Thread by @SethAbramson

I find it hard to expend any energy responding to the Trump defense team's impeachment memo because it's legally and factually empty—it's political rhetoric based on a pathological denial of testimonial and documentary evidence. It's a joke—it's beneath attorneys to "analyze" it.

I'm serious here. The Ukraine scandal documents—just the public ones—now number in the thousands and thousands of pages, and Trump's defense just acts like they don't exist. Is it my job, or anyone's, to spend dozens of hours "debunking" what amounts to a "middle-finger defense"?

The call Trump relies on as exculpatory (a) didn't happen when he says it did, (b) didn't include the content he says it did, (c) was prompted by him already having been caught, and *even despite all that* is *still* (d) wildly (as in *wildly*) inculpatory. Who has time for this?

I'd feel more comfortable if we were shown things as they are:

PROSECUTORS: Here's the strongest, most well-documented case of impeachable conduct in U.S. history. And we skipped over 98% of Trump's impeachable conduct to show it to you.

DEFENSE: Go fuck yourself.

There it is.

There's a point at which seriously analyzing something silly condones it. You don't ask a child who's put two French fries up his nose, "What are your opinions on the strength of the Japanese yen?" You turn away. That's what you do: you don't coddle it by implying it has gravity.

The *facts* of the Ukraine scandal aren't seriously contested. The *legal precedent* relevant to the Ukraine scandal isn't seriously contested. *Nothing* in the Ukraine scandal is seriously contested. It's just that Trump thinks he *has the votes to win* and that's the end of it.

UPSHOT: It's reasonable to say, if asked, "This is the strongest case for a president's impeachment ever presented, and reveals the worst conduct a president has ever been impeached for. And there's no 'other side' to it. Also, he's reoffending now and will continue to reoffend."

You might add: "There's no drama in the impeachment case but this: will Democrats win the fight to expose more than the readily impeachable 2% of Trump's crimes they're exposing? Will Trump's endless criming haunt him through a major new revelation before the end of the 'trial'?"

And: "With a repeat offender whose crimes are so numerous, vile, and incapable of deterrence he's even recommitting the same crime during his trial for that crime, all you can do is punish and punish and punish and punish and never stop punishing—meaning, keep bringing articles."

Trump's impeachment is like the first sexual assault trial of a man charged with 143 sexual assaults in 18 jurisdictions. An effective, responsible prosecutorial strategy isn't, "Well shucks, let's see if he's a bad guy!" It's "how do we set a global strategy to protect victims?"

A reasonable prosecutorial strategy in handling a career criminal like Trump would be:

(1) Hold public House hearings every day;
(2) bring at least one new article of impeachment per month;
(3) go on TV daily to warn America that Trump is an ongoing threat to national security.

My point: this impeachment shouldn't be some sort of "main event"—it's a necessarily political airing of 2% of Trump's crimes, even as federal investigations are ongoing *across the country* to try to uncover, collate, and bring to light the other 98%. That's what happening here.

Trump's impeachment is like a single arraignment in the midst of the largest, longest, most historically traitorous crime spree in U.S. political history. The outcome of this one impeachment—when there could be *dozens*—is a mere procedural fact in a years-long network of crimes.

What I'm stating is simple fact. The only reason this will be treated as "the event of the season" is (a) media needs it to be, and (b) Trump has committed so many crimes and impeachable offenses that he has overloaded our system—and thus us—to the point of incoherence and chaos.

I believe in equal justice under law: treat a POTUS the same as a pauper. Which means that right now—were I the Democrats—I'd have 25 articles of impeachment in the pipeline and daily impeachment-inquiry hearings.

This impeachment would just be *this week's* impeachment hearing.

If that sounds crazy to you, do what I did—watch (and try) criminal cases for years. See how we railroad the average shoplifter. Then ask what we should do with a billionaire who decides—for a few extra bucks and a little more power—to sell out his country over and over and over.

So good luck, I guess, to those lawyers who all day today and in the coming days will analyze every single in and out of an impeachment "defense" with the gravitas of medieval sh*t-bucket. All you're doing is creating the impression there are actually two sides to this situation.

PS/ To be clear, I'm all for taking a half-hour of commercial-free airtime—if you're CNN/MSNBC—to explain in rigorous classroom-like fashion how there's no merit to any aspect of Trump's "defense." But after that, you must move on to analyzing what's actually serious in all this.

PS2/ Once you have that half-hour in the can, you call it a 30-minute TV "special"—"Dispensing With the Fantasy of a Trump Defense"—and you run it once a day at a reasonable time. But then you dedicate the rest of your coverage to actual serious topics surrounding Trump's crimes.