"What Did the President Know?"

In 3,000 pages of impeachment testimony Trump often seems like a supporting character in someone else’s drama-- unseen, mercurial impossible to please. The key impeachment question: What exactly did he do? https://t.co/IKV1oFPMJW

— Greg Jaffe (@GregJaffe) November 11, 2019

"And when did he know it?"

That was not a critique of Richard Nixon; it was a defense.  It was offered by Sen. Howard Baker, a Republican, trying to stem the rising tide of sewage and corruption spewing into the nation's homes through the televised Watergate hearings (speaking of which, how the mighty have fallen).  It didn't work, ultimately, and Baker was among the Senators who went to Nixon and told him his goose was well and fully cooked.  It was the wrong question then; it's the wrong question now.

The truly frightening issue with Iran/Contra was not that Ronald Reagan might have blessed the idiotic efforts of Oliver North & Co. (I'm still convinced Poppy was in that up to his eyeballs; the PR campaign he pulled off after losing the Presidency is still a marvel of lies and distractions), but that he was so clueless he had no idea what was being done in his name.  Carter was criticized (falsely) for keeping track of even the tennis court schedule at the White House.  Reagan went the other way, fecklessly (and probably physically) unaware (and incapable of being aware) of what was being done in his own Administration.

So which is it for Trump?  Reagan, or Nixon?  What did he do carries an equally important question:  what did he fail to do?  If he is so clueless he has no idea what's being done in his Administration, why isn't that grounds for impeachment because he is responsible for what happens, whether he's ignorant of it or not.  If he is the micro-manager he is supposed to be, perhaps we simply haven't penetrated the inner-circle of his criminal Administration because, as he proved in the Mueller Report (Mueller said this explicitly to Congress), the liars he surrounds himself with prove perjury works if nobody cracks.

Trump, after all, has yet to have his John Dean.

This really isn't about a badly plotted narrative where the mystery writer doesn't make it clear in the last chapter who the killer is, with no ambiguity and no chance of mistake in identifying the criminal. This is reality, and even criminal law, with its high bar of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," doesn't require the absolute certainty we seek in fiction.  What Trump did is balanced by what Trump failed to do.  One is as damning as the other, as much an abuse of power as the other.  A President can abuse power willfully; he can also do it fecklessly, or even incompetently.  The President is not a King.  We are not stuck with him for four years, or eight, despite the fact he is manifestly incapable of fulfilling the role.  When the Cabinet and Vice President won't take action under the 25th Amendment, the Congress has a responsibility to do so under Art. II.

What did Trump do?  We can equally ask: what did Trump not do?  And why?