The Hill’s headline says it all:
Trump says Republicans should release their own transcripts in impeachment probe
President Trump suggested Sunday that Republicans should release their own versions of transcripts of interviews in the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry.
In a tweet, Trump claimed House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) “will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes.” His tweet came as Schiff said Democrats were planning to release transcripts of the interviews held in the probe so far.
I think Steve Benen misses an important point in his analysis, as true as it may be:
It’s unlikely that anyone in the West Wing has reviewed the deposition transcripts, but dozens of House Republicans have participated in the behind-closed-doors process – claims to the contrary notwithstanding – and they’ve had an opportunity to let the president know how the developments have unfolded.
And given the weekend’s presidential tweets, Trump has apparently been told to expect some discouraging news.
There’s also a degree of irony hanging overhead: for weeks, the White House and its GOP allies have condemned the private nature of the impeachment inquiry and demanded more transparency. But now that transcripts are poised to be released, Trump appears to be scrambling to undermine public confidence in the materials – which Republicans used to be eager for us to see.
During the assorted depositions, some House Democrats told reporters that Republicans were actually lucky that that the discussions were unfolding in private. In light of Trump’s stress-tweeting, the president is starting to realize those Dems were right.
But in order for public perceptions of President Trump to change to be in accordance with the transcripts and their interpretations, there must be trust in the transcripts.
But this goes deeper than casting doubt on the transcripts. Over the years, I’ve occasionally taken mass emails from the conservative side of the political spectrum and turned them inside out to show an anti-government thread that runs through them. Whether or not they’re reflective of American authors writing them, or the result of a studied assault on American society by a foreign power, they function as a divisive wedge separating Americans from the government by blinding us to the fact that it’s not THE government, but OUR government, and we can and should participate in it.
By casting doubt on the transcripts, which are supposed to be faithful reproductions of the statements of witnesses, we see the sowing of doubt concerning the trustworthiness of the Republic’s elected lawmakers. Whether this is purely the result of Trump’s morality-free way of life, or if he’s doing so at the direction of foreign masters, I have no idea; all I know is that either hypothesis is consistent with what little we know.
But I do know that if the Republicans endorse this defense mechanism, then they’re directly contributing to the potential dissolution of the United States.
