From Far & Near (2nd Online Update/January 23)   By Shashi Malla The Democrats’ Case Detail by detail, the House Democrats [‘managers’] prosecuting the impeachment case in the Senate against President Donald Trump laid out their arguments on Wednesday (CNN). They expounded:
  • How Trump pressured [tantamount to blackmail] Ukrainian President VolodymyrZelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential Democratic adversary in the 2020 elections.
  • How Trump held up about US Dollar 400 million in US military and security aid as a bargaining chip, willfully breaking the law and defying Congress in pursuit of its constitutional duty.
  • How insiders like Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sonderland [and many others] knew there was a quid pro quo [something for something, i.e. one favour or advantage given in  laid out
  • How the Pentagon was aghast and raised the alarm about the withheld aid already allocated by Congress.
  • How recently released emails –hidden from Congress by the Trump administration with corrupt intent – detail the effort to hold the aid against the better judgment of most of the government.
  • How all of this also helped Russia, which tried to help get Trump elected in 2016 [and which mat try to do so again in 2020].
The lead House manager, Adam Schiff, a gifted former federal prosecutor, delivered a highly persuasive opening statement, outlining the case against Trump. He quoted the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who noted the young American democracy’s need to control a man “bold in his temper .  .  . despotic in his ordinary demeanor” and whose “object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind’.” Expert Opinion Raul Reyes, an attorney, writing for CNN, stressed that Democratic Representative Adam Schiff laid out a strong case for why senators should vote to impeach and remove Trump from the presidency. He opined that on the strategic level, “Schiff’s presentation was masterful: it was eloquent, thoughtful and – most importantly – restrained.” Considering the sheer amount of ground that Schiff covered, “no senator can honestly claim to not know or not have heard about most aspects of the impeachment enquiry.” Scott Jennings, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, made the smart point that Republicans might be uncomfortable with what Trump did, but they’re not likely to throw him out of office for it: “ [some] Republicans …have various degrees of discomfort with what happened…some don’t think it was a great deal, some are probably moderately alarmed and some think it was a galactically bad judgement.” But Republicans are not ready to throw a President out of office for the first time in American history over this. The case for the persecution continues. The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com