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Home » How will the Senate handle the impeachment trial?

How will the Senate handle the impeachment trial?

The New Neo Posted on by

Rumor has it that there are enough Republicans in the Senate who are willing to vote to allow witnesses in the Senate trial of Trump that there won’t be a simple dismissal, and the fear is that the Democrats will turn it into a parade of last-minute smear jobs and grandstanding.

Well, perhaps. But didn’t a lot of people on the right originally want a trial, to get an opportunity for Republicans to call their own witnesses as well as to publicly cross-examine the Democrats’ more sketchy witnesses? Or something of that sort?

I’m not at all sure the Senate will actually call witnesses, but if they do I don’t see why it wouldn’t backfire on the Democrats. That would certainly be my hope.

One interesting piece of news is that Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr (now, there’s a duo!) will be part of the Trump defense team. I’ve written many times about Dershowitz’s position on the impeachment. I have great respect for what he’s said, which makes extreme sense to me. Now he seems to be burning whatever final bridges might have remained to any lingering social life he might have had among his erstwhile friends of the liberal persuasion, who will take this move by him as an act of unforgivable treason. There are precious few profiles in courage these days, but in my book Dershowitz had been one.

If we remember back to when the Ukrainegate/Whistlegate story first broke, one of the most puzzling things about it was how it had the potential to hurt Joe Biden even more than Donald Trump. That prospect has somewhat receded over time, in no small part because the MSM has assiduously pooh-poohed it. But any trial in the Senate threatens to highlight this aspect of the matter once again. And, since the Democrats seem to be engaged at the moment in what has traditionally been the GOP’s favorite sport, the circular firing squad (Warren vs. Sanders, for example), I would think that Democrats would want to preserve Biden’s reputation as much as possible. A trial of Trump has always seemed a funny way to go about doing that. If Biden is further tarnished, who “electable” is left with a chance of challenging Trump?

I imagine their hope is that the trial will hurt Trump more than it would hurt Biden, of course. Seems pretty risky to me; so far, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Comments

How will the Senate handle the impeachment trial? — 31 Comments

  2. Personally, I’m OK with Dems calling new witnesses as long as PDJT gets to do the same.

    Surely, though, the HoR should have crafted their evidence prior to sending it to the Senate.

  3. I wasn’t planning on really keeping abreast of the Senate trial. Now that Starr, and especially Dershowitz, are involved in the defense, this is going to be interesting.

  4. And in this corner, heavyweight tag team champions Dershowitz and Starr. And in the other corner welterweight wannabees Nadler and Schiff.

    DING!!!!!

  5. Doesn’t every police procedural drama series in the history of TV show the judge having a fit when some last-minute evidence or witness suddenly pops up after a trial is under way? That’s as much as I know about legal procedure; who among the regulars here can explain what the rules, standards and expectations are in this regard?

    There’s no doubt that if they could, the Democrats would hand over their flimsy nothingness to start, and then spend six months trotting out the latest “But wait! Huge bombshell!! Joe Schmo, who knew someone who dated the girlfriend of Trump’s former gardener’s son has come forward as a witness that he heard someone say that …” garbage.

  6. I fail to see why any extra testimony, not in the House record, should be called for. The House record contains NO ONE with any first-hand evidence to prove that Trump did what he’s accused of on the first count, and does contain one witness who said that when he spoke to Trump about it, Trump said he wanted NOTHING in exchange for the aid.

    But if Democrats, aided by Republican fools, demand more testimony, then testimony showing that the administration was right to be concerned about corruption among the previous administration’s members and supporters and their families in Ukraine will be appropriate. If Biden is going to be their nominee they are idiots to request that his son’s behavior be exposed in public hearings like this.

  7. It should be amusing to see Schiff, Nadler, et al., be demolished by the President’s defense team.

  8. “Doesn’t every police procedural drama series in the history of TV show the judge having a fit when some last-minute evidence or witness suddenly pops up after a trial is under way? That’s as much as I know about legal procedure; who among the regulars here can explain what the rules, standards and expectations are in this regard?”

    The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) are the rules for admissibility of evidence in federal courts. Most states have adopted some version of these FRE rules. Courts typically don’t admit last minute evidence unless it is extremely probative to the issue at trial because of the prejudicial effect this evidence will have on the jury. That’s why, even in some gruesome murder cases, the judge won’t allow some pictures to be shown to the jury because of the extreme effect it would have on the minds of the jurors. We want our jurors, after all, to render unpassioned and unbiased judgment, and a surprise piece of evidence offered late in trial or after the deadline has passed for submission of evidence has a strong tendency to warp or alter the jury’s assessment of the facts.

    A lot depends on the judge though. The judge has discretion to allow things. He or she has to be careful though. If the judge allows something that has a strong prejudicial effect on the jury, that could be the basis for a well-reasoned and well-argued appeal.

  9. I’m hoping that Roberts won’t play Judge Ito and will actually bring the hammer down on any shenanigans. If witnesses are allowed, though, who wouldn’t want Hunter Biden or Adam Schiff under oath?

  11. Well, Dershowitz will never be invited to another party by his former liberal friends. He will be persona non grata with democrats.

  13. Alan Dershowitz’s great sin, entirely responsible for his POV is that he’s never accepted Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”.

    Dershowitz actually believes that America and its Constitution have great value.

    That fundamentally opposes George Soros’ view that, “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States”

  14. ‘Evidence’ sufficient to convict President Trump is entirely lacking. Congressional Democrats know this, thus the goal of an impeachment trial in the Senate is not to convict Trump but to convict the Republican Senate.

    The MSM will incessantly portray an impeachment trial of Trump as proof of the GOP’s corruption and obstruction of justice.

    Regaining control of the Senate and hamstringing Trump in his second term is the goal.

  15. The latest from Dershowitz:

    Dershowitz said on The Dan Abrams Show on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel, that he will just provide an hourlong constitutional defense of the president before the Senate as Trump goes on trial next week.

    “I think it overstates it to say I’m a member of the Trump team. I was asked to present the constitutional argument that I would have presented had Hillary Clinton been elected and had she been impeached,” Dershowitz said.

    “I was asked to present my constitutional argument against impeachment,” he continued. “I will be there for one hour, basically, presenting my argument. But I’m not a full-fledged member of the defense team in any realistic sense of that term.”

  16. That’s nice Ann. Why not read Jonathan Turley on the abuse he’s taken (from faculty members among others) for a similarly detached presentation?

  17. The House managers should not be allowed to call new witnesses. They can trot out the clowns who testified during the impeachment charades.

  18. Some at CTH fear, that Mitch’s talk about votes on each witness, means that he will rig things, so that Dems get all their star witnesses, and DJT gets few or none.

  20. On the introduction of new evidence during the trial, not covered in the articles of impeachment, McCarthy tells it like it is, and he is not a happy camper:

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-postpone-senate-trial-until-house-finishes-investigation/

    Postpone the Impeachment Trial until the House Finishes Investigating
    By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY January 15, 2020 5:34 PM

    The House provided the Senate with two half-baked impeachment articles. House Democrats rushed through the investigation, forgoing salient witnesses and evidence, because of the political calendar. The charges are weak and the inquiry was needlessly short-circuited, so Democrats have continued investigating the premature allegations. Now they are publicly disclosing newly acquired evidence, with the promise of more to come. Transparently, their goal is to pressure the Senate not merely to conduct a trial but to complete the investigation that the House failed to complete — calling witnesses and gathering evidence, as if a trial were nothing more than an extension of an open-ended grand-jury probe.

    Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans should not let them get away with it. No trial court would allow itself to be whipsawed this way. A federal judge would tell prosecutors to go back to the grand jury, finish the investigation, and come back to the trial court when they have a case ready to be tried, not investigated.

  21. Conrad Black doesn’t say anything new, but I like the way he says it.

    https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/16/this-tawdry-impeachment-spectacle-must-run-its-course/

    Since the legal case is nonsense and the outcome foreordained, it is only a public relations battle now. The farther the administration is seen to enable an airing of the facts, the better and more electorally valuable will be the result. The Democrats created this trap for themselves; they should be allowed to take the consequences when that trap snaps closed on them.
    …
    For any reader who has been in a submarine or outer space or Antarctica for the last six months, the charges are abuse of office and contempt of Congress. The first is not a ground for impeachment unless specified as treason, bribery, or another high crime or equivalent misdemeanor—and none such is alleged. As to the second charge, the only thing the president is actually guilty of is contempt of Schiff, Nadler, and Pelosi for running a rigged partisan mudslinging operation where the president received none of the protections accorded to defendants by the Bill of Rights; failure to be contemptuous of it would itself be contemptible.

    The president was only asking for the facts about the Bidens’ conduct in Ukraine, not for an indictment of the Bidens. Any application of pressure is denied by the Ukrainian president, and in any case, the allegedly withheld assistance to Ukraine was delivered and the investigation requested did not occur. If they weren’t so obnoxiously sanctimonious, Nadler and Schiff would be eligible for theatrical awards for deadpan comedy in presenting such bunk as grave adjudication.
    …
    The much more important question is whether this is the time to debunk the practice of obviously unjustified recourse to the drastic remedy of presidential impeachment and to deter future reflexive partisan recourse to the attempted criminalization of policy differences.
    …
    The cant and emotionalism that enshrouds this final doomed effort to undo the 2016 election probably require a full trial. The public relations battle must be fought to the end. Then, when it is no longer timely or urgent, the Supreme Court should be asked to clarify whether the Constitution’s enumeration of justifications for impeachment is exhaustive, or only illustrative.

    The country will be curious to know whether it must expect this kind of nonsense to be a recurrent theme in its politics, a frequent dilatory and muck-raking procedure. Short of being warned off by the Supreme Court, only a revulsion in public opinion will apparently disabuse nasty and dishonest legislators like Nadler and Schiff from such irresponsible abuse of their positions as is now reaching its tawdry climax.

  22. How will the MSM handle the impeachment trial?
    Badly.

    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/16/another-dud-in-the-string-of-bombshells/

    You have to pity the bombshell-shocked American citizen trying to take seriously all the “shocking,” “stunning” and “bombshell” news coming out of Washington these days.

    It is a little maddening — though mostly amusing — watching Rachel Maddow and the breathless news wags on MSNBC and CNN contorting themselves during interviews with greasy “witnesses” to supposedly nefarious behavior in Ukraine as to why exactly what they are claiming is so important and damning.

    Or, “bombshell!,” as they like to say. And, certainly, “impeachable!”

    HINT: If it takes exhaustive and complicated explanations to pinpoint precisely why something is a “bombshell,” then it is not a “bombshell.” That is the point of a “bombshell.” It is so powerful that it does not need to come wrapped in complicated explanations.

  23. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/15/impeachment_and_the_fight_over_the_deep_state_142152.html

    By Charles Lipson

    Why is official Washington so determined to rid itself of Donald Trump? The usual answers focus on the country’s ideological divisions, now calcified in the parties, and Trump’s polarizing personality. Democrats of all stripes truly loathe him. All true, but those are only part of the answer.

    There is a deeper reason that helps explain both the origins of the impeachment articles and the larger movement to remove Trump. The key is that Trump not only ran against Washington’s entrenched power, he is actually delivering on that promise. Nothing is more dangerous to the Beltway’s power and profits, to its most powerful actors and the foot soldiers behind them. Those endangered interests are the essential backdrop to the House impeachment and Senate trial.

    Trump not only ran against the capital’s lobbyists, lawyers, and bureaucrats, he has avoided capture by them since taking office. Instead of making his peace with traditional Republican constituencies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he has shut them out. He pays little attention to familiar Republican think tanks. Instead of deferring to state party leaders, he stepped into the primaries, backed his own candidates (often underdogs), and showed it was fatal for Republicans to oppose him. Back in Washington, the Democrats shut out Trump, deciding from the outset to block as many of his Cabinet and judicial appointments as they could. The result is that Trump firmly controls his own party and is uniformly opposed by Democrats, who are otherwise fractured by ideology and age.

    For all his well-earned Pinocchios, Trump has governed exactly as he promised: as an outsider and disrupter. It is hardly surprising to find the losers fighting back hard.
    …
    The permanent government has bared its teeth at Trump not because he is uncouth, erratic, or untruthful or because he “obstructed Congress” or “abused his office” (whatever those mean). They oppose Trump because he threatens their once-secure political world. He is abolishing long-standing regulations at an astonishing clip and appointing federal judges who, for the first time in decades, refuse to ratify far-reaching regulations and executive orders that are only loosely tethered to statutory laws.
    …
    Trump is challenging both wings of the Democratic Party, as well as the dominance of bureaucratic rulemaking and the lobbyists who tweak it for their clients. He is openly confronting the administrative state, with its centralized power, its regulatory control over citizens’ lives, and its discretion to set rules outside of any democratic controls.

    This fundamental challenge forms the backdrop of the unending efforts to spy on Trump, the damning leaks from law enforcement and the CIA, the House impeachment, and now the Senate trial. Trump himself will make it a central issue in his reelection and his effort to keep the Senate in Republican hands. With Chuck Schumer as Majority Leader, Trump can’t appoint the judges he needs to battle the Washington bureaucracy. Big stakes, indeed.

    The real question is: how many Senate Republicans are still beholden to the traditional Republican constituencies and familiar Republican think tanks (aka high-toned lobbyists) who have interests threatened by his administration?

  24. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/10/shadowy-liberal-group-began-investigating-trump-ukraine-months-before-the-whistleblower-complaint/

    Months before a whistleblower complaint that would spark the Democrat effort for impeachment, a shadowy liberal group founded and staffed by Obama administration alums and former Democrat congressional staffers launched an outside investigation into whether President Trump’s allies were seeking “foreign interference” from Ukraine in the 2020 elections.

    The group, American Oversight, began investigating the issue in May — more than two months before the “whistleblower” filed a complaint alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”

    The group’s purpose is to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits requesting official documents from the administration that could be used to bolster Democrat congressional investigations, and its actions on Ukraine show Congress began looking for Ukraine-related dirt on the administration before the “whistleblower” filed his complaint that catalyzed impeachment.

    American Oversight claims to be the top “Freedom of Information Act litigator investigating the Trump administration.”

    In anticipation of Democrats winning back the House in 2018, it launched a “Parallel Investigations Initiative” in April to reinforce congressional investigations of the Trump administration.

  25. The current impeachment farce must be seen as (just) another gambit in the war that has been waged since before the 2016 elections by the Democratic Party (and its supporters and apologists) against the president of the US and in fact, the US itself.

    (In fact, this war can be referred to as “the war to fundamentally transform the USA”.)

    As such, the current impeachment stage (i.e., the current incarnation of the war against Donald Trump and the USA) must be viewed as an attempt to throw as much mud against POTUS as will stick, and to take as much time—and confound as much of the population as possible.

    Once this attack fails (and the mud no longer sticks) another tack will be taken. Another angle or direction of attack will be put in operation.

    Count on it.

    Here’s another aspect of the Democratic putsch that in this case is being fought “undercover”:, i.e., within the vast, “underground” framework of government institutions, far away from the eyes of the public:
    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/17/a_tale_of_two_whistleblowers_one_protected_one_not_142183.html
    (H/T: Powerline blog)

  26. Neo: If Biden is further tarnished, who “electable” is left with a chance of challenging Trump?

    Napoleon Bonaparte: Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

  27. Nonetheless, since the current (i.e., on going, i.e., permanent) impeachment “process” is a huge, and some hope never-ending distraction—to hide all kinds of Democratic Party (and other) malfeasance since 2009—it would behoove the Senate to try to end this monstrous perversion as quickly as possible.

    To be sure, the hydra-headed “process” will rear its ugly heads again and again, but such attempts will have to be dealt with as they occur.

    In the meantime, the forces of good will have to fight hard and long to fend off these distractions so as to correct the grotesque injustices planned, perpetrated and covered up by the previous—rogue—administration’s highly-placed provocateurs:
    https://twitter.com/JohnWHuber/status/1218295137534607360

  29. Snow on Pine:

    It’s also because they think it will hurt GOP senators in purplish states (Susan Collins, for example) and lead to the Democratic takeover of the Senate in 2020.

  30. These dems always forget that like Obama, Trump has charisma. He also has a segment that hates him as did Obama
    2016 just gave us the the polar opposite of the ecstasy they experienced. Pelosi, Schumer, Waters. Nadler are they all so doddering ?
    Must confess never saw an episode of *your fired* but have read that folks said it was a good show.

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