The Divider, page 54
After eighteen years in the Senate, Alexander was one of Mitch McConnell’s closest allies, an exemplar of the old Republican establishment supplanted by Trump. Genteel, bespectacled, and professorial, the seventy-nine-year-old Alexander looked like the university president he once was. He had served as governor and secretary of education and ran for president himself twice, although his campaigns were better remembered for his trademark red plaid flannel shirts and much lampooned “Lamar!” logo than for any votes he collected.
Institutionalists like Alexander privately considered the president distasteful at best, repugnant at worst. “By noon every day, he violates almost every rule I learned about how a president is supposed to act,” Alexander observed later, “or every rule my mother taught me about how I was supposed to act.” Even so, Alexander had long ago concluded that “my job was not to catalogue all the ways” that Trump transgressed decorum and decency, but instead to work with him “as best I can.”
But if Trump was now about to be put on trial, so was Alexander—and his fellow Senate Republicans. For three years, they had largely run away from reporters in the halls of the Capitol asking them to weigh in on the latest Trump outrage, neither willing to defend the indefensible nor eager to risk angering him. Now they had no choice but to cast judgment. There was no way to avoid an up-or-down verdict on Trump’s presidency. They would either stand by him or not. Trump was at last forcing them to choose.
Alexander was, in that sense, a fitting man in the middle. He and McConnell had been friends for fifty years and they commiserated about the toxic Trumpian turn in their party at their regular weeknight dinners. But where McConnell had come to an uneasy truce with the president, Alexander had kept his distance. He had declined to endorse Trump in 2016 and since then had gone against the president at key junctures on trade, health care, and his border wall. He still tried to reach across the ever-widening aisle. The day after the president handed him the six-page screed, Alexander met Senator Dianne Feinstein, the venerable California Democrat, for a convivial dinner at the Prime Rib restaurant in downtown Washington, where they sat at his favorite corner table and talked about everything but impeachment. On the way out, he stopped at the piano to playfully serenade her with “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” prompting the rest of the patrons to burst out in applause. In the car on the way home, he heard the news that the House had just impeached Trump.
At the White House, Trump’s advisers were most concerned about Alexander and a handful of other moderates, including Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and the president’s old nemesis, Mitt Romney. Even if he was assured of acquittal, Trump was determined not to lose a single Republican. But he wavered on how to proceed. One moment, he demanded that McConnell simply hold a vote to dismiss the case outright without bothering with a trial, an idea that Alexander and the other moderates rejected. Then Trump changed his mind and insisted on a full-scale proceeding complete with witnesses—and suggested that he would make a dramatic appearance in the Senate himself. It was all fanciful and McConnell told him so. Let me handle it, the majority leader implored. He knew how to bring along his members. “Better to be unified than divided,” McConnell told Trump.[2]
More than two years after the uneasy rapprochement that John Kelly brokered between the president and the Senate Republican leader, McConnell had made the most of the Trump administration without ever completely joining the team. He had gotten two Supreme Court justices and scores of other federal judges out of the devil’s bargain, but privately loathed Trump and bristled at how his party caucus had increasingly been driven by the rabid pro-Trump faction represented by senators such as Rand Paul, the iconoclastic libertarian from his own Kentucky, and Josh Hawley, the Yale-educated lawyer from Missouri who had transformed himself into a born-again populist. The trial would force the rest of them to swallow any reservations, not to mention their own vociferous support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia, to stand with a president who sided with Moscow against Kyiv.
Although the Senate was to serve as Trump’s jury, it would be a decidedly partisan proceeding, rather than a legal one. Few even bothered to pretend they were open to making a decision based on the facts of the case. “I’m not an impartial juror,” McConnell told reporters on the same day Alexander met with Trump in the Oval Office. “This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it. Impeachment is a political decision.”[3] Indeed, just a few days earlier, McConnell had promised “total coordination” with the White House on the trial.[4] Lindsey Graham around the same time said he did not need a trial to decide Trump’s innocence. “I have made up my mind,” he said. “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.”[5] Never mind the oath that he and McConnell were about to take to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.”
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Trump and Graham, the defendant and the juror, were on the golf course in Florida enjoying the holidays a few days later when the president made a startling disclosure. He was about to order an airstrike to kill Major General Qassim Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran.
Even Graham, a staunch hawk, found the idea unnerving. Iran was an enemy and Suleimani a threat. But he was also one of the most powerful figures in the Middle East, who oversaw radical groups across the region. Tehran or one of those terrorist factions might feel compelled to respond forcefully, Graham warned.
“What do you do if they hit you back?” Graham asked. “Then you’re in total war. Are you for this?”
Trump insisted he was.
This would not be the first time a beleaguered president ordered military action in the throes of an impeachment battle. Bill Clinton had approved a missile strike aimed at Osama bin Laden in 1998 just two days after admitting to the nation that he had not told the truth about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and authorized a four-day air barrage against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq just as the House was debating whether he had committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Clinton insisted those operations were unrelated to his political battles and had his Republican defense secretary back him up. But Trump did not bother to hide his political motivation and confided in associates that he saw the strike against Suleimani as a way to bolster Republican support in the upcoming Senate trial, even if it brought him closer to full-scale war with another nation than at any point in his presidency.
The attack on Suleimani followed days of rising tension in the region. Two days after Christmas, rockets smashed into a military base near Kirkuk in Iraq, killing an American civilian contractor. While Kataib Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group held responsible for the attack, had previously fired rockets at bases with Americans, this was the first American fatality. Trump was told by intelligence officials that Tehran had probably misinterpreted his restraint in June when he called off the retaliatory strike for the drone downing with just minutes to go as a sign of weakness. So now he decided he needed to act, ordering airstrikes at five targets in Iraq and Syria that killed at least twenty-five members of Kataib Hezbollah.
That in turn provoked pro-Iranian protesters to break into the American embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve and set fires, triggering haunting memories of the embassy hostage crisis in Tehran that crippled Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Trump sent more Marines, who broke up the protests without bloodshed. But then advisers handed the president a list of further options, including strikes against an Iranian energy facility or a command-and-control ship used by the Revolutionary Guards to direct harassment of foreign oil tankers. The memo also listed a more provocative alternative—targeting specific Iranian officials for death. On the list was Suleimani, whose Quds Force had been responsible for hundreds of attacks against American troops in Iraq during the height of the war there years before.
Shortly after midnight on January 3, Suleimani’s plane landed in Baghdad, where he and his entourage were met on the tarmac by Iraqi officials. Two cars carrying the group then headed out into the night—shadowed by American MQ-9 Reaper drones. Minutes later, several missiles ripped into the vehicles, engulfing them in flames and leaving ten charred bodies inside.
Trump was pumped up by the result. He had taken out one of the world’s most dangerous men, a “monster,” as he put it.[6] Republican lawmakers cheered him. But everyone was nervous about what would come next. “It may be ugly, so buckle up,” Gina Haspel, the CIA director, warned Trump.[7]
While he had tipped off Lindsey Graham on the golf course, Trump had given no advance notice to congressional leaders or European allies. Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman was so worried about escalation that he sent his brother to the United States to meet with Trump. It did not help that Trump and his team gave shifting explanations for why he authorized the operation, with the president at one point claiming that Suleimani was on the verge of launching terrorist attacks on four American embassies, an assertion that neither military officials nor intelligence agencies backed up in briefings with congressional leaders.
As the president watched television over the weekend, he grew angry that critics were accusing him of recklessness. Mingling with guests at Mar-a-Lago and his nearby golf club, he sought validation that he had done the right thing, recounting for them details of the Baghdad embassy protests. But even some of his most loyal supporters were not convinced. Representative Matt Gaetz, normally the most vocal of Trump backers, urged the president not to get drawn into a wider conflict in the Middle East. Annoyed, Trump had him call Tucker Carlson, another skeptic of action against Iran, and put him on speakerphone.
“Sixteen Republican senators were calling me, demanding I do this,” Trump told Carlson, as reported by the journalist Michael Bender. “They want me to do this, and they’re running impeachment. And you know it’s really not the time to ignore Republican senators. I had to listen to them.”
Carlson was having none of it. “Maybe that’s why they impeached you in the first place,” he said, “to neuter your instincts.”[8]
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While Trump was contending with missiles from Iran, his estranged former national security adviser fired a different kind of rocket into his impeachment defense. John Bolton, who had refused to testify before the House without a court order, now declared that he would appear before the Senate if subpoenaed. His statement caught everyone off guard. Bolton had called Mitch McConnell to give him a heads-up but never heard back.
Bolton’s shift came just a couple weeks after he turned in the manuscript for his $2 million memoir to the White House for a required prepublication review to make sure it did not reveal classified information. In the book was an indication of what he would testify to if called—that Trump had in fact directly tied the $391 million in Ukraine security aid to his demands for investigations of Democrats, contrary to his later denials. Bolton would have been a bombshell witness, the president’s own national security adviser accusing him under oath of the wrongdoing at the heart of the Democrats’ case. And Bolton was no Democrat; his account would have been impossible to dismiss as that of a liberal partisan.
Bolton’s newfound willingness to talk complicated McConnell’s desire to get through the trial with no testimony and no surprises. The day after Bolton’s statement, McConnell met with fellow Senate Republicans and emphasized his opposition to calling witnesses. Two days after that, McConnell met with Trump in the Oval Office, again trying to calm the president’s instincts for an all-out firefight with the Democrats. Instead, McConnell produced a set of rules for the trial modeled largely on the ones used at Clinton’s trial, delaying any decision on calling witnesses until after both sides made their opening arguments.
After intensive lobbying by Democrats eager for a high-profile assignment, Nancy Pelosi assembled a team of seven House Democrats to prosecute the case in the Senate led by Adam Schiff, once more putting him ahead of Jerry Nadler, to the lasting resentment of the New Yorker. Joining them as managers, as the House prosecutors were called, was a team with carefully calibrated geographic, demographic, age, and experience diversity. Zoe Lofgren of California had been involved in both previous impeachment efforts in modern times, first as a congressional aide during Watergate and then as a member of the House Judiciary Committee during Clinton’s impeachment. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who held the fifth-ranking position in the House Democratic leadership, was a rising star widely seen as a potential successor to Pelosi. Val Demings of Florida was a former Orlando police chief whose questioning of witnesses had impressed party elders. Pelosi rounded out the team with two newly elected members, Sylvia Garcia of Texas, a former trial judge from Houston, and Jason Crow of Colorado, a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To make their case, Schiff hoped to present Trump’s Ukraine scandal as a gripping political narrative of corruption and graft. “I want this to be like a Ken Burns documentary or an HBO miniseries,” Schiff told his staff, and he asked them to pull together lots of video, and not just from the witnesses who testified during House proceedings, but of Trump himself. Schiff also told them to feature Mick Mulvaney’s “quid pro quo” acknowledgment as many times as possible. “I want them to see that so often they can recite his words in their sleep,” he instructed.[9] And he wanted images from the front lines of Ukraine’s war with Russia too, hoping to call attention to the real-world consequences of Trump’s actions.
Schiff knew that the House managers who prosecuted Clinton had been criticized for droning on too long and repeating their arguments too much, but he concluded that there was a reason to do more or less the same this time. If there was no meaningful chance of securing the two-thirds vote for conviction, he reasoned, then the real goal was to lay out the case for the public, which remained split roughly down the middle on the matter. “We were going to build in redundancy to reach those people even if it annoyed those senators,” he decided, “because the public was more important.”
To defend him before the Senate, Trump opted for Pat Cipollone, his White House counsel. Unlike Don McGahn, Cipollone was far more in tune with Trump and did not trash-talk him behind his back. A straitlaced fifty-three-year-old son of Italian immigrants and a devout Catholic with ten children of his own, Cipollone had willingly taken on a job most top Washington lawyers considered poisonous, after being recommended to Trump by his old friend, the Fox host Laura Ingraham. Like Bill Barr, for whom he once worked as a speechwriter, Cipollone was a by-the-book lawyer with an expansive view of executive power and eager to push back hard on what he saw as congressional intrusions on Trump’s authority.
Cipollone was joined by two deputy counsels, Patrick Philbin and Mike Purpura. Several outside lawyers were brought in as well, including Jay Sekulow and Pam Bondi, a former state attorney general in Florida. Rudy Giuliani wanted to be part of the team, but that was so ludicrous given that he was at the heart of the whole Ukraine scheme that even Trump understood it was a bad idea.
In the buffet line at Mar-a-Lago on Christmas Eve, Trump had bumped into Alan Dershowitz, the eighty-one-year-old retired Harvard Law School professor who gained fame defending celebrity clients such as O. J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, Patty Hearst, Mike Tyson, and Jeffrey Epstein. Although he already had a long roster of lawyers, Trump asked Dershowitz to represent him in the Senate trial too. “Everybody wants to do this thing, but I want you,” he said.[10] Dershowitz, a nominal Democrat who had publicly embraced Trump in the past three years, tried to beg off, explaining that his wife, Carolyn Cohen, would not like it. But that only prompted Trump to hunt down Cohen across the room and convince her.
Trump also enlisted two other high-profile lawyers who knew something about investigating presidents: Ken Starr, the independent counsel whose inquiry led to Clinton’s impeachment, and Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr and wrapped up the investigation by negotiating a deal in which Clinton acknowledged not telling the truth under oath, paid a $25,000 fine, and surrendered his law license for five years. The choices were curious if only because they invited unhelpful comparisons to the Clinton case and forced Trump’s team to reconcile whatever Starr and Ray said now with the positions they had taken two decades earlier. But Trump was always attracted to television lawyers and collectively Starr, Ray, Dershowitz, and Bondi had made at least 365 weekday appearances on Fox News largely defending the president over the previous year, or basically one a day, according to a count by the liberal tracking group Media Matters.[11]
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Lamar Alexander woke up at five in the morning on Tuesday, January 21, 2020, at his home in Nashville, fixed a little breakfast, and headed to the airport to catch the 7:40 a.m. flight to Washington so that he could be in place as the impeachment trial of Donald Trump opened in earnest at 1 p.m. It was a cold, dry winter’s day, and Alexander wore a sweater with his coat and tie. “God is watching you,” read one protester’s sign as he entered the Capitol. Alexander had not paid much attention to the developing Ukraine scandal. The senator was distracted by health issues, falling ill enough after Christmas that he landed in the intensive care unit for six days. Then his wife wound up in the emergency room with pneumonia. But he knew the “perfect call” was in no way perfect. “You can’t call up a foreign leader and ask him to investigate your political opponent,” he said. “You can’t do that, or you shouldn’t do that.”
Alexander also had more than a passing interest in the history of impeachment. He hailed from Tennessee like Andrew Johnson, the first impeached president, and he held the Senate seat once occupied by Howard Baker, the Republican who made a name for himself during the Watergate investigation asking what did the president know and when did he know it. Alexander even considered himself a bit of an impeachment history buff. At an auction in Knoxville a few years earlier, he had bought an antique book on Johnson signed by every senator who voted at his trial as well as a book published by Senator Edmund Ross twenty-eight years after casting the decisive vote for Johnson’s acquittal. Now charged with sitting in judgment himself, he picked up the Ross book again, and a stack of other volumes on impeachment that he brought with him to the trial.
