When it comes to President Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.
That’s the most important lesson from the two big events that played out Monday on Capitol Hill — the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Trump’s impeachment and the release of the report on the origins of the FBI’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
One of these involved the 2016 election. The other involves the 2020 election. Both tell versions of the same story: Trump depends on, and welcomes, Russian interference to help him win the presidency. That was bad enough when he did it in 2016, openly calling for Russia to hack into his opponent’s emails — which Russians tried to do that same day. But he was only a candidate then. Now that Trump is president, he is wielding the immense powers of his office to achieve the same end.
That is precisely the type of abuse of power that the founders were most concerned about when they created the impeachment power, and it’s why Democratic leaders in the House are pressing ahead with such urgency on their inquiry. They are trying to ensure that the 2020 election, now less than a year away, is not corrupted by the president of the United States, acting in league with a foreign power. “The integrity of our next election is at stake,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “Nothing could be more urgent.”
On Monday morning, lawyers for the Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees presented the clearest and most comprehensive narrative yet of Trump’s monthslong shakedown of the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for Trump’s personal political benefit. They explained in methodical detail how the president withheld a White House meeting and hundreds of millions of dollars in crucial, congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine, all in an effort to get Zelenskiy to announce two investigations — one into Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, and another into Ukraine’s supposed interference in the 2016 election.
Who would benefit from these announcements? Trump, who believes his re-election prospects are threatened most by Biden, and Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, who has been working for years to make Ukraine the fall guy for his own interference in the 2016 election. Putin has not fooled serious people, like those in the U.S. intelligence community who determined that his government alone was responsible for meddling on Trump’s behalf. But he has fooled Republicans in Congress, who have degraded themselves and their offices by faithfully parroting Putin’s propaganda in the mainstream press.
House Republicans continued to do their best to obfuscate and misdirect, as they have done throughout the impeachment process. From the start of Monday’s hearing, they yelled and objected — an understandable strategy for people whose most honest defense of the president’s actions has been: “Yeah, he did it. So what?” But this was not a performance for the history books; it was for the president himself, who registers only who is defending him and with how much fist-pounding rage.
The upshot is that Republicans, who once claimed to be the party of patriots and national security devotees, are on the record as having no problem with an American president using hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in an effort to induce foreign leaders to interfere in an election on his behalf. (Unless that president were a Democrat, of course.)
Speaking the truth, or accepting it when they hear it, is a skill that has become increasingly foreign to Republicans. Which brings us to the other big news of the day: the release of the 434-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, into the basis for the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign. The evidence for these ties — like the evidence that Trump sought a bribe from the Ukrainian president — is indisputable. So Republicans have instead attacked the investigation itself, claiming that it was the fruit of illegal actions by Trump-hating FBI agents.
Horowitz shot down that theory. The investigation was based on sufficient evidence of an ongoing national security threat, he found, and there was no evidence it was infected by anti-Trump political bias. In fact, Horowitz turned up evidence of agents who supported Trump. One wrote to another that he was “so elated with the election,” later explaining to the inspector general that he had opposed Hillary Clinton and “didn’t want a criminal to be in the White House.”
For his part, Trump claimed that the report was “everything that a lot of people thought it would be, except far worse.”
This sort of brazen misrepresentation of facts is par for Trump’s course, and while it is sadly effective, it shouldn’t distract Americans from the emergency at hand: Whether Trump played footsie with Russians to win in 2016 or strong-armed a vulnerable new leader who is at war with Russia to win in 2020, he did exactly what the nation’s framers feared an unprincipled, power-hungry executive might do to hold onto his office. That’s why they put the impeachment power in the Constitution, and it’s why lawmakers who care about the Republic and its survival must use it.
Jesse Wegman is a columnist for The New York Times.