President Donald Trump clearly signaled that he intends to corrupt his impeachment trial by smearing election challenger Joe Biden -- but he's going to need help to get away with his latest scheme.
The president started off New Year's Eve by complaining about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pause on delivering impeachment articles to the Senate, and signaled that he wants Republicans to turn the trial into a sham investigation of Biden -- one of his strongest Democratic challengers, reported the Washington Post.
"This is utter nonsense," wrote the Post's Greg Sargent. "House Democrats have not sent the impeachment articles to the Senate because they first want to see what sort of procedure Trump and his GOP enablers will accept."
"The ones who actually fear witnesses are Senate GOP leaders, who are refusing Democratic demands for testimony from those with the most direct knowledge of Trump’s freezing of military aid to extort Ukraine into announcing an investigation of the Bidens," Sargent added. "They are doing this to protect Trump — and themselves — because he’s guilty as charged, and they know it."
Trump's claims against Biden and his son have been widely debunked, but the president still pressured Ukraine to announce an investigation of them in exchange for the release of congressionally approved military aid -- and the House voted to impeach him over the scheme.
"Trump has been weaponizing his fake concern about Ukrainian corruption to pressure Ukraine into helping him magically transform Biden’s actual efforts against Ukrainian corruption into the only 'real' corruption in this whole saga," Sargent wrote. "It’s pure disinformation warfare."
Now he seeks the GOP-led Senate's help in spread that disinformation, which reportedly came from Russian president Vladimir Putin himself, but it's not clear whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will go along with the gambit.
"If so, here’s a possible game plan," Sargent wrote. "Trump is calling for testimony from the Bidens to lay the groundwork for an endgame in which no witnesses testify. Trump’s propaganda network will then push the narrative that not hearing from witnesses Democrats want is fair and balanced retribution, given that we’re not hearing from the Bidens, either."
That will require the media to refrain from presenting the trumped-up evidence against Biden with the same weight as the credible testimony from Trump's impeachment.
"The endgame I’m envisioning banks on media coverage that fails to capture the utter absurdity of Trump’s trial demands," Sargent wrote. "Not hearing from witnesses with direct knowledge of Trump’s extortion scheme will be placed on a plane of equivalence with not hearing from the Bidens. It’s all just Washington tit-for-tat!"