden in exchange for military aid. This time around, Pelosi noted, the House was not seeking to convict the president over private conversations but for a very public insurrection that they experienced themselves and that played out on live television.“This year the whole world bore witness to the president’s incitement,” Pelosi said.Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No 2 Senate Democrat, said it was still too early to know how long a trial would take, or if Democrats would want to call witnesses. But he said: “You don’t need to tell us what was going on with the mob scene – we were rushing down the staircase to escape.”McConnell, who said this week that Trump had “provoked” his supporters before the riot, has not said how he will vote. He told his GOP colleagues that it would be a vote of conscience. More

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      Joe Biden hits the ground running by outlining national Covid strategy

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      Joe Biden began his first full day as president confronting a host of major crises facing his fledgling administration, starting with a flurry of actions to address his most pressing challenge: the raging Covid-19 pandemic.At a White House event on Thursday afternoon, Biden unveiled a new national strategy to combat the coronavirus, which has killed more than 404,000 Americans and infected more than 24 million since it first began spreading across the US one year ago, by far the highest totals in the world.“For the past year, we couldn’t rely on the federal government to act with the urgency and focus and coordination we needed,” Biden said, referring to the administration of Donald Trump, which ended at midday the day before.“And we have seen the tragic costs of that failure,” he said.Biden again braced the nation for continued hardship, saying “it’s going to get worse before it gets better” and predicting the death toll could rise to 500,000 by the end of next month.Outlining his approach, Biden told Americans: “Help is on the way.”The actions on Thursday included an order to require mask-wearing on federal property, in airports and on many flights, trains, ships and long-distance buses, and also a huge push to speed up vaccinations, which have fallen far behind the government’s own schedule.“Mask up,” he said, waving a face mask. “For the first 100 days.”Even as he charted an aggressive approach to gain control of the virus, he was met with more bad news about the economy as another 900,000 people filed for unemployment benefits last week and he inherited the worst jobs market of any modern-day president.Biden and Harris began their day joined by family at the White House, where they virtually attended an inaugural prayer service held by the Washington National Cathedral, a tradition that has been reshaped by the pandemic.The president, members of his family as well as his vice-president, Kamala Harris, and her husband sat physically distanced in the Blue Room of the White House to stream the interfaith service. Many of the speakers extended prayers and blessings to the new leaders.The Rev William Barber, a preacher from North Carolina and civil rights leader who leads an anti-poverty campaign, delivered the homily, calling on the new administration to address what he called the “five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation/denial of healthcare, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism”.“No, America has never yet been all that she has hoped to be,” Barber said. “But right here, right now, a third reconstruction is possible if we choose.”And on Thursday morning John Kerry warned, in his first remarks as the US’s new climate envoy, that the world was lagging behind the required pace of change needed to avert catastrophic impacts from the climate crisis.Kerry, the former US secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration, acknowledged that America had been absent from the international effort to contain dangerous global heating during Donald Trump’s presidency but added: “Today no country and no continent is getting the job done.”The FBI director, Christopher Wray, will remain in the role, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Thursday. During her first press briefing on Wednesday, Psaki raised speculation that his job was in jeopardy when she declined to publicly state whether Biden had confidence in him.“I caused an unintentional ripple yesterday, so wanted to state very clearly President Biden intends to keep FBI Director Wray on in his role and he has confidence in the job he is doing,” she said in a tweet on Thursday.Wray took the helm at the agency in 2017 after Trump fired his predecessor, James Comey, just four years into what is traditionally a 10-year term. Wray’s future had been in doubt for much of the past year, as Trump openly criticized the director and the agency.Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Biden’s nominee for transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, appeared at his Senate confirmation hearing while the House prepared to initiate Trump’s second impeachment trial.In an opening statement, Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ran against Biden for the Democratic nomination, said there was a “bipartisan appetite for a generational opportunity to transform and improve America’s infrastructure”.The Senate, which officially switched to Democratic control on Wednesday after the swearing-in of three new senators, two from Georgia, has never held an impeachment trial for a former president.Some Republicans have argued that it is not constitutional to try an official who has left office, but many scholars disagree. Democrats say they are ready to move forward as negotiations continue between the chambers over the scope and timing of a trial.After impeaching Trump for an unprecedented second time last week, the House has yet to transmit to the Senate the article charging Trump with “incitement of insurrection” over his role in encouraging a crowd of loyalists that attacked the US Capitol on 6 January in an effort to stop the certification of his defeat.At a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi refused to say when the House would send the article beyond that it “won’t be long”. More

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      ‘The Capitol riot was our Chernobyl’: James Comey on Trump, the ‘pee tape’ and Clinton’s emails

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      As an investigator turned author, James Comey has developed a forensic eye for detail. The colour of the curtains in the Oval Office. The length of Donald Trump’s tie. Something about the US president that the camera often misses.
      “Donald Trump conveys a menace, a meanness in private that is not evident in most public views of him,” says Comey, a former director of the FBI, from his home in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC.
      That menace came flooding out to engulf the US on 6 January when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in Washington. Five people, including a police officer, were killed in the mayhem. Comey, whose unorthodox interventions in the 2016 election are blamed by many liberals for putting Trump in the White House, watched in horror.
      “I was sickened to watch an attack on the literal and symbolic heart of our democracy, and, as a law enforcement person, I was angered. I am mystified and angry that Capitol Hill wasn’t defended. It’s a hill! If you wanted to defend it, you could defend it, and for some reason it was not defended. I think that’s a 9/11-size failure and we’re going to need a 9/11-type commission to understand it so that we don’t repeat it.”
      If he were still at work in the FBI’s brutalist building on Pennsylvania Avenue, Comey would be at the heart of the hunt for the domestic terrorists. He misses the job. Aged 60, a father of five and grandfather of one, he has spent the pandemic learning yoga, training to become a foster parent again and preparing for a teaching job at Columbia University in New York.
      Comey has also written another memoir, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency and Trust, a slender sequel to his 2018 bestseller, A Higher Loyalty. It includes anecdotes from his law enforcement career, tangling with the New York mafia and others, and quotations from William Shakespeare and Trump (who reported to Comey that “Putin told me: ‘We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world’”). It acknowledges the flawed history of his beloved FBI while defending the nobility of its purpose; he calls for it to strip the name of the former director J Edgar Hoover from its headquarters and rename it in honour of the civil rights hero John Lewis. More

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      If Trump looks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then maybe he is one | Nick Cohen

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      Assurances that “fascism couldn’t happen here” are always appealing in Anglo-Saxon countries that think themselves immune because “it” never did. The US and UK did not experience rule by Nazism or communism in the 20th century and the ignorance our lucky histories fostered has weakened our defences in the 21st.Even after all that has happened in Washington, apparently serious voices insist we cannot compare Donald Trump to any variety of fascist. Conservatives habitually say that liberals call everything they don’t like fascist, forgetting that the moral of Aesop’s fable was that the boy who cried wolf was right in the end. They used to chortle about “Trump derangement syndrome” that spreads in stages like cancer until sufferers “cannot distinguish fantasy from reality”. They have bitten their tongues now that the reality of Trumpism is deranged mobs trying to overthrow democracy.Their silence was broken last week by the historian of Nazism, Richard Evans, who with the effortless ability to miss every point a professorship at Cambridge bestows, decided now was the moment to denounce his colleagues, Timothy Snyder and Sarah Churchwell. They might compare the Trump and fascist movements but “few who have described Trump as a fascist can be called real experts in the field”, he wrote in the New Statesman with an audible sniff. “Genuine specialists”, such as, and since you asked, himself, “agree that whatever else he is, Trump is not a fascist”.Before we get to why the argument matters, I should say the New Statesman needs to expand its fact-checking department. Snyder, whose work on how democracies turn into dictatorships is essential reading, does not say that the Trump movement is “fascist”. He writes that “post-truth is pre-fascism and Trump has been our post-truth president”. Churchwell’s astonishing studies of how German Nazis and American white supremacists fed off each other are a revelation. (And I come from the old left and thought I had learned about everything that was rotten with America at my mother’s knee.) When asked, she says she too is careful and characterises the Trump movement as “neo-fascist”.The use of “fascism” in political debate is both a call to arms and a declaration of war. For once you say you are fighting fascism there can be no retreat. By talking of “pre-fascism” or “neo-fascism”, you acknowledge that the F-word is not a bomb you should detonate lightly; you also acknowledge the gravity of the times.The alternatives look like the euphemisms of formerly safe societies that, like Caliban, cannot bear to see their face in the mirror. The Trump leadership cult, the attacks on any source of information the leader does not authorise, the racist conspiracy theories, the servile media that amplify the leader’s lies are not “conservative” in any understanding of the term. How about populist? If it means anything today, populism is supporting the people against the elite. But what could be more elitist than denying the result of the people’s vote with the big lie, the Joseph Goebbels lie, that Trump won the election he lost and then inciting brainwashed followers to storm democratic institutions? Followers, I should add, who included men dressed in “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts and waving Confederate flags and wannabe stormtroopers crying “sieg heil!” and “total negro death”. “Far right” and “extreme right” are no help. They are just polite ways of saying neo-fascist.In his The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton, the pre-eminent authority on its ideology, wrote that the Ku Klux Klan in 1867 rather than Mussolini’s squadristi in 1920 could be seen as the first fascist movement. As with the Nazi party, the embittered officers of a defeated army formed the Klan. They mourned the defeat of the Confederacy and did not accept the legitimacy of the US government. They had uniforms, white robes rather than leather jackets, the fantasies of racial supremacy and deployed terror to maintain the subjugation of African Americans. Last week, police sources told the Washington Post they were shocked to see “former law enforcement and military personnel as well as senior business executives” among the Washington mob. If they had known the history of military and bourgeois support for fascism, they would have been less surprised. It isn’t always powered by “the left behind”.Paxton said last week that he had “resisted for a long time applying the fascist label to Donald J Trump”, but Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label”.Republicans fear assassination if they vote to impeach Trump. Rupert Murdoch’s broadcasters are delivering barely veiled threats of violent insurrection if the Democrats pursue impeachment. “We see what’s happening around this country, how 50 state houses are being threatened on Inauguration Day,” warned one. “This is the last thing you want to do.” I can see three objections to calling a large section of the Republican party pre-fascist. The first can be dismissed with a flick of the fingers as it comes from a self-interested right that has to pretend it is not in the grip of a deep sickness – and not only in the United States. The second is the old soothing “it can’t happen here” exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon west, which has yet to learn that the US and UK are exceptional in the 21st century for all the wrong reasons. The third sounds intelligent but is the dumbest of all. You should not call Trump or any other leader a pre- or neo-fascist or any kind of fascist until he has gone the whole hog and transformed his society into a totalitarian war machine.The example of the stages of cancer, so beloved by believers in Trump derangement syndrome, explains the stupidity. Imagine you are a doctor looking at pre-cancerous cells or an early-stage cancer that has not grown deeply into tissue. The door bursts open and a chorus of Fox News presenters and Cambridge dons cry that “real experts in the field” agree that on no account should you call it cancer until it has metastasised and spread through the whole body. A competent doctor would insist on calling a fatal disease by its real name and not leave treatment until it was too late to stop it. So should you.• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist More

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      Republicans must repudiate Trump – or live with the consequences forever | Geoffrey Kabaservice

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      A little more than a week ago, most Americans – perhaps even many of Donald Trump’s supporters – were ready for the 45th president and his administration to pass into the history books. Now Trump is making us all live through history.On 6 January, the US Capitol was sacked by a pro-Trump mob, the first large-scale occupation of the citadel of American democracy since the British burned it during the War of 1812. The mob succeeded in forcing Congress to evacuate and halting the constitutional ceremony of certifying the electoral college votes – another first. Now Trump, who was charged by the House of Representatives with “incitement of insurrection” for his role in the riot that left five dead, has become the first president in history ever to be impeached twice.Ten Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump, the largest number of lawmakers ever to support impeaching a president from their own party. But then, in the words of Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming who holds the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership, “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the constitution.”Trump is unlikely to become the first president removed from office, since the outgoing Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, won’t reconvene the Senate until the day before Joe Biden will be sworn in as the next president. But if the Senate does eventually vote to convict Trump, he will become the first ex-president ever to be barred from holding any future federal office.McConnell has, shockingly, told colleagues that he is open to convicting Trump. In the view of many party strategists, Republicans might be better off if Trump were prevented from running again. The possibility of a 2024 Trump campaign freezes out potential successors and prevents the party from moving in new and more positive directions. The president arguably cost his party its Senate majority with his lies and conspiracy theories about the election, which depressed Republican turnout in the pivotal Georgia senatorial races. His role in inciting the Capitol riot disgraced his party as well as his legacy. Tellingly, almost no Republicans attempted to defend him during the impeachment hearings. Instead, many warned that impeachment would further enrage Trump’s followers when what’s needed is national unity and healing.Of course, this come-together plea is rank hypocrisy from those who encouraged Trump’s shredding of the social fabric, believing that his attempt to tear the country apart would leave them with the bigger half. The claim that lions would lie down with lambs if Democrats would drop their vindictive harassment of the outgoing president conveniently overlooks the fact that the Capitol invasion happened only because Trump pushed the Big Lie that Democrats, the media, and the Deep State stole the election. And nearly two-thirds of Republicans in Congress made themselves complicit in Trump’s lie by voting to overturn the election results, even in the wake of that deluded, destructive and deadly riot.Representative Peter Meijer, a newly elected Republican from Michigan who was one of the 10 Republicans to vote for impeachment, observed that many of his party colleagues argued that since millions of Americans believe the election was stolen, therefore Congress would be justified in preventing Biden from taking the presidency. But, he pointed out, most of the voters who believe in this false reality do so precisely because they have heard it from Trump and his congressional enablers. “That doesn’t make it right. That doesn’t make it accurate. It means that you lied to them, and they trusted you and they believed your lies.”Nonetheless, 45% of Republican voters, according to a recent YouGov poll, approve of the storming of the Capitol. And that’s largely because 72% of Republicans, according to another survey, say that they don’t trust the accuracy of the 2020 election results.So long as millions of Americans believe in Trump’s Big Lie, the country becomes ungovernable and civil war beckons. If you believe what Trump and his Republican enablers tell you, you will consider Joe Biden to be “an illegitimate president”, as Trump put it in his 6 January speech, and the members of his administration to be usurpers. Why then should you pay taxes to such a government or respect its laws? Why wouldn’t you support the violent overthrow of that government, even if that revolutionary vanguard was led by the kind of neo-fascists who planned the Capitol invasion and erected a gallows outside? As Representative Meijer observed, the logical conclusion of this line of thinking makes it likely that we’ll see “political assassinations or some type of additional attempts to take lives by the folks who feel emboldened by what’s happened”.Most of Trump’s supporters would probably recoil from the charge that they’re pushing America toward civil war and revolutionary carnage. To accept the Big Lie, however, requires you to believe that the entire US justice system, in which even Trump-nominated judges rejected every baseless claim of electoral fraud asserted by his legal team, is also part of the conspiracy. And such a widespread rejection of courts and the law would shatter the political and social stability on which the country’s free-market capitalism depends.Unsurprisingly, many corporations and institutions have cut ties with Trump and his businesses and suspended contributions to those congressional Republicans who challenged Biden’s victory. Many of the party’s mega-donors have also turned off the cash spigot, worrying about reputational damage from being seen to support Trump’s false election claims and the ensuing Capitol riot.If the party has an ideology it’s what the French call je-m’en-foutisme, a contemptuous indifference toward othersWhat, really, does the Republican party believe in now other than the imperative of maintaining Trump in power? So long as the party clings to Trump’s Lost Cause, it rejects business, law and order, national unity, the constitution, fiscal responsibility, traditional morality, democratic norms and nearly everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for.If the party has an ideology it’s what the French call je-m’en-foutisme, a contemptuous indifference toward others. It was exemplified by the House Republicans during the Capitol siege who, sheltering with colleagues in a secure location, mocked requests that they wear masks; now three of the Democratic lawmakers who were there have become infected with Covid-19. If Trump’s Republican party has a motto, it’s the Arizona state Republican chair Kelli Ward’s urging the president to “Cross the Rubicon” – that is, to imitate Julius Caesar’s treasonous action that led to civil war and the collapse of the Roman Republic.If there is to be civil war, one hopes that it will be bloodless and confined to the Republican party. The party needs to separate itself from those who undermine our civil order by maintaining that Democrats stole the election. The Republican lawmakers who voted against certifying the election should be given off-ramps, perhaps in the form of opportunities to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy. The party should support efforts like the new Republican Accountability Project to channel donations to legislators who face primary challenges as a result of voting for Trump’s impeachment or removal. The party should make sincere efforts to persuade its base voters to return to reality. And it should accept and perhaps facilitate the departure of the worst bitter-enders into the political wasteland of a third party.Democrats and others who have little love for the Republican party may rejoice that Trump has brought it so low. But just as the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, warned that the government could not stand as a house divided, the country cannot now endure if one of the two major political parties rejects the legitimacy of the other when it wins elections and attempts to govern. It has to become a country with two more-or-less normal parties or none. If Trump-inspired radicalism on the right isn’t checked by responsible actors on both sides, history will record this moment as the beginning of the end of American democracy.Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party More