1. Frank Rich: Republicans Are Excusing a Criminal Conspiracy

Had Trump pulled out that (so far) proverbial gun and shot someone on Fifth Avenue, Republicans would trot out the exact same defense they have this week: The shot was fired at 2 a.m. and there were no eyewitnesses. Those nearby who claimed to have heard the shot had actually heard a car backfiring. The closed-circuit video capturing the incident is, as the president says, a hoax concocted by the same Fake News outlets that manufactured the Access Hollywood video. The confession released by the White House was “perfect” evidence of Trump’s innocence. Election records show that the cops who arrived on the scene were registered Democrats and therefore part of a deep-state conspiracy to frame the president for a crime he didn’t commit but that the Democrats did. The victim was not killed and will make a complete recovery, so no crime was committed anyway. And even if Trump had killed the young woman he gunned down, the argument advanced by Trump’s lawyer last month would apply: “The person who serves as president, while in office, enjoys absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind.” Next case!

The crime Trump actually is accused of is far more severe than that imaginary shooting in any event. He and his co-conspirators, including the vice-president and secretary of State, were guilty of aiding Vladimir Putin’s plan to bludgeon Ukraine, an American ally, and, in Fiona Hill’s language, “to weaken our country” as well. That Putin’s foremost goal is to sabotage the electoral process that is the beating heart of our democracy doesn’t seem to matter a whit to Vichy Republicans. If the devastating facts unfurled with great clarity by Adam Schiff’s committee has failed to move them, what would? History — particularly the history of the prominent political figures in England, France, and the United States who appeased and collaborated with Germany during the Nazis rise to power — suggests that they will only be moved to speak up when it’s too late. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/frank-rich-republicans-excuse-criminal-conspiracy.html

2. Charlie Sykes  Devin Nunes' impeachment defense of Trump — and possible Ukraine collusion — redefines partisan hackery

As Trump’s loyal attack ferret on the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes has continually pushed the same debunked conspiracy theories about Ukraine, the Democratic National Committee and CrowdStrike that the Russians have apparently worked so diligently to spread. Indeed, Nunes has become the de facto face of the GOP defense of Trump, in all of its bizarre contempt for facts, its willingness to ignore and defame witnesses and its zeal to defend the president at all costs — including actively colluding with efforts to dig up dirt on his political opponents.

Not content with rhetorical support for Trump and his bizarre conspiracy theories, we now learn that Nunes may also have traveled to Europe to meet with a former (and highly corrupt) Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss the effort to vilify former Vice President Joe Biden. (Speaking with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Nunes dodged questions about the report.)

It is true that Nunes will never be confused with Abraham Lincoln in either intellect or statesmanship. It also is worth remembering that he is the guy suing a Twitter account called “Devin Nunes' Cow,” for $250 million for (among other things) calling him a “treasonous cowpoke,” and tweeting that: “Devin’s boots are full of manure. He’s udder-ly worthless and its pasture time to move him to prison.”

Nunes, like so many of his colleagues, IS a political hack. But he’s more than that. Devin Nunes has redefined hackery in the age of Trump. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/devin-nunes-impeachment-defense-trump-possible-ukraine-collusion-redefines-partisan-ncna1090261

3. Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch: The Double-Barreled Dream World of Trump and His Enablers

The Ukraine scandal now unfolding in congressional impeachment hearings has at its core a Shakespearean twist: President Trump, abetted by his paladins of spin, has trapped himself in an alternate universe. To undermine the well-established fact that Russia corrupted the 2016 vote to help him win, Mr. Trump and his allies have tried to build a fiction that pins those crimes on Ukraine.

In doing so, he has confirmed our darkest fears. The president’s bid to solicit foreign help to impugn a domestic political rival in 2019 should wipe away any doubts about his willingness to do the same with Russian help in 2016.

Mr. Trump and his enablers — Rudolph Giuliani foremost among them — have scrambled all year to do two deeds at once. They want to besmirch Joe Biden, without foundation, for supposedly using his office as vice president to protect his son Hunter, who served until recently on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. And they want to reinvent what happened in 2016 so as to switch the blame for the election meddling from Moscow to Kyiv. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/opinion/sunday/trump-ukraine-russia.html

4.  New York Times editorial board: Sondland Has Implicated the President and His Top Men

If Mr. Trump truly believes he insisted on no conditions for the White House meeting and the aid for Ukraine, he has a clear choice: Let people testify. At this point it’s hard to see what reason they have for continuing to refuse. Nor is there any justification for the administration to refuse to turn over the underlying documents and notes made by those witnesses who have already testified.

Americans shouldn’t be distracted by Republican smoke bombs, but they should also not be satisfied with a truncated inquiry into a question as consequential as whether the president of the United States should be removed from office. There is already abundant evidence that Mr. Trump has abused his power, holding out hundreds of millions of dollars to secure a bribe from a foreign government he wanted to investigate his political rival. In the process, he undermined American national security, and he is continuing to obstruct efforts by a coequal branch of government to get to the bottom of what happened.

These are classic examples of impeachable offenses; some are federal crimes. It is essential for the House to conduct a thorough inquiry, including hearing testimony from critical players who have yet to appear. Right now, the House Intelligence Committee has not scheduled testimony from any witnesses after Thursday. That is a mistake. No matter is more urgent, but it should not be rushed — for the protection of the nation’s security, and for the integrity of the presidency, and for the future of the Republic. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/opinion/sondland-impeachment-hearings.html

5. Greg Sargent: In Fiona Hill’s powerful testimony, a disturbing glimpse into Trump’s mindset

The past few days of impeachment hearings have shined a particularly harsh light on the role in this scandal played by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And now we’re getting a dispiriting glimpse of what Pompeo himself thinks about all of it.

This peek into Pompeo’s mindset captures with unique clarity the contempt for basic governing and the rule of law that pervades much of this administration.

On Wednesday, Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, deeply implicated Pompeo in the whole saga, testifying that Pompeo fully understood the dimensions of the scheme that Sondland was implementing to pressure Ukraine into carrying out President Trump’s political bidding.

Sondland even testified that Pompeo had direct knowledge of his own view that military aid to Ukraine had been frozen to leverage that country into carrying out the “investigations” Trump wanted.

The reason this is particularly damning in Pompeo’s case is that the man whose official role is to implement the nation’s foreign policies through the State Department as “the president’s chief foreign affairs adviser” was himself actively involved in perverting those policies — by placing them at the disposal of the president’s corrupt personal and political ends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/21/amid-powerful-testimony-fiona-hill-disturbing-glimpse-into-pompeos-mindset/

6. Paul Krugman: Trump and His Corrupt Old Party

Formally, the House of Representatives is holding an inquiry into the question of whether Donald J. Trump should be impeached. In reality, we’ve known the answer to that question for a long time. In a different era, when both parties believed in the Constitution, Trump’s abuse of his position for personal gain would have led to his removal from office long ago.

No, what we’re actually witnessing is a test of the depths to which the Republican Party will sink. How much corruption, how much collusion with foreign powers and betrayal of the national interest will that party’s elected representatives stand for?

And the result of that test seems increasingly clear: There is no bottom. The inquiry hasn’t found a smoking gun; it has found what amounts to a smoking battery of artillery. Yet almost no partisan Republicans have turned on Trump and his high-crimes-and-misdemeanors collaborators. Why not?

The answer gets to the heart of what’s wrong with modern American politics: The G.O.P. is now a thoroughly corrupt party. Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and our democracy will remain under dire threat even if and when he’s gone.

The big question is whether America as we know it can long endure when one of its two major parties has effectively rejected the principles on which our nation was built. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/opinion/trump-republicans-corruption.html

7. Jonathan Chait: Trump Just Repeated the Russian Conspiracy Theory Republicans Deny He Believes

Yesterday, Fiona Hill testified that President Trump and his allies have circulated “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” absolving Vladimir Putin of interference in the election by claiming Ukrainians, not Russian hackers, actually stole Democratic emails in 2016. Republicans indignantly denied the charge. Byron York called it a “willfully misleading statement.” Devin angrily replied, and the Trump War Room quickly posted a clip of his response on YouTube, headlined, “Devin Nunes Destroys Fiona Hill’s False Claim About Republicans Denying Russian Meddling.”

This morning, Trump gave an interview to Fox & Friends repeating the very theory Republicans so angrily denied he has ever promoted. As the friendly hosts looked on apprehensively, Trump began unspooling a wild theory he has mentioned before, and invoked on his phone call to Ukrainian president Zelensky. The theory posits that Ukrainians hacked Democratic emails, framed Russia, and kept the server they hacked to hide their crime. It fixates on the role of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that helped the FBI solve the crime.

Trump called CrowdStrike “a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian … why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?” None of this is true. CrowdStrike is not owned by Ukrainians. The FBI did examine the server. Ukrainians don’t have it. And Robert Mueller proved that Russian hackers carried out the email hack. An obviously concerned Steve Doocy, apparently aware that Trump was blowing up the defense Republicans had laid out the day before, asked, “Are you sure they have it?” Trump seemed sure. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/trump-russian-conspiracy-theory-fox-friends-fiona-hill-crowdstrike-ukraine.html

8. Andrew Sullivan: Fiona Hill: The Antidote to Trump

Watching Fiona Hill listen carefully to Castor and Nunes’s questions and arguments, and then just as carefully, methodically dismantle them was a kind of cleansing shower in an impossibly humid summer. Her clear distinction between national security and a “domestic errand” is at the heart of the profound corruption in this presidency, and I have simply never seen it expressed so coherently and plainly.

This is why we needed impeachment hearings. We can see this “deep state” for the patriotic professionals so many of them are. We can pierce through the propaganda and see the Washington that many of us who live there have always seen: countless quiet, principled public servants, usually genuinely seeking the public good. Yes, there are many, many cronies and lobbyists and swamp-dwellers as well. But they are outnumbered.

And to see how these people have had to endure a president this deranged, this indifferent to the truth, this craven toward the enemies of the United States because they can be assets for his domestic political purposes is to experience the appropriate amount of anger toward the damage he has done. It feels like a moment to me. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/andrew-sullivan-fiona-hill-is-the-antidote-to-trump.html

9.  Maggie Haberman: A Senate Trial Could Put Trump’s Use of Aggressive Defense Tactics to Their Biggest Test

Over four decades in public life, President Trump has sought to bend business, real-estate and political rivals to his will. Facts that cut against his position have been declared false. Witnesses who have questioned his motives have been declared dishonest. Critics of his behavior are part of a corrupt, shadowy effort aiming to damage him.

And, as he likes to put it, his own actions are always, to one degree or another, “perfect.”

That approach — which proved effective when Mr. Trump faced off against the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III — is about to face a formidable test as the impeachment process moves forward.

The White House and congressional Republicans allied with Mr. Trump are preparing for a Senate trial in which they will not only declare Mr. Trump’s innocence but also present a version of events that portray him as the victim of a broad plot to undermine his presidency even before it began.

That narrative will include claims that Ukrainians meddled in the 2016 election instead of the Russians — an unfounded allegation refuted by the administration’s own intelligence agencies as recently as this week — and that Biden, the younger son of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., used his father’s connections to make money in Ukraine.

Asked about the hearings, Mr. Trump flatly denied testimony given under penalty of perjury by a succession of career national security officials. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/us/politics/trump-impeachment-defense.html

10. Sonia Saraiya: Impeachment, the Comedy

A colorful cast of characters, incoherent yelling, and a country-wide lesson on the proper way to pronounce the name of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv (It’s “keev.”). Even the president was watching! Okay, to be fair, the president is always watching. And if this is a TV show, surely it’s a soap opera: The neverending crisis state of the Trump administration. Every day brings a new drama to unfold, but there’s never any resolution.

We’ve seen hearings before, after all. James Comey. Robert Mueller. Time and again the reasonable public servants come to sit in front of politicians and the cameras, and they say things like: The president was “generally” untruthful in his responses to special counsel Mueller. The president and his administration told “lies, plain and simple” about Comey’s tenure at the FBI. But nothing changes. No one is surprised, after all, that Trump lies—it was practically the central pillar of his campaign. The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact has a 13-page topic titled “All False Statements Involving Donald Trump.”. The Washington Post counts 13,435 false statements—and counting—since Trump took office. For reasons that stymie pundits and excite social scientists, his supporters don’t care.

This soap opera has a dark sense of humor. The most important revelation of the hearings was a farcical, idiotic bit worthy of Curb Your Enthusiasm by way of Veep: The president’s a loud talker. A loud phone talker. He’s so loud that career diplomat (and modern Adonis) David Holmes heard Trump’s voice, blaring from the tinny speaker of Gordon Sondland’s cell phone in a restaurant in Kyiv, clearly asking if Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky would accede to the investigation. During his testimony, Holmes mimed Sondland holding the phone away from his ear and wincing at the volume of the president’s voice. That little gesture is comedic gold. In a moment it shows you the discomfort of listening to Trump’s voice. Its boorish volume. His words are so craftily vague—”so, he’s going to do the investigation?” being only slightly more specific than did the guy do the thing? The attempt to escape the voice—and the futility inherent.

The joke, obviously, is on us. The hearings were riddled with cynical laughter. As the room buzzed with activity, Post photographer Matt McClain caught Sondland in a moment of stillness, with a sly, smug smile on his face. Both Sondland and acting ambassador William Taylor could not stop themselves from grinning through indignant, blustering questions. Holmes nearly laughed through Jim Jordan’s tirade against him.. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/11/impeachment-hearings-fiona-hill-david-holmes-comedy

11. Washington Post Editorial: Did the Trump administration really expect a jury to criminalize basic human kindness?

THE FIRST time federal prosecutors in Arizona put a humanitarian volunteer on trial for the unpardonable offense of providing food, water and a change of clothes to a pair of Central American migrants, this spring, a deadlocked jury failed to convict. The second time, there was no such ambiguity — a new jury this month took barely two hours to produce an acquittal, meaning the prosecutors were all but laughed out of court.

The defendant, Scott Warren, a 37-year-old teacher, delivered a brief coda on the judicial ordeal he endured, in which he was charged with felonies that could have meant years in prison: “The government failed in its attempt to criminalize basic human kindness.”

Basic human kindness is not exactly the organizing principle of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, to put it mildly, but the conspicuous lack of it — in fact, the impulse to gratuitous cruelty — has repeatedly run afoul of the courts as well as the basic decency of most ordinary Americans. That was the lesson of last year’s systematic family separations, a festival of barbarism masquerading as a policy of deterrence. And that was the lesson of the misguided prosecutions of a good Samaritan in Arizona.

Mr. Warren is active in a group called No More Deaths, which is motivated by humanitarian and religious principles to assist desperate migrants who trek across the desert to reach the United States. Over the past couple of decades, thousands have died in an unforgiving landscape where temperatures can reach well above 100 degrees. The group leaves water and other supplies for migrants and offers medical care and clothing if needed. It is not engaged in human smuggling. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/did-the-trump-administration-really-expect-a-jury-to-criminalize-basic-human-kindness/2019/11/22/2de5b0ae-0cb8-11ea-bd9d-c628fd48b3a0_story.html

12. Washington Post Editorial: Yes, Congress should be talking about the president and bribery

DID PRESIDENT TRUMP commit bribery? When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) leveled this accusation this month, some may have heard hyperbole — or even a public-relations stunt. Messaging concerns persuaded Democrats to abandon the term “quid pro quo” for “bribery.” But it is not phony messaging. The Democrats’ charge is grounded in the Constitution’s language — and it is credible.

The Constitution specifically lists bribery as an impeachable offense, before “high crimes and misdemeanors.” If the president is guilty of bribery, there is no need to wonder what “high crimes and misdemeanors” means.

Of course, the Constitution does not define “bribery,” either. But federal law does: It is the act of giving, offering or promising anything of value — not just money or tangible items — to a public official to influence an official act. Likewise, the law bars public officials from soliciting anything of value in return for influencing the performance of an official act. In Mr. Trump’s case, two weeks of testimony have uncovered evidence that he solicited something of value from the Ukrainian government (besmirching a political opponent) in exchange for official acts (a White House meeting, the delivery of military aid). https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-congress-should-be-talking-about-the-president-and-bribery/2019/11/22/ba0c209c-0cb6-11ea-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html

13. Kathleen Parker: The impeachment witnesses are the silver lining to this embarrassing chapter in our history

After fidgeting through five days of public hearings, a dozen witnesses and countless political pontificators, Americans should be gratified by the quality of the people who testified and who actually do the nation’s work abroad.

If there was a silver lining to an otherwise embarrassing chapter in our history, it was that we were able to meet and hear from those whose names aren’t well known except to their colleagues. To listen and observe was to have one’s faith restored in America’s image despite the withering damage suffered these past few years.

One after another, the men and women who testified, subjecting themselves to the sometimes scurrilous scrutiny of political profilers, maintained their focus and their cool. It was grating to hear the screech of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whose raised voice surely signaled a stretch-and-restroom break for many viewers. While we’re on the subject, can’t the man put on a blazer? Jordan appeared without one, putting in mind a teenager who refuses to play by his parents’ rules. Jordan proved that age and maturity can be mutually exclusive. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-impeachment-witnesses-are-the-silver-lining-to-this-embarrassing-chapter-in-our-history/2019/11/22/280569b6-0d73-11ea-bd9d-c628fd48b3a0_story.html

14. David Ignatius: In firing Richard Spencer, Trump recklessly crosses another line

President Trump’s attempt to manipulate military justice had a sorry outcome Sunday with the firing of Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer. For the past nine months, Spencer had tried to dissuade Trump from dictating special treatment for Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher — but in the end Spencer was sacked for his efforts to protect his service.

Gallagher has become a hero in the Trump echo chamber of Fox News commentary, where he’s seen as a victim of vengeful SEAL commanders. His case may have caught White House attention because his legal team included two Trump friends who are former partners of Giuliani: investigator Bernard Kerik, a former New York police commissioner, and Marc Mukasey, who represents Trump.

While Gallagher is celebrated on Fox, current and former senior officers of the SEALs and other elite units told me this weekend that his case has little support within the community of Special Operations forces. One former SEAL commander noted that maintaining discipline among these elite units is so important that the SEAL peer-review panels have removed more than 150 Trident pins since 2011, or more than one a month.

That’s the process of internal accountability that Spencer was trying to defend, and that Trump sabotaged. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/24/firing-richard-spencer-trump-recklessly-crosses-another-line/

15. Max Boot: For aiding Trump’s abuse of power, the GOP deserves to be voted out of existence

The impeachment hearings have revealed President Trump’s congenital corruption. The Republican Party’s nonchalant reaction, with not a single Republican member of Congress so far endorsing impeachment, reveals its own pervasive corruption.

When the Republican Party sold its soul to Trump in 2016, the price included overlooking his attacks on Mexicans and Muslims, on Gold Star parents, on a disabled reporter, even on John McCain; his abysmal ignorance of basic matters of public policy (he had never heard of the nuclear triad); his open collusion with Russia (“Russia, if you’re listening”); and, of course, his boasts about sexually assaulting women.

A pretty high price, that, but, like a landlord raising the rent because he knows you’re too lazy to move, Trump has dramatically escalated the cost his supporters must pay to stay in his good graces as we approach his fourth year in power. The price came to include overlooking his racist rants (e.g., telling congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from); putting kids in cages; kowtowing to Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other tyrants; abandoning America’s Kurdish allies; obstructing justice and stonewalling Congress; declaring a state of emergency to spend money that Congress has not appropriated for a border wall that we don’t need; lying nonstop; using the presidency to enrich himself; and disparaging the press as “the enemy of the people.”

Now, as the impeachment proceedings have made clear, the price includes turning a blind eye to Trump’s attempt to solicit a bribe from Ukraine in return for releasing military aid — and his disparagement of the dedicated men and women in the Foreign Service, the military and the intelligence community who have revealed his self-dealing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/25/aiding-trumps-abuse-power-gop-deserves-be-voted-out-existence/

16. George F. Will: On Trump, the Republican Party is docile, supine and invertebrate

Trump’s gross and comprehensive incompetence now increasingly impinges upon the core presidential responsibility. This should, but will not, cause congressional Republicans to value their own and their institution’s dignity and exercise its powers more vigorously than they profess fealty to Trump. He has issued a categorical refusal to supply witnesses and documents pertinent to the House investigation of whether he committed an impeachable offense regarding Ukraine. This refusal, which is analogous to an invocation of the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, justifies an inference of guilt. Worse, this refusal attacks our constitutional regime. So, the refusal is itself an impeachable offense.

If Trump gets away with his blanket noncompliance, the Constitution’s impeachment provision, as it concerns presidents, will be effectively repealed, and future presidential corruption will be largely immunized against punishment.

Trump is not just aggressively but lawlessly exercising the interests of his place, counting on Congress, after decades of lassitude regarding its interests, being an ineffective combatant. Trump’s argument, injected into him by subordinates who understand that absurdity is his vocation, is essentially that the Constitution’s impeachment provisions are unconstitutional. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-spiraling-president-adds-self-impeachment-to-his-repertoire/2019/10/10/8c1a739c-eb7c-11e9-9c6d-436a0df4f31d_story.html