‘They’re tying themselves in all kinds of pretzel knots to avoid the truth…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As the Senate prepared to enter into its question-and-answer phase of the ongoing impeachment trial against President Donald Trump, all indications were that Republicans would not acquiesce to Democrats’ efforts to spin the narrative and deflect from their own misconduct.
GOP senators planned to home in on several major areas that cast the impeachment discussion in a broader framework of the Left’s partisan political ambitions, as well as past instances of corruption or hypocrisy.
Among the topics that GOP Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rick Scott of Florida planned to raise, according to advance statements from their respective offices:
- the inconsistency displayed by Democratic House managers in declaring their efforts ‘legitimate’ and ‘nonpartisan’ despite saying the opposite during the Bill Clinton impeachment in 1999
- the role that House Democrats played in engineering the whistleblower complaint that launched the partisan impeachment, as well as their suppression of secretive testimony from Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson
- the questions surrounding the Obama administration’s disingenuous efforts to combat Ukrainian corruption while allowing Hunter Biden and others working for the corrupt Burisma company to lobby top U.S. officials
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, meanwhile, sought to get in front of the curve by pressing his own claims that he was rebutting GOP arguments after falsely framing the narrative.
“I want to talk about three lines of push-back that they’re using with tremendous pressure, that President Trump and Leader McConnell are using on Republican Senators, to try and get them to avoid the crucial Friday vote on witnesses and documents,” Schumer claimed in a press conference prior to the start of the session Wednesday.
Republican leaders have sought a quick dismissal of the trial on the basis that the politically-motivated effort does not rise to the standard of impeachment and lacks legitimacy.
While public disinterest—and the boredom of the senators themselves—in the belaboring of stale and hollow claims about “abuse of power” has also been a significant storyline, Schumer falsely insisted Republicans’ chief concern was that the trial would take too long.
“I predicted this. We said—you may remember this, a week and a half ago—they’re going to say ‘let’s wait,’ and then when we wait, they’re going to say ‘it took too long, we shouldn’t have waited,'” Schumer claimed.
“Again, just double-talk to avoid the truth—that’s what they’re doing,” he continued. “They’re tying themselves in all kinds of pretzel knots to avoid the truth.”
Schumer also touched in his second point on the lack of criminal charges, falsely claiming that a legal consensus had “discredited” the “completely phony” arguments put forth by revered Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
“If the people can’t hold the president accountable for abuses only he can commit, then the impeachment power is meaningless,” said Schumer, who prominently said the opposite during the Clinton impeachment.
He also falsely claimed that Republicans opposed a “fair trial” since the outcome—acquittal—was baked into the cake.
“Talk about being political. Talk about being cynical,” Schumer said, feigning outrage and indignation over the impeachment that was decided in the House on a strictly partisan basis.
Schumer pointedly tiptoed around the questions about Hunter Biden and his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, refusing to name them but vaguely alluding to talking points that the Bidens’ testimony was irrelevant to the present case.
“We’re not going to be dilatory in any way. We have only asked for relevant evidence,” Schumer claimed.
“It could be reviewed expeditiously,” he added. “Four witnesses, four sets of documents, the men who were in the room where it happened. No more, no less. That’s reasonable, that’s why the American people are so strongly in favor of witnesses and documents.”
Schumer has maintained in several previous press conferences that any sort of agreement to allow Democrats’ desired witnesses, such as former national security adviser John Bolton, in return for consensus on a Hunter Biden subpoena was “off the table.”
However, Hawley indicated that he planned to introduce motions for the subpoena of both Hunter and Joe Biden, Atkinson, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff and the so-called whistleblower, according to Politico.