For all their work, Democrats were not able to raise public support for impeachment beyond the level it had been before the hearings. On October 12, 2019, weeks before the public sessions began, support for impeaching the president was 49.8 percent, according to the 538 Impeachment Tracker. Today, it is 49.9 percent. Those are high numbers, based mostly on the fact that a large majority of Democrats has wanted to impeach the president for a long time. For everyone else, support and opposition levels have been mostly unchanged for the last three months.
Now, with the Senate impeachment trial, Democrats have their last chance to excite public passions and win converts. And to Republicans, the outline of their strategy is becoming clear: Democratic impeachers realize they can't just tell the same story all over again in front of the Senate and expect the result to be different this time.
In December the House Intelligence Committee released a 300-page report making the case for impeachment. Later in the month the House Judiciary Committee added a report of its own. And on December 18, the full House passed articles of impeachment boiling down those reports to a few paragraphs. That is what impeachment leader Rep. Adam Schiff read aloud to the Senate at the impeachment opening ceremony on Thursday.
That reading was required. But next week Democrats will begin to make their case, with 24 hours of Senate floor time to do it. Does anyone think dry recitations, or even dramatic recitations, of the same old material will stir the Senate and the public?
"The Democrats understand that their current fact pattern won't suddenly become vastly more compelling," Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a text exchange Friday morning. "We've seen it all before. I suspect they've held back some nuggets to time-release for theatrical impact as the Senate trial goes on. Parnas is the front end of that wave."
Gaetz referred to Lev Parnas, the indicted Rudy Giuliani associate, who has emerged from hiding to do splashy interviews this week with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and CNN's Anderson Cooper. In December, Parnas, who is trying to win lenient treatment from prosecutors in a campaign-finance case, asked a court to let him give material seized in the case to the House Intelligence Committee. Two court orders, one on January 3 and another last Monday January 13, gave Parnas the go-ahead.
Not long after, Parnas' lawyer, Joseph Bondy, announced that he had turned over the material to the House Intelligence Committee. Parnas then headed to MSNBC and CNN.
There wasn't much new in the Parnas material. One thing that did seem new and striking -- the suggestion that a previously-unknown character, Robert Hyde, was stalking then-ambassador Marie Yovanovitch -- Parnas denied ever took place. Most of the rest of the interviews consisted of Parnas claiming that the president and top Trump administration officials, particularly Attorney General William Barr, "knew exactly" what was going on in the Trump-Ukraine affair. Through a spokesman, Barr strongly denied the allegation.
Parnas already had serious credibility problems. He was, after all, the man who claimed that House Intelligence Committee ranking Republican Devin Nunes had met with former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in Vienna in December 2018. Then Nunes produced photos showing he was nowhere near either Shokin or Vienna. For Parnas's credibility, it was a Michael-Cohen-in-Prague moment.
Nevertheless, some in the media touted Parnas's interviews as huge news.
A "bombshell," pronounced Maddow.
"Bombshell," said the Washington Post.
"Bombshell," said CNN.
"Bombshell," said CNN, again.
And so on.
The effect of the coverage was to suggest to the public that there were new and damaging revelations in the impeachment case -- not the old stuff that everyone had already digested and was reflected in the polls, but new and really serious charges. Impeachment was exciting again!
And does anyone expect that to be the last such revelation? From now until the trial is over -- and perhaps beyond -- Republicans expect Democrats to come up with some new something on a regular, if not daily, basis. GOP defenders are beginning to see the next month in the Senate not so much as an impeachment trial but as a replay of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings: a fait accompli that becomes a cliffhanger with new and progressively more spectacular allegations. None of them were true, but they threw Republicans on the defensive and plunged the confirmation into chaos for a while.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/can-democrats-produce-a-daily-impeachment-show
