Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Are you serious? First of all, you can get a criminal conviction with only circumstantial evidence if a jury decides it doesn't have reasonable doubt. But more importantly, the question is impeachment, not a prosecution. There aren't going be criminal charges and no judge is going to hear the case. The Congress is going to gather a lot of evidence, and then each Member is going to have to decide how to vote. No judge or statute tells Congress how to do that. It is, as you already said, a political question.
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The issue is, is there enough grey there for more than 1/3 of the Senate to say it's not enough to convict regardless of politics.
There is. If I were a senator's PR flack, I could easily spin that as a bunch of potentially bad facts, but no conclusive proof. "It's troubling, concerning, but I have a Constitutional duty to uphold, and this simply isn't enough to undo the will of the voters." Easy peasy. All. Day. Long.*
(As an aside, you've never been in the crim trenches, have you? A he said/she said on a crime of intent, with just circumstantial evidence is super difficult to prove. That gets pleaded out. The only time you see that go forward is when somebody's wired. Or somebody flips. Even if you flipped Zelensky, the conversation isn't clearly a quid pro quo. If the Ds can flip an insider who Trump confided with about holding back the gun money to get dirt on Biden, then you'd have him by the balls. That's where it'd get interesting.)
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* I'd also encourage more aggressively political R colleagues to spin this situation as analogous to the Steele Dossier, which I'd say was an equally troubling instance of a domestic admin using foreign intel against political opponents. Go ahead and argue the distinctions. Politically, they'll never be heard. Voters will see equivalence, and senators will acquire political cover.
...But this is all on evidence to date. Maybe more will come out. The horse race is just starting.
