Democratic all-stars line up to back Trump impeachment - POLITICO
Former Vice President Al Gore is one of the most prominent Democrats now urging a formal launch to President Donald Trump’s impeachment. | Scott Heins/Getty Images)
Alumni of the Obama and Clinton worlds are joining the pro-impeachment caucus after years of reticence.
House Democrats demanding President Donald Trump’s impeachment picked up new support in recent days from people who know a thing or two about Congress investigating the White House: alumni of the Clinton and Obama administrations.
The bold-faced Democratic names untethering their voices now in urging a formal launch to Trump’s impeachment — Al Gore, James Carville and Chris Lu among them — had previously stayed quiet for many reasons. They thought 2020 was the better solution to oust the president. They didn’t want to make it worse for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a longtime liberal firebrand now tasked with steering a caucus featuring diverse opinions on the topic. They know how an ill-led attempt to get rid of the president could come back to bite their party’s own 2020 prospects.
Story Continued Below
Then came last week’s explosive allegation that Trump attempted to pressure Ukrainian officials to sway the next election, and with it an avalanche of fresh public statements that it’s time for Trump to face the full force of the Constitution.
“It makes breaking into the Watergate seem kind of like kid’s play,” Neera Tanden, the longtime Hillary Clinton aide who also served in the Obama administration, told POLITICO when asked about her public shift last week from simply backing the House’s impeachment inquiry into a full-blown member of the pro-impeachment crowd.
“We’re a people who are perpetually outraged about things, but this sort of took it to a whole new level,” explained Lu, a former top Obama White House aide and deputy Labor secretary.
Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Neera Tanden told POLITICO, “It makes breaking into the Watergate seem kind of like kid’s play." | Larry French/Getty Images for MoveOn
Obama aides often celebrate how, over eight years, they avoided the kinds of administration-crippling scandals that plagued their Clinton predecessors, though they didn’t survive unscathed either: Fast and Furious, Solyndra and Benghazi became household terms thanks to GOP-led oversight efforts.
In an interview, Lu said that he spent Friday stewing over whether the institutional forces of congressional oversight and the next election were enough to properly check Trump — before deciding over dinner with his wife that the answer was no. “This isn’t about politics but doing what’s right,” he finally wrote on social media.
Other ex-Democratic luminaries described coming to similar realizations.
“When the facts changed, I changed my mind,” said Carville, the ex-Clinton senior strategist who played a lead role as an attack dog defending the Democratic president against a GOP-led 1998-99 impeachment effort.
Carville said he’d been of the view, before last week, that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia findings were “horrific” but still best dealt with in 2020. Now, he’s suggesting Democrats speed a single article of impeachment through the House describing how Trump contacted a foreign government to urge it to find dirt on a political opponent, a move that would then put the ball in the court of several vulnerable 2020 Senate Republicans.
“Let’s see Sens. [Susan] Collins, [Martha] McSally, [Thom] Tillis, [Cory] Gardner, [Joni] Ernst and [Mitch] McConnell all stew on it,” Carville said.
This new wave of Obama and Clinton alumni backing impeachment recognize they have no vote on the matter. Still, party leaders and Democratic lawmakers in the thick of the investigation say their newly found positions carry weight, considering their past work in the trenches of White House politics and policy — and because a raft of newly elected lawmakers may not be so familiar with the nuances of Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
“Having influential people raise their voices reinforces that every factor is pointing toward taking stronger action,” said Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Gore and Vice President Joe Biden who argues that the latest developments involving Trump and the Ukraine “add more urgency” to the need to impeach the president.
From a practical vote-getting standpoint, there’s another benefit to having so many of these former administration officials weigh in. Many used to work with people who are now serving themselves in Congress.
“If we hesitate to impeach a president for this, we might as well pass an amendment removing the impeachment clause from the Constitution, and become a popular, not constitutional, republic,” freshman Rep. Tom Malinowski, who worked as a top State Department official during the Obama administration, wrote last Friday in a series of tweets taking issue with Trump’s Ukraine behavior. The New Jersey Democrat, whose swing district includes the president’s country club at Bedminster, added that if the Ukraine allegations were proven true “there is only one remedy.”
Another former Democratic official, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, made an ever-so-slight shift in position on Friday in the wake of the latest news reports. The New Jersey lawmaker who once wrote speeches for President Clinton called for an “immediate and thorough investigation” into Trump’s dealings with the Ukraine, while adding “no foreign country should ever be allowed to interfere in our domestic politics. Congress has a responsibility to conduct strong oversight, and we must fulfill our article 1 constitutional obligations in this matter and others.”
Spokespeople for Pelosi and House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler did not comment when asked about the wave of new Obama and Clinton alumni who have joined the impeachment bandwagon. But Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of Nadler’s panel leading the impeachment push, said the former administration officials can influence their Democratic colleagues.
“The more establishment voices increase the volume of the chorus,” Raskin told POLITICO, adding that he’s seen a “pervasive spread within the Democratic caucus and Democratic party of the sense to counter the lawlessness coming from the White House.”
One group not participating in the impeachment push: The party’s living ex-presidents. All three have tried up to now to stay out of the impeachment spotlight, and former aides to both Obama and Clinton said they don’t expect that to change anytime soon. “It’s just not their style,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime adviser to Hillary Clinton dating back to her tenure as a New York senator.
As for Jimmy Carter, the 94-year old Democrat told Fox Business Network in August 2018, “I think that’s the wrong thing for Democrats to do.”
But impeachment has been fair game for many other senior Democrats. “The president asked a foreign power to help win an election. Again,” Hillary Clinton wrote on Friday on Twitter in response to the Ukraine scandal.
While her social media post didn’t mention impeachment, it echoed a more expansive line of arguments the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee made in a Washington Post op-ed published in April when the Mueller report was dominating the headlines. There, Clinton called it a “false choice” for lawmakers to think they needed to respond to the special counsel’s findings as “immediate impeachment or nothing.”
Instead, she urged Congress to use Mueller’s findings as a “road map” to consider impeachment while adding that his report included a “warning about the future” where foreign adversaries including Russia, China and North Korea keep trying to meddle in American elections.
INTERACTIVE: See which House lawmakers support impeachment.
“And unless he’s held accountable, the president may show even more disregard for the laws of the land and the obligations of his office,” wrote Clinton, who noted the “strange twist of fate” in her own one-of-a-kind resume that includes stints as a young House Judiciary Committee staff attorney during its Watergate impeachment inquiry and more than two decades later as a first lady whose husband faced impeachment.
Gore, the former vice president whose own unsuccessful 2000 White House campaign was weighed down by the Bill Clinton impeachment saga, said in an interview with MSNBC last week just before the Ukraine whistleblower story broke that he too understands the political calculus Democrats face on the subject, including the GOP-led Senate composition that would make a vote to convict and remove Trump a long shot at best.
“But I think we have an obligation beyond all of that to the Constitution, and the only remedy for these serious crimes that have been alleged is the impeachment process,” said Gore, who also represented Tennessee in both the House and Senate.
On Monday, Gore responded to the latest news reports by telling CNN that Trump’s conversations with the Ukrainian president “must be investigated thoroughly. “And this latest accusation, like some of the others, falls into a rare category. The only remedy is an impeachment investigation,” he said.
Some members of the Democratic administration alumni club have been banging the impeachment gong for months.
“A well-planned and well-executed impeachment inquiry may be the only way to wrest the microphone from Trump and tell a story on our terms about who Trump is and the damage he has wrought on our country,” former Obama White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer wrote in May.
Others have tried to lay low, avoiding the use of the I-word however they can. John Kerry, the former Obama secretary of state and Massachusetts senator, for example studiously skipped over mentioning the process during an MSNBC interview Monday where he also described his reaction as “one of absolute shock and amazement” when he learned the at-issue call between Trump and his counterpart in Kiev happened the day after Mueller testified to Congress.
“We need to see the institutions of our country stand up here. Americans rely on that,” Kerry explained before calling for Republicans to break ranks and speak up against the president on the topic.
For Democrats who have recently shifted into the impeachment camp, the decision hasn’t been easy. It’s meant fending off the label they were going after Pelosi, the speaker who played a crucial role in passing Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.
“It’s hard to thread the needle of being pro-impeachment and not attacking Speaker Pelosi,” said Reines, himself an outspoken supporter of impeaching Trump for much of this year.
Several new members of the pro-impeachment club said in interviews they recognized the political peril of what they were doing. They personally know many of the freshman Democrats elected in 2018 from swing districts that backed Trump two years ago. They know about the long-shot prospects in the Senate, as well as the argument Trump allies keep making that impeachment will turn the public against Democrats and help the president win a second term.
“I think now it’s worth the risk,” said Joe Lockhart, a former Clinton White House spokesman who last Friday made his pro-impeachment stance known after earlier this year publishing an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that it’d be better to leave Trump in office because it was the “best way to cement Trumpism’s hold on the Republican Party.”
Lockhart served in the Clinton White House during the president’s impeachment in the late 1990s, so he knows the challenges. But then came the Ukraine story, which he said raises a whole new level of concern about the future of the country. “When you start doing things that call into question the legitimacy of the next election, you’re in a whole other territory,” he said.
Taking a pro-impeachment position now also may be easier given the trajectory of the issue headed into 2020. “Whether Democrats impeach Trump or not,” Lockhart said, “Trump is providing so much fodder for this that it’s now going to be the story between now and Election Day.”
Missing out on the latest scoops? Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning — in your inbox.