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The Potemkin Trial
Political Justice, Sacrificed on the Altar of Political Expediency
The Republicans can’t fight fair, so they fight foul.
Before they were sworn in, Senate Majority Leader “Moscow Mitch” McConnell and his faithful toady, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), stated that they were not going to be impartial in the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump. So much for the Senate leaders who were then going to swear to do “impartial justice” in Trump’s trial. (I wonder if Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the trial, would entertain any motions to recuse them for breaking their oaths….)
Over three days, the Democratic House impeachment managers, captained by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, presented logical, legal, ethical, and impassioned arguments that led inexorably to one and only one conclusion: Donald John Trump committed impeachable offenses and must be removed from office.
In their last day, on Friday, January 24, 2020, the impeachment managers engaged in a “prebuttal” against the arguments that the lawyers defending Trump would make, starting on Saturday. The lawyers made the usual number of lies, but the one argument they made which surprised the Democrats is the notion that cross-examination is absolutely essential for determining…