Jeff Robbins: Republicans behaving badly

If the posse of Republican congressmen who broke into the House Intelligence Committee’s secure meeting room last week to disrupt the testimony of a Pentagon official about President Trump’s conduct thought they were helping their cause, they miscalculated. It they are fortunate they will be remembered merely as brainless frat boys; if less so it will be as stormtrooper wannabes.

Nor did they much help the president, whom they regard as their master, and understandably so. As with virtually all congressional Republicans, when the president instructs them to jump, they ask him: “How high?” What Americans saw, however, was a Lilliputian attempt to stop the rolling waves of evidence of presidential misconduct presented by a procession of Trump administration officials who have rejected the president’s demand that they keep their mouths shut. By week’s end, 55% of Americans disapproved of the president’s job performance compared with 42% who approved, and a solid half of Americans support his removal from office through the Constitution’s impeachment process.

As damaging as the currently available evidence is to the president, things are likely to get worse. Trump continues to lose battle after battle in his hell-bent attempt to block the disclosure of evidence he gives every indication of believing will reinforce further the case for impeaching him, hurt him politically, support criminal indictments against him or all of the above. Late Friday, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to hand over otherwise secret grand jury evidence gathered by special counsel Bob Mueller to the House Judiciary Committee so that it could be used for impeachment deliberations. “Congress’ need to access grand jury material relevant to potential impeachable conduct by a president is heightened when the executive branch willfully obstructs channels for accessing other relevant evidence,” wrote the federal judge, referencing Trump’s orders that his administration stonewall Congress’ impeachment inquiry. Along the way the court rejected out of hand Trump’s patently ridiculous claim that Congress’ impeachment inquiry was “illegal” because the full House had not yet voted to proceed with impeachment. “[A] House resolution has never, in fact, been required to begin an impeachment,” held the judge.

Earlier this month a federal appeals court ruled that Trump’s accountants had to turn eight years’ worth of financial records relating to Trump and certain of his companies over to the House Oversight Committee. It rejected Trump’s arguments that the subpoenas issued by House investigators were invalid. That ruling, in turn, followed a separate decision by another federal court that Trump’s accountants were required to turn over eight years of his tax returns to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which subpoenaed them in connection with its own ongoing criminal investigation into whether the Trump Organization falsified business records to conceal the hush money payments he made to various women. That federal judge called Trump’s argument that the tax returns should not be turned over because he was immune from being criminally investigated “repugnant” to the United States Constitution.

America’s national nightmare is far from over, however — very far. The odds that 20 Republican senators will summon the minimal integrity required to acknowledge that the president has committed crimes and abused his office are low indeed. The judicial rulings that the evidence of his conduct that the president so devoutly wants hidden from public view are still subject to reversal by a Supreme Court filled with justices either appointed by him or resolutely in his corner. And a solid 40% of our countrymen either do not understand what the president has done or do not care.

But with court after court ordering that evidence damaging to the president be disclosed, he and his team are left trying frantically to plug holes in a dike that is starting to resemble Swiss cheese. Whatever else he may be able to prevent, Trump is increasingly powerless to prevent history from judging him a crook and his presidency a stain on the nation.

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Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S.delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

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