Impeachment Drama Is Fraught with Traps for Sane Observers

Conrad Black  "It is painful to take issue with my blessed friend Peggy Noonan, and also painful to read both that she has effectively joined the disreputable impeachers of Donald Trump and has invoked a disingenuous argument in support of that position.

Noonan

"Writing in the Wall Street Journal on November 2, she asserted that it is clear President Trump used his office to ask the president of Ukraine to destroy Joe Biden politically and that he used U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine as an incentive, and the withholding of it as a threat to incite such activity. And she wrote that the only remaining argument is whether that constitutes an article of impeachment that warrants removal from office.
"In fact, there is no evidence that there was a direct connection between Ukraine investigating Biden and the assistance involved. There is no evidence that Trump was asking for more than the facts of Biden and his son’s exposure in Ukraine—if the Bidens’ conduct was unexceptionable that finding would have fully satisfied Trump’s request to know what happened. The entire United States should want to know if Biden’s son was influence-peddling in Ukraine, China, and Romania—as has been alleged—and it should equally wish to know if the charges are unfounded.
"Peggy Noonan posed the question in her Wall Street Journal column, “Can we prove through elicited testimony, that the president made clear to the leader of (Ukraine) . . . that the U.S. would release congressionally authorized foreign aid only if the foreign leader publicly committed to launch an investigation that would benefit the president in his 2020 reelection effort?” Her answer: “We all know that.”

Tony Branco, Townhall

"We don’t know anything of the kind. The absence of evidence that information on Biden and aid were connected and that the president was directing President Zelensky to produce a condemnation of Biden and his son is precisely why this spurious Star Chamber conducted by the most chronically dishonest person in American public life (Adam Schiff, though only by a nose over House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, both Democratic congressmen), should not even get to the Senate.
"If there were convincing evidence on these points, that Trump was saying to Zelensky: “If you want any assistance from this country, give me an investigation of the Bidens’ activity in your country that demonstrates their corruption,” then there would be an issue that justified being enacted as an article of impeachment. The question Peggy Noonan posed of whether this justified the president’s removal from office would then be the subject of a Senate trial." . . .