Editor’s Note: Joe Lockhart was White House press secretary from 1998-2000 in President Bill Clinton’s administration. He co-hosts the podcast “Words Matter.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
If the Senate does not approve hearing from witnesses, and that looks increasingly likely, the impeachment trial will likely come to an abrupt end on Friday.
So, what has the shortened trial accomplished?
For the House Managers and the Democrats, the trial gave them a high-profile platform to demonstrate the President put his own political interests ahead of the national interest. After exhaustive, and exhausting, presentations, it is clear that Donald Trump was not actually motivated by broad issues of political corruption and financial burden sharing among European allies.
It is also clear after witness testimony and evidence presented in the House, that the President wanted to force Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens and promote the bogus theory that Ukraine was behind the election interference in 2016. That theory, by the way, originated in Moscow – according to the US intelligence community.
The President’s lawyers made the case that the process was not fair. Through an elaborate series of presentations, they argued the subpoenas issued by the House were not valid. They emphasized the House had rushed and not done its own work (like not subpoenaing former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who now appears to be a critical witness).
So, what about the President? Well, his legacy is forever stained – being only the third President in our history to be impeached. And as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says, once you are impeached, you are impeached forever. But he seems more and more likely to get a quick acquittal, maybe even with some Democrats voting in favor of the President. And you can be assured, Trump will proclaim full exoneration.
Trump also got exactly what he wanted in the first place. He got to smear the reputation of the Democratic candidate he thinks is his strongest opponent – former Vice President Joe Biden. Remember, the impeachment inquiry was launched after a whistleblower filed a complaint that Trump had conditioned military aid in exchange for an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s alleged corruption (for which there has been no evidence of wrongdoing).
And we now know the Ukrainian government was willing to launch the investigation in order to get the aid released. The whistleblower mitigated that by reporting the malfeasance just prior to a formal announcement.
But not to be deterred, the President and his Republican colleagues found an alternative venue to smear Biden – the floor of the United States Senate. His legal team – in particular, Pam Bondi – aired all the charges against Biden without providing ample evidence to support any of them. She, and the rest of White House counsel, misled the Senate and the American people on the basic facts of the case.
Let me take a minute to clear the record. It’s pretty simple. Viktor Shokin was a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who was not doing one of his key jobs – investigating Burisma. The international community, including the US, demanded he be fired and replaced by a prosecutor who would aggressively investigate corrupt companies, not protect them.
Biden was sent to Ukraine to deliver that message on behalf of the President of the United States. He got results – Shokin was fired. In doing so, Biden pursued America’s national interest, despite it not necessarily being in the interests of his son, who was on the board of Burisma at the time.
But that’s not what we heard from the President’s lawyers and from his supporters in Congress. They deliberately confused the facts to create the impression that Biden was working to promote corruption, rather than actively fighting against it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Facts aside, the President accomplished his initial goal. Of course, he got impeached along the way, but he succeeded in getting US Senators and his legal team to smear a dedicated and respected public servant of 40 years. And, in that respect, Trump won.