Eli Stokols and Noah Bierman -
As US President Donald Trump fights possible impeachment, he has adopted a sweeping argument to defend his demands that Ukrainian authorities investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden — what he calls his “absolute right” to ask foreign leaders to help root out corruption.
“I don’t care about Biden’s campaign. I care about corruption,” Trump said last Friday, one of the 27 times he uttered the word “corruption” in a 23-minute news conference.
Asked whether he had requested that any governments investigate corruption not involving his political opponents, Trump was stumped. “We’d have to look,” he said.
He argued that nothing was wrong with his soliciting a foreign power to investigate a former US vice president — who has not been accused by others of any wrongdoing — or with withholding congressionally approved US military aid or a promised visit to the White House to get his way.
Trump made this shift under duress, after newly released texts from concerned US diplomats in Ukraine directly undercut his denials that he was seeking a quid pro quo — US aid for Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed insurgents in exchange for dirt on a potential Democratic presidential nominee next year.
According to a White House memorandum of a July 25 phone call, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for what he called “a favour” — an investigation into Biden and into Ukraine’s supposed role in helping Democrats in the 2016 election. No evidence indicates Biden, who made multiple visits to the embattled former Soviet republic as vice president, was engaged in any wrongdoing. Nor has any evidence emerged to support right-wing conspiracy theories that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election.
After angrily refusing at a news conference last Wednesday to say what he wanted from Ukraine, Trump decided to go on offence. He said last Thursday that he had demanded — and still seeks — an investigation of Biden. He went further, publicly urging China to find something on Biden’s family, too. To Democrats and numerous nonpartisan observers, it sounded like the president was waving a smoking gun — admitting in public to what they had argued was an impeachable offence, and then taunting them by asking one of America’s adversaries to also get involved in a US election.
Some analysts, however, saw Trump’s unexpected defence as clever, one intended to portray a potentially illegal act as cloaked in civic virtue.
“His China statement was, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with rooting out corruption wherever it is?’” said Elaine Kamarck, a fellow in governance studies at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington.
Given America’s deep partisan divisions, Trump and his allies are betting that enough voters will take the president’s side in a titanic political battle to help him win reelection next year — even if he is impeached by House Democrats.
The coming weeks will test whether Trump’s unconventional behaviour and demagogic appeals have created a strong enough shield for him — and Republican lawmakers — to avoid normal political consequences for his efforts to get foreign governments to take down his political enemies.
With polls showing support for the impeachment probe rising to 51 per cent, anew high, Trump has taken to levelling false or unsubstantiated claims at Democrats in an effort to stoke the emotions of partisans on both sides.
He said Biden is “crooked as hell” although investigators in Ukraine say they have no evidence of wrongdoing. He claimed the anonymous whistleblower who first disclosed Trump’s alleged abuses was a “partisan hack,” and repeatedly insulted Rep Adam B Schiff, the California Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee.
Trump has also revamped an argument that Richard Nixon famously asserted in a TV interview three years after he resigned as president in 1974 to avoid certain impeachment and conviction: If the president does it, it is not illegal. — dpa
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