Trump impeachment inquiry: The epic struggle begins

Democrats have been salivating over impeaching President Donald Trump since the moment he was elected. The constant whining and hysterics — magnified by their allies in the Democratic Media Complex — have been exhausting.

Now, Pelosi and her Democrats have decided. The hook is the story that Trump abused presidential power by asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter over their dealings with Ukraine. There is plenty of gas in the Trump/Ukraine story, but not enough facts yet.

But what we do know doesn't look good for Trump.

Trump withheld some $400 million in military aid that was approved by Congress and, in his July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, asked him to go after the Bidens for their conflicts in the country.

As vice president, Biden dangled a billion dollars in U.S. aid to Ukraine but demanded that leaders first fire a federal prosecutor investigating corruption. Biden's son Hunter, who knew nothing about gas, was making $50,000 a month with a Ukrainian natural gas company in a Chicago Way deal, Ukrainian style.

What Biden did was indeed sleazy. But, however you cut this, if President Trump demanded a Biden investigation from a foreign power in exchange for American aid, he went over the line that even narcissists should not cross. No president should be using U.S. foreign policy to benefit his or her political future. And now the Democrats, who control the House, will decide how far to take it.

Biden isn't going to like this much. Some of the most tribal left insist what Biden did as vice president in Ukraine isn't a story because the Washington Post told them so. But it is most definitely a story. It rips the scab off Joe.

Ask yourself: What would Republicans be doing right now if President Barack Obama were in office, and he'd withheld military aid to Ukraine unless they investigated his political opponents, say, some GOP milquetoast like Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney?

Republicans would be screaming bloody murder, just like the Democrats are doing right now, filling up with air, making big speeches and pithy tweets.

John Kass, Chicago Tribune

Trump's releasing the phone call transcript won't satisfy congressional Democrats. Pelosi stressed Congress is entitled to the whistleblower's report by the laws governing intelligence agencies, which she helped write. And both parties' Senate leaders backed a resolution demanding to see it.

This case epitomizes the administration's repeated refusal to provide Congress the kind of information that was routine in prior administrations.

The president also said there is nothing wrong with soliciting dirt about potential opponents from foreign governments.

His stance echoes former President Richard Nixon's more than 40 years ago when he told interviewer David Frost that, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

But Nixon's own case showed the limits to presidential actions. Only his resignation saved him from impeachment and conviction on several counts stemming from his efforts to cover up the Watergate break-in, including obstruction of justice and withholding information from Congress.

Still, it took more than a year of Senate and House hearings for the American public to turn against Nixon. With the 2020 election just 13 months away, the Democrats simply don't have that much time.

The House may well act. But when all is said and done, the bottom line remains that the American voters, not Congress, will render the final verdict on Trump's fitness for office.

The case that Joe Biden did something wrong in Ukraine is essentially nonexistent. I say "essentially" because when he was vice president, Biden pressed Ukraine to fire a corrupt and ineffective prosecutor who had earlier investigated the owner of an energy company where Biden's son, Hunter, was on the board.

But the inquiry was no longer active in 2016 when Biden weighed in — and his message was part of a joint effort by the Obama administration, other countries and the International Monetary Fund to clamp down on corruption in Ukraine. It wasn't aimed at protecting the vice president or his son.

Trump isn't trying to help voters examine the gnarly history of foreign aid and corruption in Ukraine. He's trying to divert attention from his own apparent attempt to use U.S. foreign policy for personal gain, a clear abuse of power.

No one should be surprised that the more Trump's troubles grew, the more he lashed out at Biden. Trump's response to any charge of misconduct is to point the finger at someone else.

It has Democrats fretting that they and the media will fall into the same trap, letting Trump define the debate and fight on his own terms.

Here's why: Trump no longer gets the benefit of the doubt. His record of exaggeration and falsehood is far too long to take anything he says at face value.

Moreover, major media organizations have already investigated Biden's son. They all reached the same conclusion: Hunter Biden showed poor judgment and created the appearance of conflicts of interest, but no evidence suggests his father did anything wrong. Trump knows that too: After all, he asked Ukraine to investigate Biden, not the FBI.

But that won't deter him from throwing more mud — or, as he puts it, "going after people hard."

Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Some think that Trump's provocations are deliberate: The president seeks his own impeachment because it's unpopular with voters and will rally his base. It was just one day after special counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress, after all, when Trump allegedly told Zelensky to discuss the Biden affair with his personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani. That doesn't seem like a man who's particularly worried about being impeached, notes Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

Trump does not really want a Ukrainian probe in order to find dirt on the Bidens. He wants a spectacle to spotlight the "dirt" that's already known. It's not unlike an oversight investigation or a counterintelligence inquiry that digs into allegations generated by opposition research. The point is not to find facts, but to give the appearance that your "facts" are more durable than they really are.

Eli Lake, Bloomberg Opinion

For two years, Trump defenders had an infinite supply of indignation over the mere suggestion that the president would collude with Russia. But now that indignation is reserved for anyone who suggests the president should not have tried to collude with the Ukrainians? Come on.

We're supposed to believe a president who has never shown an iota of real concern over corruption in China, Egypt, Russia, the Philippines, North Korea and elsewhere is upset about the one corruption story that coincidentally touches on the potential Democratic opponent who's crushing him in the polls? Does anyone believe Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, is calling Hunter Biden a "drug addict" on TV because this is all a matter of statecraft?

Jonah Goldberg, Tribune Content Agency

The truth is that all presidents, from George Washington through Barack Obama, have done things that are arguably contrary to their oath of office. But what distinguished Richard Nixon from the rest, and led to the articles of impeachment that would have removed him from power in 1974 if he hadn't resigned first, was how many different ways he abused power; the extent to which he refused to respect the powers of all other actors in the political system; and the sense among all those involved in government that he could not be trusted to tell the truth.

Trump approached Nixonian levels of all those things early in his presidency. The whistleblower's revelations have mushroomed into a scandal that goes even further.

That doesn't mean he'll be removed from office. There are strong partisan incentives for Republicans to stick with their president, and they still probably will overwhelm the case for impeachment that Trump keeps making against himself. It's quite possible that if the House does approve articles of impeachment, the resulting Senate trial will be held under rules designed by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to focus on wild and discredited theories of misbehavior by Biden or whomever seems the most likely Democratic presidential nominee at that point.

But maybe not.

The outcome will be driven by some combination of public opinion, choices by party actors and the actual evidence that emerges (yes, cynics, that will actually matter). We know enough now to be able to say that there's evidence of legitimately impeachable actions. But that still leaves a lot of unknowns.

If we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do.

In May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote a letter to Ukraine's prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as "strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine," the Democratic senators declared, "We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump," before demanding Lutsenko "reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation."

So, it's OK for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it's not OK for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?

And then there is Joe Biden. Put aside the Ukrainian prosecutor's firing. Hunter Biden took a position with a Ukrainian natural gas company just a few weeks after his father visited Ukraine in 2014 to urge its government to increase its natural gas production. He had no expertise in Ukraine or natural gas. It will not just be Republicans calling this suspicious; nonpartisan experts in ethics law will testify that this was a major conflict of interest.

Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post

Corruption often doesn't operate explicitly. Faced with a U.S. military aid delay on the one hand and Trump's demand for a Biden investigation on the other, Ukrainian President Zelensky could have figured out what was required of him. The same goes for the Biden case. A wealthy Ukrainian businessman hired the U.S. vice president's son to be on the board of his natural gas company. Could Ukraine's leadership not understand, without being told, that pursuing a money-laundering investigation into that businessman might have repercussions for relations with the U.S. administration?

Once upon a time, people in the former Soviet Union believed that things worked differently in the West — that business and government operated largely above board, according to transparent rules. This illusion dissipated quickly when the walls came down. Decades of interaction in the real world of winks, nudges, veiled threats and name-dropping helped make post-Soviet regimes as utterly cynical and devoid of principles as they are.

Now, people in the Western world automatically assume that anything post-Soviet is suspect. After all, isn't Ukraine corrupt through and through?

Yet Zelensky's whole claim to legitimacy — the reason he was elected — rests on his promise to turn a deeply corrupt nation into one where everyone, from officials to ordinary citizens, actually ignores all the winks and nudges. On Monday, he advertised on Facebook a hotline Ukrainians can call when someone tries to extort a bribe from them or offer a kickback. "We'll never overcome corruption if you close your eyes to it," he exhorted citizens.

The U.S., and the West in general, should be taking Zelensky's pledges at face value and helping him achieve his goal of cleaning up Ukraine. This means staying out of Ukrainian politics (and politically connected companies), and keeping official communications clear and public, with conditions for aid and other support always spelled out, so that both the government and ordinary citizens can understand them. Instead, the U.S. is casting a pall on Ukraine's leadership by dragging Zelensky into its own toxic politics.

Trump deserves to be impeached. But the prospect terrifies me, and it should terrify you, too.

If you're horribly offended and utterly exhausted by Trump, you're tempted to cheer impeachment as long-sought justice and forget that it's just the prelude to the main act, which is a trial in the Senate. That chamber is controlled by Republicans, who, based on current conditions, are as likely to convict Trump as they are to cosponsor Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax. So Trump's supporters would wind up furious that he was put through what they regarded as an overwrought exercise with a foregone conclusion, while the frustration of Trump's detractors would be exponentially multiplied. Let the healing begin!

And would impeachment proceedings effectively lay bare — and force Americans to focus on — sins of Trump's that are being ignored? That's long been one of Democrats' arguments for impeachment, but I wonder. Trump's true colors were conspicuous from the start. You either saw a perverse rainbow or you stared into darkness.

Meanwhile, Trump. How vulnerable will drawn-out impeachment proceedings make him feel? How impotent? How desperate? To flex his power, vent his fury or distract the audience, what would he do? He's capable of anything.

Certainly he'd do all he could to convince Americans of the nefariousness of Democrats, and absolutely his strategy would be to smear the people, the procedures and the institutions arrayed against him as utterly unworthy of trust. If holding on to power meant ruling over rubble, so be it. Trump is beholden only to Trump, and he'd simply declare the rubble gold dust.