Trump Still Hasn’t Forced Ukraine To Fabricate Dirt On Biden [Click]”… it seems more like the government is taking a likely inconsequential step to improve its own domestic political standing and send vague signals to Washington that it’s playing ball without actually doing anything significant.“
Did Donald Trump Just Self-Impeach? By Susan B. Glasser October 3, 2019
On Thursday, Trump didn’t bother to contest the charge that he leaned on Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son. In fact, he did it again, live on camera, from the White House lawn.
In the ten days since the House of Representatives launched its impeachment inquiry, President Trump has spoken and tweeted thousands of words in public. He has called the investigation a “coup” and the press “deranged.” He has demanded that his chief congressional antagonist, the California representative he demeans as “Liddle’ Adam Schiff,” be brought up on treason charges. He has attacked the “Do Nothing Democrats” for wasting “everyone’s time and energy on BULLSHIT.”
There have been so many rationales coming from the President that it’s been hard to keep them straight. “How do you impeach a President who has created the greatest Economy in the history of our Country, entirely rebuilt our Military into the most powerful it has ever been, Cut Record Taxes & Regulations, fixed the VA & gotten Choice for our Vets (after 45 years), & so much more,” he complained via tweet last week, in a less-than-accurate recap of his Administration’s record. He called the charges against him a “hoax” and, quoting his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, said that he was “framed by the Democrats.” He has blamed the “#Fakewhistleblower” and the “fake news” for the impeachment investigation, which has now replaced the Mueller investigation in Trump’s rhetoric as “the Greatest Witch Hunt in the history of our country.” Trump has also insisted, over and over again, that there was nothing at all wrong with his July 25th phone call with the President of Ukraine. The call—in which he asked for the “favor” of having Ukraine investigate his 2020 political rival, the former Vice-President Joe Biden, even as he was holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid—triggered the impeachment inquiry in the first place. But Trump says it was “perfect.”
On Thursday morning, Trump appeared to dispense with excuses altogether, no longer even bothering to contest the charge that he leaned on Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son Hunter. How do we know this? Because Trump did it again, live on camera, from the White House lawn. In a demand that is hard to interpret as anything other than a request to a foreign country to interfere in the U.S. election, Trump told reporters that Ukraine needs a “major investigation” into the Bidens. “I would certainly recommend that of Ukraine,” the President added, shouting over the noise of his helicopter, as he prepared to board Marine One en route to Florida. He also volunteered, without being asked, that China “should start an investigation into the Bidens,” too, given that Hunter Biden also had business dealings there while his father was in office. Trump, minutes after threatening an escalation in his trade war with China, suggested that he might even personally raise the matter of the Bidens with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.
You could practically hear the collective gasp in Washington. Republicans had spent days denying what Trump had more or less just admitted to. “As President Trump keeps talking, he makes it more and more difficult for his supporters to mount an actual defense of his underlying behavior,” Philip Klein, the executive editor of the Washington Examiner, a conservative magazine, soon wrote. It was as though Richard Nixon in 1972 had gone out on the White House lawn and said, Yes, I authorized the Watergate break-in, and I’d do it again. It was as though Bill Clinton in 1998 had said, Yes, I lied under oath about my affair with Monica Lewinsky, and I’d do it again.
Twitter wags immediately began wondering if the President had just committed the nation’s first act of self-impeachment. On CNN, a chyron read “TRUMP ADMITS TO VERY OFFENSE DEMS LOOKING TO IMPEACH OVER.” His 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, tweeted, “Someone should inform the president that impeachable offenses committed on national television still count.” But that is not, of course, how Trump sees it. He now faces an energized Democratic majority in the House that’s ready to impeach him for abusing his power. But with little prospect that the Republican Senate will dare to convict him and remove him from office, he isn’t even bothering to deny the facts. He’s saying, Yes, I did it—and so what?
Several weeks ago, back when Ukraine was an obscure Washington controversy about delayed military aid relegated to the inside pages of the Times, Trump already seemed to be a President on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His behavior, always erratic, had become noticeably more combative, angry, and extreme. He was hurling insults at a record pace, and he cancelled an August trip to Denmark in a fit of pique because its leader had mocked his offer to buy Greenland from her. Looking at his tweets back then, I found that Trump had amped up the volume to a striking degree, sending out hundreds more in August of this year than he had in previous summers—and many more of them were provocative, highly personal attacks on targets ranging from the “fake news” media to his Federal Reserve chairman.
Well, we hadn’t seen anything yet. Trump produced six hundred and ninety tweets in August; in September, he reached a record for his Presidency of eight hundred and one tweets, according to Factba.se, a company that tracks Trump’s statements. There were whole new bizarre episodes—remember Sharpiegate? Trump’s aborted Camp David invite to the Taliban?—and an angry parting of ways with John Bolton, his third national-security adviser. All of those incidents, of course, now seem as though they took place long ago. The sharpest spike in Trump’s tweets, not surprisingly, came late in the month, when news of the Ukraine whistle-blower’s complaint became public and congressional impeachment, until then an unlikely outcome, became a new political reality. Trump, in fact, was so publicly agitated about this swift and unexpected turn in his fortunes that the week of September 23rd was the single most active tweeting week of his Presidency. Trump sent out two hundred and forty tweets to his followers that week, easily beating his previous record of two hundred and seven, set during the week of July 7th.
Reading back over those tweets now, one can see the real-time realization by the President that, whatever he was doing, it wasn’t working. Confidence about his “perfect” call with Ukraine’s leader descended into self-pity, after he released the White House summary of the call and the controversy escalated instead of disappeared. Soon there were laments of “presidential harassment.” By September 26th, Trump was talking about “THE GREATEST SCAM IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICS” and retweeting validation from his son, his White House counsellor, his communications director, and his congressional allies. Over the weekend and into this week, the message seemed increasingly frenetic and muddled. One minute, Trump seemed to be shoring up his Republican base and attempting to change the subject to his policy feuds with Democrats; the next, he was deep into the details of the scandal, assailing the credibility of the whistle-blower and the investigators. Again.
On Wednesday, in two separate appearances alongside the visibly uncomfortable President of Finland, Sauli Niinistö, Trump ranted in such agitated and confused fashion that the dialogue at times resembled an absurdist play:
Finnish reporter: Finland is the happiest country in the world.
Trump: Finland is a happy country.
Finnish reporter: What can you learn from Finland?
Trump: Well, you got rid of Pelosi, and you got rid of shifty Schiff. Finland is a happy country. He’s a happy leader, too.
Trump, as that exchange so memorably suggests, just can’t get over it. He can’t even formulate a sentence in public that doesn’t capture his obsessive focus on the political scandal that he created. Where previous embattled Presidents refused to discuss their plights, Trump can talk about nothing else.
The President’s ability to capture public attention, however, is diminishing. He is caught in a cycle of greater and greater rhetorical excess, a cycle that predates the Ukraine scandal but helps explain his otherwise inexplicable behavior in responding to it. According to Factba.se’s week-by-week tracking, Trump began his escalatory spiral this spring, when the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s 2016 election interference was released. Up until that point, the President had already been notable for his aggressive use of Twitter, his combative public statements, and his hostile relationship to the truth. But, in both frequency and volume, he was significantly more muted than he has been since the Mueller report’s release. In the first two years of his Administration, there were only seven weeks when Trump tweeted more than a hundred times; since the Mueller report was made public, in April, he has done so every week except for two.
The Mueller investigation, and Trump’s festering grievance about it, appears to have shaped his public persona more than any other event of his tenure. Trump publicly proclaimed victory with the report’s release, portraying it as “complete and total exoneration.” “I won,” he said, but Trump did not take the win. Instead, he launched his Attorney General, William Barr, on what we know now was an international quest to investigate the origins of the Mueller investigation, pressuring U.S. allies from Britain to Italy to Australia, and also Ukraine, to unearth information that undermined the Mueller probe’s credibility. Who knows what will come out next. The impeachment investigation has just begun, and although it is starting out as tightly focussed on Ukraine, we have no real idea where it might end up. What we do know about Trump, though, is unlikely to change: the restraints on him are gone, and they are not coming back.
Let’s take a step back in time to the late 1950’s, when I was in junior high school and the political consensus was that of the New Deal. The school library was divided between a grammar school/junior high section and a high school section, and both sections were open to all students. One of my particular memories of the library is reading parts (the whole thing was far too much to endure) of Mein Kampf. [Q: Do today’s high school and middle school libraries have Mein Kampf on the shelves?] The thing that stuck in my mind, without any guidance from teachers or parents, was The Big Lie technique which Hitler used while attributing it to the Jews. Wikipedia [Click] has a more expansive article about it, but what I took away was that it could be summarized as “if you tell enough lies often enough, people are sure to believe some of them.” [That might in fact be a quotation from the book.] This is exactly what Trump and his allies are doing—and again they are blaming it on others. To label such radicalism “conservative” —which is almost universal in the US press—is frank complicity. If journalists cannot bring themselves to call it what it is, can they not at least put the word ‘conservative’ in quotation marks?
California just legalized public banking [Click] Gee! A couple of elections back, the Green Party nominee for governor promoted this—just as the Green Party Presidential nominee called for a Green New Deal. So the Green Party is fulfilling the traditional role of a third party—coming up with ideas that are co-opted by major parties.
If in fact he had a myocardial infarction (the usual meaning of "heart attack"), it must have been an incredibly mild one; sounds more like an angina attack to me.
Yes, myocardial infarction means heart attack. I agree it was relatively mild, but at 78 it will still take some time to recuperate from. I'm glad he'll be taking it easy until the debate.
Fundraising Totals for last quarter. The only real surprise is that Pete did better than Joe (even with the recent understandable sympathy toward Biden.)
Bernie $25.3M Liz $24.6M Pete $19.1MJoe $15.2M Kamala $11.6M Andrew $10M Cory $6M Marianne $3M Steve Bullock $2.3M Michael Bennet $2.1M
WHEN COURTS ARE STONEWALLED Or, We're going to give you an offer you can't refuse:
In civil cases, courts have powerful tools for dealing with someone who blocks access to the very information needed to judge the allegations against him.
The most commonly known method is the rule that says that once a person is legally served with a lawsuit against them, they must respond to the complaint. If they don’t, the court can enter a judgment against them based on the allegations in the complaint. But there are other processes as well.
One court tool that could easily be adapted to the impeachment process comes from the federal rules of civil procedure. In a process called “request for admission,” one party to a lawsuit can give their opponents a list of detailed factual allegations with a demand for a response.
If the party does not respond, the court can treat each allegation as if it were true, and proceed accordingly. If the respondent denies one or more particular allegations, there is a follow-up procedure called a request for production, demanding any documents in their possession or control supporting the denial. If the respondent refuses, again the court has the power to order that the alleged fact be taken as true.
GETTING TO THE TRUTH
In an impeachment process against President Donald Trump, the House of Representatives could present the president with a request for admission to the following two simple factual statements, which could be inferred from a whistleblower complaint:
“In July 2019 President Trump personally issued instructions to suspend all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.” “President Trump issued these instructions with the intent to pressure the government of Ukraine to conduct a formal investigation of Hunter Biden and his father Joe Biden.”
The House could give Trump a brief amount of time to respond, including providing any evidence that might disprove the allegations.
If he refused to respond, or if he denied but refused to produce supporting documentation, the House could assume the set of alleged facts to be true and include them in articles of impeachment. Then the House could vote and, depending on the outcome of that vote, the matter would then proceed to the Senate for trial.
Congress could engage in a long, drawn-out battle trying to use its oversight and subpoena powers to force various executive branch officials to release documents or testify about what they saw, heard and did. Or they could try this simple and quick procedure, which does not require the cooperation of the Department of Justice or court action.
Big Trump/Ukraine Document Dump, Annotated [Click]
ReplyDeleteHere's a link to the AP story on the text messages. [click]
ReplyDeleteThe photograph is more than a little interesting; Volker leaving the Capitol surrounded by armed police escort.
DeleteTrump Still Hasn’t Forced Ukraine To Fabricate Dirt On Biden [Click]”… it seems more like the government is taking a likely inconsequential step to improve its own domestic political standing and send vague signals to Washington that it’s playing ball without actually doing anything significant.“
ReplyDelete😄👍
DeleteFrom The New Yorker
ReplyDeleteDid Donald Trump Just Self-Impeach?
By Susan B. Glasser
October 3, 2019
On Thursday, Trump didn’t bother to contest the charge that he leaned on Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son. In fact, he did it again, live on camera, from the White House lawn.
In the ten days since the House of Representatives launched its impeachment inquiry, President Trump has spoken and tweeted thousands of words in public. He has called the investigation a “coup” and the press “deranged.” He has demanded that his chief congressional antagonist, the California representative he demeans as “Liddle’ Adam Schiff,” be brought up on treason charges. He has attacked the “Do Nothing Democrats” for wasting “everyone’s time and energy on BULLSHIT.”
There have been so many rationales coming from the President that it’s been hard to keep them straight. “How do you impeach a President who has created the greatest Economy in the history of our Country, entirely rebuilt our Military into the most powerful it has ever been, Cut Record Taxes & Regulations, fixed the VA & gotten Choice for our Vets (after 45 years), & so much more,” he complained via tweet last week, in a less-than-accurate recap of his Administration’s record. He called the charges against him a “hoax” and, quoting his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, said that he was “framed by the Democrats.” He has blamed the “#Fakewhistleblower” and the “fake news” for the impeachment investigation, which has now replaced the Mueller investigation in Trump’s rhetoric as “the Greatest Witch Hunt in the history of our country.” Trump has also insisted, over and over again, that there was nothing at all wrong with his July 25th phone call with the President of Ukraine. The call—in which he asked for the “favor” of having Ukraine investigate his 2020 political rival, the former Vice-President Joe Biden, even as he was holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid—triggered the impeachment inquiry in the first place. But Trump says it was “perfect.”
To Be Continued
On Thursday morning, Trump appeared to dispense with excuses altogether, no longer even bothering to contest the charge that he leaned on Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son Hunter. How do we know this? Because Trump did it again, live on camera, from the White House lawn. In a demand that is hard to interpret as anything other than a request to a foreign country to interfere in the U.S. election, Trump told reporters that Ukraine needs a “major investigation” into the Bidens. “I would certainly recommend that of Ukraine,” the President added, shouting over the noise of his helicopter, as he prepared to board Marine One en route to Florida. He also volunteered, without being asked, that China “should start an investigation into the Bidens,” too, given that Hunter Biden also had business dealings there while his father was in office. Trump, minutes after threatening an escalation in his trade war with China, suggested that he might even personally raise the matter of the Bidens with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.
DeleteYou could practically hear the collective gasp in Washington. Republicans had spent days denying what Trump had more or less just admitted to. “As President Trump keeps talking, he makes it more and more difficult for his supporters to mount an actual defense of his underlying behavior,” Philip Klein, the executive editor of the Washington Examiner, a conservative magazine, soon wrote. It was as though Richard Nixon in 1972 had gone out on the White House lawn and said, Yes, I authorized the Watergate break-in, and I’d do it again. It was as though Bill Clinton in 1998 had said, Yes, I lied under oath about my affair with Monica Lewinsky, and I’d do it again.
Twitter wags immediately began wondering if the President had just committed the nation’s first act of self-impeachment. On CNN, a chyron read “TRUMP ADMITS TO VERY OFFENSE DEMS LOOKING TO IMPEACH OVER.” His 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, tweeted, “Someone should inform the president that impeachable offenses committed on national television still count.” But that is not, of course, how Trump sees it. He now faces an energized Democratic majority in the House that’s ready to impeach him for abusing his power. But with little prospect that the Republican Senate will dare to convict him and remove him from office, he isn’t even bothering to deny the facts. He’s saying, Yes, I did it—and so what?
To be continued
Several weeks ago, back when Ukraine was an obscure Washington controversy about delayed military aid relegated to the inside pages of the Times, Trump already seemed to be a President on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His behavior, always erratic, had become noticeably more combative, angry, and extreme. He was hurling insults at a record pace, and he cancelled an August trip to Denmark in a fit of pique because its leader had mocked his offer to buy Greenland from her. Looking at his tweets back then, I found that Trump had amped up the volume to a striking degree, sending out hundreds more in August of this year than he had in previous summers—and many more of them were provocative, highly personal attacks on targets ranging from the “fake news” media to his Federal Reserve chairman.
DeleteWell, we hadn’t seen anything yet. Trump produced six hundred and ninety tweets in August; in September, he reached a record for his Presidency of eight hundred and one tweets, according to Factba.se, a company that tracks Trump’s statements. There were whole new bizarre episodes—remember Sharpiegate? Trump’s aborted Camp David invite to the Taliban?—and an angry parting of ways with John Bolton, his third national-security adviser. All of those incidents, of course, now seem as though they took place long ago. The sharpest spike in Trump’s tweets, not surprisingly, came late in the month, when news of the Ukraine whistle-blower’s complaint became public and congressional impeachment, until then an unlikely outcome, became a new political reality. Trump, in fact, was so publicly agitated about this swift and unexpected turn in his fortunes that the week of September 23rd was the single most active tweeting week of his Presidency. Trump sent out two hundred and forty tweets to his followers that week, easily beating his previous record of two hundred and seven, set during the week of July 7th.
Reading back over those tweets now, one can see the real-time realization by the President that, whatever he was doing, it wasn’t working. Confidence about his “perfect” call with Ukraine’s leader descended into self-pity, after he released the White House summary of the call and the controversy escalated instead of disappeared. Soon there were laments of “presidential harassment.” By September 26th, Trump was talking about “THE GREATEST SCAM IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICS” and retweeting validation from his son, his White House counsellor, his communications director, and his congressional allies. Over the weekend and into this week, the message seemed increasingly frenetic and muddled. One minute, Trump seemed to be shoring up his Republican base and attempting to change the subject to his policy feuds with Democrats; the next, he was deep into the details of the scandal, assailing the credibility of the whistle-blower and the investigators. Again.
On Wednesday, in two separate appearances alongside the visibly uncomfortable President of Finland, Sauli Niinistö, Trump ranted in such agitated and confused fashion that the dialogue at times resembled an absurdist play:
DeleteFinnish reporter: Finland is the happiest country in the world.
Trump: Finland is a happy country.
Finnish reporter: What can you learn from Finland?
Trump: Well, you got rid of Pelosi, and you got rid of shifty Schiff. Finland is a happy country. He’s a happy leader, too.
Trump, as that exchange so memorably suggests, just can’t get over it. He can’t even formulate a sentence in public that doesn’t capture his obsessive focus on the political scandal that he created. Where previous embattled Presidents refused to discuss their plights, Trump can talk about nothing else.
The President’s ability to capture public attention, however, is diminishing. He is caught in a cycle of greater and greater rhetorical excess, a cycle that predates the Ukraine scandal but helps explain his otherwise inexplicable behavior in responding to it. According to Factba.se’s week-by-week tracking, Trump began his escalatory spiral this spring, when the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s 2016 election interference was released. Up until that point, the President had already been notable for his aggressive use of Twitter, his combative public statements, and his hostile relationship to the truth. But, in both frequency and volume, he was significantly more muted than he has been since the Mueller report’s release. In the first two years of his Administration, there were only seven weeks when Trump tweeted more than a hundred times; since the Mueller report was made public, in April, he has done so every week except for two.
The Mueller investigation, and Trump’s festering grievance about it, appears to have shaped his public persona more than any other event of his tenure. Trump publicly proclaimed victory with the report’s release, portraying it as “complete and total exoneration.” “I won,” he said, but Trump did not take the win. Instead, he launched his Attorney General, William Barr, on what we know now was an international quest to investigate the origins of the Mueller investigation, pressuring U.S. allies from Britain to Italy to Australia, and also Ukraine, to unearth information that undermined the Mueller probe’s credibility. Who knows what will come out next. The impeachment investigation has just begun, and although it is starting out as tightly focussed on Ukraine, we have no real idea where it might end up. What we do know about Trump, though, is unlikely to change: the restraints on him are gone, and they are not coming back.
Since I have access to this through a newsletter, I figured it was probably behind a paywall. That's why I posted it here.
DeleteAt least parts of it I recognize from bits outside the paywall; but others I do not. Thanks, Cat. For once HRC managed to get off a zinger:
DeleteHillary Clinton, tweeted, “Someone should inform the president that impeachable offenses committed on national television still count.”
It’s well stated and I read it clear through. Thanks, Cat!!
DeleteLet’s take a step back in time to the late 1950’s, when I was in junior high school and the political consensus was that of the New Deal. The school library was divided between a grammar school/junior high section and a high school section, and both sections were open to all students. One of my particular memories of the library is reading parts (the whole thing was far too much to endure) of Mein Kampf. [Q: Do today’s high school and middle school libraries have Mein Kampf on the shelves?] The thing that stuck in my mind, without any guidance from teachers or parents, was The Big Lie technique which Hitler used while attributing it to the Jews. Wikipedia [Click] has a more expansive article about it, but what I took away was that it could be summarized as “if you tell enough lies often enough, people are sure to believe some of them.” [That might in fact be a quotation from the book.] This is exactly what Trump and his allies are doing—and again they are blaming it on others. To label such radicalism “conservative” —which is almost universal in the US press—is frank complicity. If journalists cannot bring themselves to call it what it is, can they not at least put the word ‘conservative’ in quotation marks?
ReplyDeleteOur little public library, where I worked, has it!
DeleteGood. I read within the past year that an annotated version has been printed in Germany; ever since the end of WWII publication had been forbidden.
DeleteCalifornia just legalized public banking [Click] Gee! A couple of elections back, the Green Party nominee for governor promoted this—just as the Green Party Presidential nominee called for a Green New Deal. So the Green Party is fulfilling the traditional role of a third party—coming up with ideas that are co-opted by major parties.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteThe Scandal Has Spiraled Out of Trump’s Control [Click] Has President Brilliant Genius been hoist by his own petard?
Berne released from hospital. Turns out he had a heart attack.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2019/10/04/bernie-sanders-leaves-las-vegas-hospital-after-undergoing-heart-procedure/1NwKAaPiNJvS47nmyOhjBM/story.html
If in fact he had a myocardial infarction (the usual meaning of "heart attack"), it must have been an incredibly mild one; sounds more like an angina attack to me.
DeleteYes, myocardial infarction means heart attack. I agree it was relatively mild, but at 78 it will still take some time to recuperate from. I'm glad he'll be taking it easy until the debate.
DeleteFundraising Totals for last quarter. The only real surprise is that Pete did better than Joe (even with the recent understandable sympathy toward Biden.)
ReplyDeleteBernie $25.3M
Liz $24.6M
Pete $19.1MJoe $15.2M
Kamala $11.6M
Andrew $10M
Cory $6M
Marianne $3M
Steve Bullock $2.3M
Michael Bennet $2.1M
Love kids! Mine just brought in an orange salamander who was just sittin' on a rock. Gorgeous little guy. Very calm.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletePolitico:
DeleteBiden’s looming cash crunch [Click]
Iranian Hackers Attacked Trump’s Campaign [Click] Hey, you never can tell about these things; it might have been some guy in Peoria.
Politico:
ReplyDeleteBiden’s looming cash crunch [Click]
Iranian Hackers Attacked Trump’s Campaign [Click] Hey, you never can tell about these things; it might have been some guy in Peoria.
White House Will Refuse To Cooperate With Impeachment Probe [Click]
ReplyDeleteInformed Comment on what to do when subpoenas are ignored: [Click]
WHEN COURTS ARE STONEWALLED
Or, We're going to give you an offer you can't refuse:
In civil cases, courts have powerful tools for dealing with someone who blocks access to the very information needed to judge the allegations against him.
The most commonly known method is the rule that says that once a person is legally served with a lawsuit against them, they must respond to the complaint. If they don’t, the court can enter a judgment against them based on the allegations in the complaint. But there are other processes as well.
One court tool that could easily be adapted to the impeachment process comes from the federal rules of civil procedure. In a process called “request for admission,” one party to a lawsuit can give their opponents a list of detailed factual allegations with a demand for a response.
If the party does not respond, the court can treat each allegation as if it were true, and proceed accordingly. If the respondent denies one or more particular allegations, there is a follow-up procedure called a request for production, demanding any documents in their possession or control supporting the denial. If the respondent refuses, again the court has the power to order that the alleged fact be taken as true.
GETTING TO THE TRUTH
In an impeachment process against President Donald Trump, the House of Representatives could present the president with a request for admission to the following two simple factual statements, which could be inferred from a whistleblower complaint:
“In July 2019 President Trump personally issued instructions to suspend all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.”
“President Trump issued these instructions with the intent to pressure the government of Ukraine to conduct a formal investigation of Hunter Biden and his father Joe Biden.”
The House could give Trump a brief amount of time to respond, including providing any evidence that might disprove the allegations.
If he refused to respond, or if he denied but refused to produce supporting documentation, the House could assume the set of alleged facts to be true and include them in articles of impeachment. Then the House could vote and, depending on the outcome of that vote, the matter would then proceed to the Senate for trial.
Congress could engage in a long, drawn-out battle trying to use its oversight and subpoena powers to force various executive branch officials to release documents or testify about what they saw, heard and did. Or they could try this simple and quick procedure, which does not require the cooperation of the Department of Justice or court action.