Lindsey Graham to help Donald Trump search for the real high crimes and misdemeanors
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Donald Trump’s most obsequious assistant to the butler offers a robust substantive defense:
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a fierce defender of the president and a lead sponsor of the Senate resolution, dodged questions on Thursday about the president’s dealings with Ukraine. He called the impeachment investigation “a star-chamber type inquiry” and accused Democrats of pursuing an investigation that is “out of bounds, is inconsistent with due process as we know it.”
Mr. Graham, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and the 40 other Republican senators backing the resolution are taking their cues from a grievance-filled president. Over lunch with a small group of them at the White House on Thursday, Mr. Trump complained bitterly that he was the victim of a never-ending political assault by enemies who are wielding an unfair process.
“He feels like it never stops, that he’s been in office for, what, three years now, and every time he turns around there’s another reason that his family, his friends have to pay legal bills,” Mr. Graham said. “He keeps telling us he did nothing wrong.”
Case closed! In related news, congratulations on Graham for being hired as a consultant to the Human Resources Department of the Houston Astros.
Needless to say, Graham’s procedural arguments are no less ridiculous:
Many of the concerns outlined by Graham are superficial. Holding the hearings behind closed doors in a SCIF—a secure room designed for discussing classified information—makes sense when questioning diplomats about national-security matters. (It also makes it harder for witnesses to coordinate their testimony.) House Republicans aren’t being denied access to the sessions. So long as they sit on the relevant committees, they can and have participated in the inquiry. Nor is any of this novel. Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News legal analyst, noted on Thursday that Democrats were operating under rules established by former Speaker John Boehner in 2015. Under those same rules, House Republicans held multiple closed-door hearings to depose witnesses during the congressional Benghazi investigations.
Those rules were never meant to apply to investigations of Republicans!