I didn’t expect to watch the entire trial today, but it turns out that is exactly that’s what I did. And I’m glad I did. This is only the third time that a trial has been held to decide whether a President of the United States is to be removed from office – to say it is historic is an understatement. During the Clinton trial it was evident early that the Senate would not convict the President and that was all I really cared about at the time. A trial about the President lying about sex in the Oval office seemed like a soap opera to me, so I wasn’t much interested in the details. I am retired now, and more appreciative of the magnitude of the event. However, back then my work was demanding, and my personal life was full so I really didn’t have the much time or, admittedly, the inclination to pay close attention.
For many of you reading this may be exactly your situation right now, so I will try to provide a brief synopsis of what I saw today along with some of my humble opinions about the proceeding.
First up was Adam Schiff who spent good deal of time providing a summery of the timeline of the entire sorted affair from end to end. He began with the plot by Rudy Giuliani to remove Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch because she stood in the way of his efforts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden all of the way through to the point where Trump was forced by events to release the funds to the Ukraine and the impeachment inquiry began in the House of Representatives.
As we leaned yesterday, Schiff is a brilliant orator. Looking only occasionally at his notes he wove a compelling story of how Trump was always the central figure behind the complicated efforts of Rudy Giuliani and his surrogates in the State Department to coerce President Zelensky of the Ukraine into announcing investigations into the Bidens and the debunked conspiracy theory that the Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 elections. His style was riveting. He was plain spoken and it appeared that he was telling a story from memory. Given his encyclopedic knowledge of the facts, in large part he was doing just that. I have to agree with one of the guests on CNN who, during a break in the action, said something to the effect that “I looked up and realized he had been speaking for two and a half hours; I could have sworn that less than an hour had elapsed.”
Other House trial managers then took turns relating the various aspects of that timeline in much greater detail. For instance Representative Jerrold Nadler followed Schiff and descried in chronological fashion, and in great detail, the evidence uncovered regarding the efforts by Giuliani and his Ukrainian partners to smear and then remove Ambassador Yovanovitch from her post. Other managers followed, each describing, again in great detail and in chronological order, the subsequent segments of the entire effort by Trump and his partners in crime to subvert the best interest of the nation and its security to his personal ambitions.
Frankly I didn’t find follow on segments as compelling as Schiff’s earlier performance, though that is setting a very high bar. In defense of the other trial managers, the parts of the narrative they were describing events in much greater detail which was quite a lot to commit to memory. That, I suppose, caused them to have to read almost all of their remarks. I could see that they were trying to vary the inflections of their voices to match the words they were speaking, but they for the most part were not as effective in this respect as was Adam Schiff. Frankly this made parts of their presentations boring and I almost nodded off several times. I guess it would be impossible for one man to talk for eight hours, but I found myself wishing that Schiff could have given the entire presentation from end to end.
One thing that all of the trial managers did very effectively was to insert videos of excerpts from the testimony of the impeachment witness such as William Taylor, Gordon Sondland, Fiona Hill, and David Holmes to help tell and lend credence to their narratives. They also inserted videos of Donald Trump and used his own words to incriminate himself and make their points. That was very well done.
Then it was left to Adam Schiff, with the help of Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, to sum it all up. This was Schiff at his best and they both did an excellent job. I was most impressed when Schiff recalled several situations where important testimony by the House witnesses could have been backed up by the hard evidence of their contemporaneous notes and other documents which the White House has refused to release. Time and time again he told the senators that he would like to show them those notes and documents, but he couldn’t for obvious reasons. In each case he asked the senators (and I am paraphrasing here), “Wouldn’t like to see those notes (or documents); I would think that you would. But you can. You can compel the White House to produce them. It is within your power to do so.”
It was a long day. The House trial manger have to know that there will never be enough Republican senators willing to convict Trump, but nevertheless their efforts in the prosecution of Trump are still vitally important. In large part their presentations were aimed at the Americans voters who are capable of removing Donald J. Trump from office and thus able to remove that stain from the body politics. However, one has to ;understand that many millions didn’t have ability and/or the compulsion to watch a sizable portion to today’s proceedings.
I believe that in large part Schiff and his associates were speaking to the four to six or seven vulnerable Republican senators who might vote with the Democrats to subpoena witness such as John Bolton and Dick Mulvaney and the documents which the White House continues to hide. The managers know those witnesses and documents have the capability to debunk most of the defenses which will be presented by Trump lawyers and to nail Trump to the wall. That would be something that the voting public would really notice and probably doom Trump to oblivion in the 2020 election.
Cajun 1/22/2020