And then, you know, I think the response, the Republicans have been kind of coordinating their talking point. And their response to all of the events of the last two days in the Senate is to say, "This is boring. We're not seeing anything new." So, it's quite an amazing piece of brazenness.
I think, overwhelmingly, what you're seeing is what I think we all expected, which is brick-by-brick laying out of the case. Everything that was established in the House impeachment investigation, everything that was established in the Lev Parnas document dump for last week is simply being laid out very, very systematically by one impeachment manager after another. And they're just trying to reconstruct and assemble the story of these two articles, both the abuse of power that you described and the obstruction. And they're doing it over these three long eight-hour days in the Senate, with the hopes that senators who are hearing it for the very first time, some of them, might be moved.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Dahlia, if you can tell us what that is, for the very first time? If you can, in a nutshell, tell us what they are alleging and what they have charged the president with, elaborating on those articles of impeachment?
DAHLIA LITHWICK: I mean, in a nutshell, the two articles are, one, this use abuse of presidential power, the quid pro quo that Adam Schiff was talking about right there, where both a visit for Zelensky and aid to Ukraine were withheld by this president and Mick Mulvaney pending a promise that the president of Ukraine would go on television and announce that he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden, Burisma and Joe Biden. And that promise, that almost amounts to bribery, withholding of desperately sought aid by Ukraine in exchange for just political oppo research to benefit the president in the 2020 election that's the first.
And as Val Demings said in that tweet, the second is obstruction of Congress. This is an unprecedented moment. Even Nixon agreed to work with Congress when they investigated him for impeachment. Even Clinton extensively cooperated with the House impeachment. This is the first time we've seen a White House absolutely say, "We will not cooperate with any part of this. We want nothing to do with it. No witness may testify." So that's the second article, is obstruction of Congress, in effect, saying, "Come and get it." And that is not how impeachment is meant to happen. So, the second article is the withholding of any, any possibility that congressional oversight could happen.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let's go back to President Trump speaking in Davos.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I would rather go the long way. I would rather interview Bolton. I would rather interview a lot of people. The problem with John is that it's a national security problem. You know, you can't have somebody who's at national security. And if you think about it, John, he knows some of my thoughts. He knows what I think about leaders. What happens if he reveals what I think about a certain leader and it's not very positive, and then I have to deal on behalf of the country? It's going to be very hard. It's going to make the job very hard.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that's Trump speaking in Davos, Dahlia. So, could you talk about why you've written about this, why Republicans are arguing that they can't vote just yet on witnesses, and Trump in fact saying that he would like to hear from John Bolton and many others, and yet it would be a national security threat to do so?
DAHLIA LITHWICK: I would step back for one second and just flag that this is the same Donald Trump who said, "I will not let any of these people testify before the House, because the House process is compromised. It's a witch hunt. But I will be happy to have them testify in the Senate." Here we are at the Senate, and now they are also being you know, the argument is, "Well, we have a problem. You know, we have to assert immunity. We have to assert privilege." So, it's part of the very, very consistent bait and switch, where there is a promise that "We are going to accommodate you down the road, we want this information to come out," and then, once the context changes and presumably now they can come forward and testify, we're told, "Oh, now there's a new rationale for why he can't testify in the Senate."
I mean, I think that the constitutional claim that's being made, and has been made throughout, which is absolute immunity, that no one who has ever served as an adviser to the president can be called to testify, certainly it's an argument. It has never prevailed. It has never been seen as a legitimate constitutional claim to bar people from coming forward. Moreover, if you're going to claim that certain things are privileged, the witness has to come forward and assert the privilege. So, we're not even having that. We're not even having witnesses come forward and say, "Well, I can talk about this, but not about this, and I have to stop here." Even that hasn't happened. We're just getting an absolute blackout.
And so, for the president to say, "Oh, you know, I wish they could, but my hands are tied because of the law," is another piece of kind of bait-and-switchery that we've been seeing all along. The endgame is going to be: find a reason to say at the end of the day, "We can't have any witnesses, so you may as well vote to have no witnesses, because this whole thing was a hoax."
AMY GOODMAN: And you also have, of course, President Trump saying, "I would love to go before the Senate," just as he said he would of course speak to Robert Mueller, in the end not doing so and only answering written questions, or at least his lawyers answering those questions.
I wanted to go to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who said during a campaign stop in Iowa Wednesday that he would not participate in a witness swap as part of the Senate impeachment trial, Biden's comments coming in response to a voter's question. According to reports, Biden said, quote, "The reason I would not make the deal, the bottom line is, this is a constitutional issue. We're not going to turn it into a farce or to some kind of political theater. They're trying to do that. I want no part of that. I'm not going to play his game. The Senate job is now to try him. My job is to beat him."
So, if you can talk about this issue of, what, that Senator Ted Cruz called a witness reciprocity, trading one or, reciprocal witnesses, the whole issue of either Biden or his son, Hunter Biden, having to testify if Bolton does? And also, are Democrats putting all their eggs in one basket to get Bolton there? Who knows actually what the former national security adviser would say? Some say that Trump assassinated Soleimani for him, as a kind of bone to throw to this Iran hawk, Bolton, who, right after the assassination, tweeted, "This is what we've been working on for a long time."
DAHLIA LITHWICK: I mean, I think, as to the reciprocity, maybe the best way to think about it, Amy, is to think about what we saw in the House during the House impeachment process, which was not a sort of sober consideration of these claims about Ukraine, a sober consideration of whether the president abused his power, but a whole lot of clown show about Hunter Biden and Burisma and counter very, very much roundly debunked counter-conspiracy claims about how, "Oh, it wasn't Russia who intervened in the 2016 election. In fact, it was Ukraine." All of that was being surfaced every day. And I think that Mitch McConnell has been really clear that that was not going to happen in the Senate, that the Senate was not going to be a place where a whole bunch of lunatic-fringe debunked conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden and Burisma were going to be played out again.
And one of the reasons that Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, who have been put on the president's defense team but are not speaking in the well of the Senate, is that Mitch McConnell does not want this to turn into a circus. He wants it to be a sober, narrow consideration of these two articles. And I think when Ted Cruz was floating this reciprocity deal, it was very much sounding in the key of "Let's just open the doors and bring in the clowns. Let's really have this turn into a circus." That's not in Joe Biden's interest, for the reasons you just heard. I don't think it's in Mitch McConnell's interest, either, to have this be a place where every single wacky conspiracy theory that has ever appeared on Fox News is going to be surfaced. And so I think it was in both sides' interests, in some ways, to shut it down.
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