Sen. Lindsey Graham speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting in June in Washington. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Getty)
04 October 19
Trump asked foreign government for help in an election. Republicans say that’s fine.
Two years ago, in the early days of the Russia investigation, many
Republican senators said collusion with a foreign government to
influence an American election would be a betrayal of the United States.
They didn’t believe Donald Trump had solicited campaign help from
Russia. But they agreed that if he had, it was illegal and perhaps
impeachable.
Today, some of those senators—notably, the committee
chairmen responsible for protecting national security and the rule of
law—have renounced that principle. They now assert, in the case of
Ukraine, that collusion is OK.
Sen. James Risch of Idaho is the chairman of the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In June 2017, he interrogated
then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a hearing
of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Collusion with the
Russians—or any other government, for that matter, when it comes to our
elections—certainly would be improper and illegal,” Risch stipulated. He asked Sessions, “Would that be a fair statement?” Sessions replied, “Absolutely.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina expressed a similar view. At a press conference
earlier this year, Graham, who is now the chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, explained, “The big thing for me, guys, has always been: Did
Trump work with the Russians? And I told him to his face, almost two
years ago: ‘If you did, that’s it between me and you. And anything that follows, you deserve.’ I will say that about any politician of any party.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Committee on
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, espoused the same rule. The
pivotal question, the Wisconsin senator insisted, was whether “members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.” The United States “should be investigating, ‘Was there collusion?’
” said Johnson. In April, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked the senator
whether he agreed with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that “it’s OK for
Republican campaign members, for Republican candidates, to welcome
support from a foreign adversary, from Russia. Do you feel the same way?
Would you welcome support from Russia in your campaign?”
Johnson
replied decisively, “No.”
Then, on July 25, Trump flagrantly crossed that line. In a phone call,
Trump reminded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that his country,
besieged and partially occupied by Russia, depended on U.S. military
aid. “We do a lot for Ukraine,” said Trump. He complained that Ukraine
wasn’t providing “reciprocal” help, and he asked Zelensky for “a favor”:
to work with Giuliani and U.S. Attorney General William Barr on two
investigations that could help Trump in 2020. Trump explicitly named
former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who was, at that point, the
Democrat most likely to face Trump in the general election. “There’s a
lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution” of
him, said Trump. “A lot of people want to find out about that. So
whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went
around bragging that he stopped the prosecution. So if you can look
into it … ”
The phone call was open-and-shut collusion. Trump had
asked a foreign government to investigate his opponent, and the request
was recorded in a White House transcript.
When the transcript was released on Sept. 25, it put Republican
senators in a bind. They had to choose between country and party,
between abandoning Trump and defending collusion.
They chose to embrace collusion.
“I looked at the transcript,” Risch told an Idaho TV station.
“This conversation that the president had with the head of Ukraine is a
typical conversation.” The senator argued that Trump’s statements in
the call “were absolutely normal, ordinary, regular things.”
When a reporter asked Risch to address the incriminating parts of the
transcript, the senator talked over him and shut the conversation down,
insisting, “I saw nothing in the conversation that was inappropriate. We’re done here.”
Johnson, too, fell in line. After a meeting at the
White House, at which he and other Republican lawmakers received the
transcript and Trump’s talking points, the senator told reporters that
the transcript showed nothing wrong with the call. “We all kind of looked at it and said, ‘There’s nothing here,’ ” said Johnson. The next day, he elaborated:
“I never got any sense at all there was any kind of pressure [on
Zelensky]. I just put the best construction on the call.” When a
reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked Johnson whether he was
“troubled that—even absent a quid pro quo—the president would ask a
foreign leader to investigate a political opponent of his,” Johnson
dismissed the question. “Almost everybody who is saying that is just troubled that Donald Trump is president,” the senator scoffed.
Graham, like his colleagues, says the call is fine. On Sunday, in an interview with Margaret Brennan
of CBS News, he defended it line by line. Graham described Trump’s
pitch to Zelensky this way: “We are very generous to the Ukraine. Other
countries, like Germany, should do more. And, oh, by the way, I have
heard that this prosecutor that got fired, maybe he was a good guy, and
they fired him because he was looking at Joe Biden’s son. Could you look
into that?”
Graham’s paraphrase of the call was, by his own
previous standard, collusion. But he defended Trump’s message to
Zelensky, even when Brennan cited other incriminating parts of the call.
She noted that Trump, in the transcript, “brings up the Biden family
and the need for an investigation. He repeatedly lays that out. And also
the aid package is mentioned.” She asked Graham, “You have no problem
with any of this?” Graham replied, “I have zero problems with this phone
call.” Brennan persisted: “Do you think it was ethical for the
president to bring up Joe Biden?” Graham replied, “Yes, absolutely.”
The president thinks these declarations of innocence
exonerate him. At the White House on Wednesday, he claimed that Graham
privately told him the call was unimpeachable. “Lindsey Graham said, ‘I
never knew you were that nice a person,’ ” Trump told reporters. “He said, ‘You never asked [Zelensky] for anything. You were really, really nice. … That was a perfect conversation.’ ”
It’s true that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee
sees nothing wrong with the conversation. Nor do the chairmen of the
committees on Homeland Security and Foreign Relations. But that doesn’t
mean the conversation was perfect. It means that the Republican Party no
longer believes it’s wrong to enlist the help of foreign governments to
win an election.
It has become the party of collusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment