During a surprisingly tough interview on Fox News this evening about the impeachment trial, Kellyanne Conway was confronted about the Trump administration’s refusal to produce any documents to support its withholding of aid to Ukraine.
Despite the cheerleading from the likes of host Dana Perino, an 11-minute interview with Kellyanne Conway, full of skeptical questions about Trump’s impeachment trial strategy, telegraphed some serious concerns Trump TV is raising for Dear Leader.
During the dinner break, Perino complained that Democrats’ arguments are boring and repetitive (a complaint I heard repeatedly on Fox today). “By the time we get into a few days of this, all of us will have heard the same information another six times and they’re not winning any converts that way," Perino said.
Maybe no converts from the Republican Senate (yet) but the Democrats have certainly been successful in rallying public support for a Senate trial with evidence. A new SurveyUSA poll shows that 71% of Republicans think McConnell should call witnesses.
Perino did not mention the poll. Nor did any of the supposedly straight journalists chatting with Conway during the same dinner break. But their questions for her indicated concern at Trump TV about the court of public opinion.
After listening politely to Conway’s spiel, which included the Orwellian argument that the White House had put forth “a full-throated defense of those facts [of the case] which is a full-throated offense” and the false claim it had argued “for the same rules that applied to the Clinton impeachment,” the three Fox panelists expressed their skepticism.
Martha MacCallum went first. The fact that she cited Fox/Trump boogeyman Adam Schiff to confront Conway strongly suggested MacCallum was acting at the behest of higher ups, or at least with their consent. Only a rogue Fox host would side with Schiff over the Trump administration on a whim.
MACCALLUM: So one of the things that they keep bringing up is the request for documents and the argument that Adam Schiff just made is if, you know, if you had a good motivation for withholding that money from Ukraine for that period of time, during that window, you know, why not, why not produce the documents that show that? If you haven’t done anything – if you know that this wasn’t for political purposes, why not prove it by saying, you know, here’s Mick Mulvaney, here’s the players that were in those discussions when we talked about the concerns we had about corruption in Ukraine? Why not?
In case you didn’t already know that the reason is because there is no good explanation for Trump’s behavior, Conway’s answer ought to make you see the light.
CONWAY: Thankfully, Martha, that’s not the way American jurisprudence works for any of us as a quote, defendant, including, if not especially the president of the United States. And so it’s bad enough, in my view, that the House, that the Democrats want the Senate to fill in all the gaps that they failed to complete when they had their chance at the fact-finding body here. That’s bad enough. But now to ask the executive branch to do that?
They failed to go to the other co-equal branch, they failed to take some of their open questions to the judiciary. They should have done that. Professor Jonathan Turley, my law professor back in the day, he made that point. He said, look, you didn’t even invoke the judicial branch to make, to ask about these questions of executive privilege. So they rushed through and now they want, not just the Senate but the executive branch to fill in the blanks. American jurisprudence doesn’t work that way. We don’t say I think Martha MacCallum is guilty of something and if I could just poke around her private spaces in her house or listen to her friends converse about her, I’m going to find something eventually. It doesn’t work that way. And that’s really where they are today.
No, that is not where they are today. For one thing, asking for evidence about Trump’s official actions with public money is nothing like “poking around” someone’s private spaces or listening in on her friends. For another, the House impeachment hearings already revealed quite a bit of evidence of official misconduct.
Most importantly, though, if you believe for one second that Trump would withhold exculpatory evidence based on jurisprudence principle, then I’ve got just the degree to sell you from Trump University.
Not surprisingly, nobody challenged Conway’s BS. But the panel did go on to ask more tough questions.
You can watch evidence that Trump TV is not quite so confident of Dear Leader as they’d have you believe below, from the January 21, 2020 impeachment trial coverage.
Kellyanne, the Wicked Witch of the West Wing, has taken time off from her obsession of stealing a pair of ruby slippers from a little girl from Kansas to reveal on TrumpTV™ Trump’s legal team’s latest mud at the wall defense. They think it’s the perfect Catch 22.
To wit, the Cult of the Mango Man-Child demands slam-dunk eyewitness testimony from Trump’s co-conspirators despite the mountain of evidence already against him. BUT they – evil geniuses they are – have a slam-dunk legal technicality which will keep those guilty so-and-sos from ever testifying under oath (forgetting Mulvaney already did at a presser): executive privilege.
You know you’re guilty when you keep changing defenses. It started out with a cry of innocence regarding the “perfect call”. It’s morphed along the way to Democrats don’t have a case to they have a case but their process isn’t fair. Now we’re seeing what Republicans meant by a ‘fair process’ for Trump which is a rushed one in which minimal (if any) evidence is presented against him for an easy we have the majority acquittal.
To be fair to the Wicked Witch of the West Wing, this isn’t their final last ditch defense. If this one fails to convince Republicans in Congress – and it’s clear from the poll quoted here it isn’t convincing the general public – they’ll finally use the Alan Dershowitz far reach of a defense that Trump’s obvious corruption doesn’t rise to the crimes and misdemeanors mentioned in the Constitution.
Nuff said, eh?
