Back In The USSR Timeline Part 20 — Impeachment #1

Impeachment proceedings started in September of 2019 over Ukraine. Speaker Pelosi addressed the nation on December 5, 2019 and asked the House Judiciary Committee to start drafting up articles of impeachment. It was a very somber announcement. She resisted it for a very long time because she feared it would tear the country further apart.

Articles of Impeachment were delivered to the Senate on January 15, 2020. There were 2 articles of impeachment by the House of Representatives. The first was the abuse of the power of Trump’s office by attempting to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate his political rival Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The second was for obstructing Congress by refusing to cooperate in its investigation. 28,000 pages of trial records were handed over to the Senate.

Republicans didn’t want the trial to be public (they didn’t want a trial at all.) They blocked the calling of any witnesses. The jurors had already made up their mind how they were going to vote before the trial even started. They were going to stick together and vote with their party even though Trump had been clearly proven guilty and 75% of the country wanted him out.

During the impeachment trial, attorneys kept things simple and laid out how Trump directed a plot to pressure Ukraine to make up bogus claims against Biden, holding his power as president over their heads. He exploited tools and resources of his office as leverage. A lot of people were in on it.

Mitch McConnell blamed the Democrats for making a spectacle out of the presidency. He said they were the ones who were abusing their power. He argued for Trump’s acquittal, “That is the original sin of his presidency…..that he won, and they lost……..Tomorrow the Senate must do what we were created to do…….We must vote to reject the House’s abuse of power……..Vote to acquit the president of these charges.”

Lindsey Graham wouldn’t stay in the room while the Democrats presented their case. He called it a lynching.

Impeachment manager Adam Schiff ended the second day of the impeachment team’s arguments by saying, “If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. The framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves, if right and truth don’t matter. And you know that what he did was not right. That’s what they do in the old country, that Lt. Col. Vindman’s father came from. Or the old country that my great-grandfather came from, or the old countries that your ancestors came from, or maybe you came from.

But here, right is supposed to matter. It’s what’s made us the greatest nation on earth. No constitution can protect us if right doesn’t matter anymore. And you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to. This is why if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed. Because right matters. Because right matters and the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost.”

51 senators abdicated their constitutional duty and voted to acquit him knowing full well that he was guilty of what he was charged with and more. Mitt Romney was the only Senator who voted to convict. Trump broke the law, got caught, covered it up, hid evidence, tampered with the jury, tampered with witnesses, got impeached, bribed senators, and got off. That’s the story of his life. He got away with it once again.

Right after Trump made history for being impeached for extorting a foreign country, Bill Barr sent out a memo letting everybody know that from that moment on, no investigations of Trump can happen without his approval until the election.

After the trial, Trump was feeling all full of himself and admitted that he did send Rudy to Ukraine to find damaging information about Biden and now there’s nothing anybody can do about it. He announced that from then on, he would bar all officials from listening in on his phone calls.

A year later, he’d make history again and be impeached for a second time, this time for inciting a mob to attack the Capitol right before he was to vacate the office that the Russians helped him get. The Republicans would acquit him again.