WASHINGTON — By the point the Senate opened impeachment trials for Andrew Johnson and Invoice Clinton, its members fairly effectively knew the info
WASHINGTON — By the point the Senate opened impeachment trials for Andrew Johnson and Invoice Clinton, its members fairly effectively knew the information of the accusations in opposition to the presidents. None of them wanted to activate “The Rachel Maddow Present” to be taught issues they didn’t already know.
However as senators formally convened on Thursday as a court docket of impeachment within the case of Donald John Trump, new revelations had been nonetheless rising and necessary questions remained unanswered. The most recent interviews by Lev Parnas, the Soviet-born affiliate of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s private lawyer, in addition to documents released by House investigators, solely strengthened the truth that there’s extra nonetheless to be realized.
None of it could matter to the result even when extra data does current itself within the weeks to return. The quasi-jurors who swore an oath on Thursday to do “neutral justice” for probably the most half have already signaled their partiality. And what has been documented to date offers a fairly clear image of Mr. Trump’s efforts to strain Ukraine for incriminating details about his political rivals, whether or not it’s trigger for eradicating him from workplace or not.
But there are nonetheless so many unfastened threads to be pulled that the story feels incomplete. Did Mr. Trump know “everything that was going on,” as Mr. Parnas put it in an interview with The New York Instances on the identical day he appeared on Ms. Maddow’s MSNBC show? Was an American ambassador who had been focused by Mr. Trump actually put under surveillance by an unstable affiliate of Mr. Parnas, as textual content messages indicated?
Underscoring the fluidity of the story was the discharge on Thursday of a damning new report by the unbiased Authorities Accountability Workplace, or G.A.O. The report concluded that the federal finances workplace, performing on Mr. Trump’s orders, violated federal regulation by suspending safety assist to Ukraine even because the president and his associates had been pushing the previous Soviet republic for assist in opposition to Democrats. The accountability workplace’s discovering would presumably be related in a trial turning partially on the suspended assist.
And the offer to testify by John R. Bolton, the president’s former nationwide safety adviser who privately denounced the geopolitical “drug deal” orchestrated by Mr. Trump’s different advisers, solely underlines that lots of the key gamers within the story of intrigue have but to publicly disclose what they know.
The lacking data, like nearly all the pieces else in Washington today, is seen by means of drastically totally different lenses relying on the viewer’s political perspective.
To Democrats, Mr. Parnas’s revelations and Mr. Bolton’s supply of testimony solely bolster their argument for calling witnesses throughout the Senate trial, which is able to get underway in earnest on Tuesday. If the Republican majority led by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky refuses, Democrats say, will probably be perpetuating a cover-up on behalf of a corrupt president.
“Each the revelations about Mr. Parnas and the G.A.O. opinion strengthen our push for witnesses and paperwork within the trial,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic chief, instructed reporters. “The G.A.O. opinion, particularly, makes clear that the paperwork we requested in our letter to Chief McConnell are much more wanted now than once we requested it final month. As a result of President Trump, merely put, broke the regulation.”
To Republicans, the newest claims and disclosures are proof that Home Democrats put collectively a slapdash investigation that didn’t cowl sufficient bases earlier than they rushed to an finally partisan vote on the Home flooring. It isn’t the Senate’s job, Republicans say, to do what the Home did not do.
“Makes them look sloppy as hell,” mentioned Solomon L. Wisenberg, a deputy unbiased counsel throughout the Starr investigation. “I believe they need to have gotten their act collectively just a little higher.”
Mr. Wisenberg mentioned the Home Democrats ought to have approved an impeachment inquiry and issued subpoenas to Mr. Bolton and anybody else they wished to query. “They wouldn’t be on this sizzling mess,” he mentioned.
Someway, it’s clear the Senate is opening a trial in a far totally different place than it did in 1868 when it decided Johnson’s destiny or in 1999 when it thought of expenses in opposition to Mr. Clinton, each of whom had been finally acquitted.
The Johnson case turned largely on two allegations — that he improperly fired the secretary of conflict and that he maligned Congress in a sequence of speeches. In neither occasion had been the information severely in query.
With Mr. Clinton, each important doable witness had been interviewed by the investigators of the unbiased counsel Ken Starr earlier than Congress took up the problem, and the query earlier than the Senate was actually about deciphering the information and deciding whether or not they added as much as excessive crimes worthy of elimination from workplace.
With Mr. Trump, there was no particular prosecutor investigating the Ukraine matter and it was left…