The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Impeachment divide
DEMOCRATS
Democrats believe testimony will paint a vivid picture of presidential misconduct. Yet many of them are privately uncertain about how the public will view the proceedings, particularly if Trump is impeached along party lines.
In the hearings beginning today, Democrats plan a narrow focus and a narrative retelling of Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Democrats as his administration withheld military aid to an Eastern European ally on Russia’s border.
All three witnesses this week — top Ukraine diplomat William Taylor, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch — expressed concerns about Trump’s efforts in closed-door depositions last month.
The Democrats see all three as highly credible, detail oriented and well positioned to tell that story to the American people.
“This is a very simple, straightforward act,” said California Rep. Jackie Speier, a member of the House intelligence committee, which is conducting the hearings. “The president broke the law. He went on a telephone call with the president of Ukraine and said I have a favor, though, and then proceeded to ask for an investigation of his rival.”
REPUBLICANS
House Republicans plan to aggressively defend Trump during the impeachment hearings by arguing that his efforts to push a foreign leader to announce investigations into his political rivals were legitimate attempts to root out corruption.
Their argument: The president did it, but he had completely innocent reasons.
According to a memo Tuesday by their top impeachment investigators, Republicans plan to say that the president had a “deep-seated, genuine and reasonable skepticism” about Ukraine given its history of corruption, and that his decision to withhold security aid was “entirely reasonable.”
Details of the Republican strategy were distributed to the party’s members in the House late Monday night by Republican staffers.
The document makes it clear that Trump’s Republican defenders will raise doubts about the witnesses who have testified in the Ukraine affair.
“Democrats want to impeach President Trump because unelected and anonymous bureaucrats disagreed with the president’s decisions and were discomforted by his telephone call with President Zelenskiy,” the memo’s author’s wrote. “The president works for the American people. And President Trump is doing what Americans elected him to do.”