Neal Katyal: Lev Parnas and Rudy Giuliani have demolished Trump's claims of innocence [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/15/lev-parnas-rudy-giuliani-have-demolished-trumps-claims-innocence/

New documents show why the president has been trying to hide evidence from Congress.

By Neal Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer

Jan. 15, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Americans who have been wondering why President Trump has taken the extraordinary step of trying to block every document from being released to Congress in his impeachment need wonder no longer. The new documents released Tuesday evening by the House Intelligence Committee were devastating to Trump’s continuing — if shifting — defense of his Ukraine extortion scandal, just days before his impeachment trial is likely to begin in the Senate. These new documents demolish at least three key defenses to which Trump and his allies have been clinging: that he was really fighting corruption when he pressured Ukraine on matters related to the Biden family; that Hunter Biden should be called as a witness at the Senate impeachment trial; and that there’s no need for a real, honest-to-goodness trial in the Senate.

The most basic principles of constitutional law require relevant information, including documents and executive branch witnesses, to be turned over to Congress in impeachment. Particularly because sitting presidents cannot be indicted, impeachment is the only immediate remedy we the people have against a lawless president. And for that remedy to have any teeth, relevant information has to be provided. That’s why President James Polk said that, during impeachment, Congress could “penetrate into the most secret recesses of the Executive Departments … command the attendance of any and every agent of the Government, and compel them to produce all papers, public or private, official or unofficial.” No president, not even Nixon, thought he could just say “no” to impeachment. That’s why the House added Article II to Trump’s impeachment: “Obstruction of Congress.” It was a response to an unprecedented attempt by Trump to hide the truth.

The documents released Tuesday now show what Trump has been so afraid of. For starters, they prove that Trump’s already-eyebrow-raising claim to have been fighting corruption in Ukraine was bogus. Notes taken by Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas — now facing federal criminal charges — show what his and Giuliani’s mission was when they got in touch with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “get Zalensky [sic] to Announce that the Biden case will Be Investigated.” Look hard at the real goal here: not to prompt an investigation of Hunter Biden, but to score an announcement of a Biden investigation. Pursuing an announcement, rather than an actual investigation, makes sense only if Trump’s objective was to dirty the reputation of his leading political rival, Joe Biden. Both of us served in high-ranking Justice Department positions; we’ve never heard of an investigation that is kept from the Justice Department, given to a private attorney and then publicly announced — investigations work best when done in secret. If Trump, as he has long claimed, was truly interested in pursuing anticorruption in the bizarrely specific form of a single investigation of a single American citizen, then he would’ve wanted an actual investigation. Instead, Trump was fixated on the public announcement of one — which, if anything, would have harmed the investigation by tipping off its subject. The public announcement would’ve helped only one thing: Trump’s personal political prospects.

And if Trump wasn’t really pursuing corruption in Ukraine, then his demand that Hunter Biden be called as a witness at the upcoming Senate impeachment trial also crumbles. This effort by Trump and his allies to shift attention away from Trump and toward the Bidens makes no sense on its own terms — after all, Trump is the one being accused of impeachable offenses, not Joe or Hunter Biden. But the effort defies logic entirely, since Parnas’s notes make clear that his and Giuliani’s marching orders from Trump were to provoke a Ukrainian announcement of a Biden investigation, rather than an investigation itself. What could Hunter Biden possibly tell the Senate about that? Trump’s push had nothing to do with what Biden did or didn’t do, and everything to do with whether Trump could extort and bully the Ukrainian leadership into casting aspersions on Biden regardless of what he did or didn’t do. That leaves Biden with nothing of relevance to say at a Senate impeachment trial — the final word on Trump’s preposterous effort to refocus scrutiny on the Biden family. That was, of course, the very push that got Trump into this mess in the first place, so to allow him to succeed now through the mechanism of impeachment itself would be irony bordering on tragedy.

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