October 24.President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense has come to this.His Republican shock troops storm secure hearing rooms, he blasts Republican doubters as “human scum” and his aides slam diplomats who testify about his alleged abuses of power as “radical bureaucrats” at war with the Constitution.
Yet neither Trump nor his White House has come up with a strong counterargument to the potential smoking-gun testimony of the US top diplomat in Ukraine, which is still reverberating through Washington.
A day of inflammatory behavior by the President and his allies on Wednesday actually hinted at the depth of Trump’s troubles on Capitol Hill and in courtrooms beyond instead of its apparent purpose in distracting from it.
In a remarkable moment Wednesday morning, around two dozen Republican lawmakers stormed a secure hearing room that was due to hear a deposition by a senior Pentagon official on the Ukraine scandal.
Top US diplomat in Ukraine Bill Taylor’s deposition on Tuesday added to a pile of damning testimony alleging that Trump used presidential power to pressure a foreign government to try to sway the 2020 election, which Republicans and the White House are struggling to refute with facts and arguments of their own.
And it led to a rare sign of concern in the Republican ranks on which Trump will rely to save him in any Senate impeachment trial — from senior GOP Sen. John Thune.
“The picture coming out of it, based on the reporting that we’ve seen, I would say is not a good one,” said the South Dakotan, though like many of his colleagues he faulted the so-far closed Democratic investigative process.
The President did what he often does when an unappealing political reality threatens: He simply invented a more advantageous one, launching misleading attacks on the conduct of the inquiry and picking new fights.
“The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!” he tweeted.
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