Trump Wrote a Deranged, Six-Page Letter to Pelosi Telling Her to Stop Impeaching Him
The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote Wednesday on the two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. While the Senate is expected to let Trump off the hook quickly—Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has reportedly been coordinating the president's defense with the White House—but he's still incensed that House Democrats are moving forward anyway. And on Tuesday, Trump sent a rambling, six-page open letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, demanding that she stop trying to impeach him but also claiming that he knows she won't.
The letter is a mishmash of self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing talking points, and it reads like a wordier (more edited) version of one of Trump's tweet storms. In it, Trump accuses Pelosi and Democrats of committing all of the offenses he's been accused of, writing, "You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish, personal, political, and partisan gain."
He also refers to the impeachment as a "coup," and claims it "represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history." In reality, the impeachment process is actually part of the Constitution, which makes it emphatically not a coup, and it's not "unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries" since two other presidents have been impeached. But Trump has certainly never let facts trip him up:
Worse still, I have been deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process from the beginning of this impeachment scam right up until the present. I have been denied the most fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution, including the right to present evidence, to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses, like the so-called whistleblower who started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made. Once I presented the transcribed call, which surprised and shocked the fraudsters (they never thought that such evidence would be presented), the so-called whistleblower, and the second whistleblower, disappeared because they got caught, their report was a fraud, and they were no longer going to be made available to us. In other words, once the phone call was made public, your whole plot blew up, but that didn't stop you from continuing.
Trump gets a lot of basics totally wrong here. He expressly ordered that no one from the White House participate with the House's investigation, so the people he claims could have cleared his name weren't allowed to testify. So far, the only people willing to appear before Congress have said that the president acted inappropriately. And a rough transcription of the call that he released did not clear him of wrongdoing. If anything, it confirmed that he did exactly what the whistleblower accused him of.
He then adds, "More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials," referring to an episode of mass hysteria that resulted in the hanging of 19 people.
Adam Jentleson on how McConnell remade the Senate into a minority-rule institution by abusing a once-obscure procedural rule—and how to restore its integrity.
Originally Appeared on GQ
