Via the Blaze, the funniest part of this clip is that Chris Hayes was obviously teeing him up to say the opposite. Republicans claim that Democrats have been looking to impeach Trump from day one and often point to you as proof, Hayes tells Green, inviting him to rebut the charge.
Actually, says Green, I’ve been looking to do it since before day one.
He reasons that various Republicans, including Trump crony Lindsey Graham, insisted emphatically during the 2016 campaign that Trump was unfit for office, which is true but neither here nor there. The electorate decided whether he was fit at the polls; impeachment is, or should be, a matter of whether he’s committed high crimes or misdemeanors since taking the job. Green points back to the Russiagate probe as evidence that he has, and that it began early in his presidency, but that argument won’t persuade impeachment skeptics post-Mueller. Trump didn’t prevent Mueller from finishing the probe and he didn’t force Mueller to withhold judgment on whether the president was guilty of obstruction. If anything, citing now-stale Russiagate attack lines to bolster the case for impeaching him over Ukraine might weaken public support for the latter by convincing skeptics that the effort in the House really is just a grab bag of Democratic grievances aimed at delegitimizing Trump, just as the White House says. Which, of course, is why Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler decided to omit those attack lines from the actual Ukraine articles of impeachment.
Citing Comey’s firing as grounds for impeachment seems especially tone-deaf now that the Horowitz report detailing systemic negligence by the FBI in the Carter Page FISA case is out. Trump’s motive in that firing was self-interested, but good luck making the case in 2020 that heads at the DOJ didn’t deserve to roll for how the 2016 election was handled. Impeachment is a political process, as the kids say, and you won’t get far politically arguing to Americans at this point that Comey’s dismissal was somehow a crime so terrible that it might warrant removing the president from office over it.
By the way, an interesting trend in today’s RCP tracker of impeachment polling:
The graph picks up on the far left side on October 1, fresh off the first revelations about the Ukraine matter, with the public having suddenly flipped from strongly opposed to impeachment during Russiagate to newly supportive. That was a fraught moment for Trump: Clearly the Senate wasn’t about to remove him over a 48/44 split in public polling but no one knew at the time what sort of evidence might soon come out to move the public more firmly towards removal. Within three weeks, though, support for removal had peaked at 49.5 percent, still a whisker shy of a majority. By early December, as Democrats got closer to the big vote, opposition began to spike; it finally overtook support on December 16, two days before Trump was impeached, and has remained stronger every day since — until today, when support for removal has crept back into a tie. Seems pretty clear that House Dems suffered a backlash over impeachment, but it may have been a temporary one that’s begun to fade now that the initial annoyance among the public has subsided.
