Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Apparently THIS is Their "Defense"



Dozens of House Republicans on Wednesday stormed the secure facility inside the Capitol where impeachment investigators have been deposing witnesses, forcing a delay to the proceedings on the heels of damning new revelations that could further imperil President Donald Trump.

The two sides were still trying to work through the standoff by mid-morning, with Republicans who do not sit on the committees leading the inquiry refusing to leave the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in the basement of the Capitol, and Democrats insisting those lawmakers had no right to be there.

The view from inside the room:

“They basically ran over a member of the staff” to get in the room, said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). “They just came into the room and started shouting about the president. Literally some of them were just screaming … saying that the process is wrong.”

One Republican who has been able to attend the proceedings, Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah, acknowledged that the closed-door nature of the impeachment proceedings are consistent with the House’s procedures.

“This may be within House rules. That’s not the question. The question is, is it a good idea to impeach the president in secret hearings?” Stewart said. “This may very well be within Chairman Schiff’s and Nancy Pelosi’s authority to do this. I think it’s a bad idea.”

Please note this is an arguable point, but still "well within Chairman Schiff's and Nancy Pelosi's authority."  Storming into a closed Congressional hearing is not acting with any authority whatsoever.

And hearings are closed to preserve the integrity of the proceedings:

“It’s three floors below the Capitol, no cameras inside, no phones allowed inside,” [Rep. Eric] Swalwell said. “Any classified notes stay inside, classified conversations stay inside. It’s to protect the information, and in this case there was no special counsel, there was no special prosecutor.”

“The attorney general refused to even take up this case, so we have to do this in a closed environment because we know that if witnesses know what other witnesses will say, they will tailor their testimony and cook up alibis, and we have reason to believe that may be going on,” he added. “We’re trying to protect that information to the degree that we can.”

“So what we have seen — and I’m not going to go into it — but we have seen evidence that witnesses have talked to other witnesses, and the reason we’re having these hearings in this fashion is so that when witnesses testify, the information is held closely,” Swalwell said.

“If the information is getting out in the public, then they’re able to work together and try and get their stories, you know, together and aligned,” he added, “especially if they’re not necessarily innocent actors in this scheme.”

This is, after all, equivalent to a grand jury proceeding.  Lawyers for the potential defendants who storm a grand jury room quickly find themselves arrested.  Maybe we need similar laws for Representatives.  And then there's the matter of who's really interested:

“There were a lot when we started,” he said. “I counted about 75 people in this very small room, you know, about two-thirds of them were members. Now, at the end of the day, after all of the complaints about the process, after all of the attacks on the chairman, it was about, you know, a 10-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans.”

Besides, the process itself is perfectly fair:

In reality, more than 45 House Republicans — nearly a quarter of the House GOP conference — already have full access to the depositions through their membership on one of the three panels leading the impeachment inquiry. During the depositions, Republican lawyers are given the same amount of time to question witnesses as Democratic counsels.
And eventually, whatever evidence leads the House to put forward Articles of Impeachment will at that point become public, and certainly have to be presented in a trial before the Senate.  Really, if the evidence is being contained, it's the best possible situation for all concerned.  Storming the room is just the desperate act of people with no idea how to govern, investigate, or run anything more complex than a two-car funeral procession.


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