Facing Fresh Revelations, Republicans Struggle to Mount a Defense of Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/us/politics/republicans-trump-defense.html

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WASHINGTON — Republican leaders are struggling to settle on a clear message and effective strategy for responding to Democrats’ aggressive and fast-moving impeachment investigation of President Trump, thrown off by early stumbles and a chaotic White House that have upended efforts to set a steady tone.

With Mr. Trump effectively functioning as a one-man war room — doling out a new message, and provocative statements, almost by the hour — top Republicans have labored to find a unified response to push back against the inquiry and break through a near daily cascade of damaging information.

Instead, they have tried to avoid tough questions about Mr. Trump’s conduct, staying mostly silent. Few defended Mr. Trump’s declaration on Thursday that China, as well as Ukraine, should investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading Democratic presidential candidate, and his son Hunter Biden. Fewer still have commented on text messages released as part of Democrats’ inquiry that show that envoys representing Mr. Trump sought to leverage the power of his office to prod Ukraine into opening investigations that would damage his Democratic opponents — and that some of them viewed it as a clear quid pro quo.

Inquiries to nearly two dozen congressional Republicans, including members of leadership and the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, yielded only two responses on Friday.

“The obvious challenge for everybody here is that they are working with a president with no tolerance for anyone to criticize” him, said Brendan Buck, a former counselor to the last two Republican House speakers, Paul D. Ryan and John A. Boehner.

Rather than acknowledging that Mr. Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president, in which he asked that the leader investigate a leading political rival, was inappropriate and moving on to a debate about whether that rose to impeachment, Mr. Buck continued, “they’re getting stuck wrapped around the axle of whether what the president did was wrong, or whether he even did it in the first place.”

In an attempt to rally and unify the conference, Mr. Trump joined a call with House Republicans on Friday afternoon, according to a person present who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it. The president emphasized to lawmakers that Democrats were refusing to focus on solutions that would help the American people and instead trying to overturn the result of the 2016 election, the person said.

But even Republican lawmakers who have tried to stay on message and defend the president have not been as successful as they have hoped.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, for instance, told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that he had confronted Mr. Trump in a phone call in late August about allegations that he was engaging in a quid pro quo with Ukraine, and that the president had flatly denied it.

In doing so, however, Mr. Johnson brought to light new information that was ultimately unhelpful to Mr. Trump: that the American ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, had told the lawmaker that aid to Ukraine was tied to Mr. Trump’s request to have Kiev investigate Democrats. He later told reporters at a constituent stop that he tried to get permission from Mr. Trump to tell Ukraine’s president that American aid was on its way in the wake of those allegations, but Mr. Trump refused, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Yet a small minority of Republicans spoke out against Mr. Trump on Friday. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah and a former presidential candidate, delivered the sharpest rebuke. The president’s appeal to China and Ukraine to investigate the Bidens was “brazen and unprecedented,” Mr. Romney said, calling the conduct “wrong and appalling.”

Representative Will Hurd of Texas, a former C.I.A. officer and member of the Intelligence Committee who is retiring next year, also denounced Mr. Trump’s suggestion that China should investigate the Bidens. But in an interview on Friday with CNN, Mr. Hurd declined to make a definitive judgment about the text messages.

“I think some of these things are indeed damning,” he said. “However, I want to make sure we get through this entire investigation before coming to some kind of conclusion.”

None of those reactions are in line with the one that Republican leaders have settled on for defending the president. They have argued that there was nothing improper about the president’s suggestion that a foreign country should investigate one of his political rivals, and that no quid pro quo was suggested.

Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, said in an interview on Thursday that “a lot of people” want to get to the bottom of the rumors about the Bidens and that Mr. Trump “is echoing what people have been calling for, for a long time.” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida suggested Mr. Trump was simply trying to provoke outrage from the news media, arguing of his public appeals to China and Ukraine, “That’s not a real request.”

The party’s scattered responses underscore the challenge for Republican leaders of setting a message for a set of developments that are out of their control, said Antonia Ferrier, the former communications director for Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader.

“It’s very difficult to message on quicksand,” she said.

Problems for House Republicans surfaced almost as soon as the formal inquiry began, with a halting performance last weekend by Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Mr. McCarthy appeared not to have read the transcript of a call between Mr. Trump and the Ukrainian president that is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry; as he tried to defend the president, the correspondent Scott Pelley noted that he was reciting a set of talking points that the White House had circulated earlier.

Republican lawmakers and aides fretted privately that Mr. McCarthy looked unprepared and uncertain, and that their party had no strategy for confronting the crisis engulfing the president. Since then, leaders have buckled down to devise a fusillade of messages they hope will resonate with the public as the investigation unfolds.

An early version of their defense centered on three main arguments: that Democrats are truly trying to impeach the president, that nothing in Mr. Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president is impeachable and that Democrats are exploiting the call to achieve an end result they had hoped for from the beginning of Mr. Trump’s presidency, impeachment.

But in a sign of how Republicans’ strategy has continued to shift, Mr. McCarthy in recent days has appeared to adopt a number of other approaches, most notably introducing a message that focuses narrowly on Democrats’ impeachment process. That strategy hinges on the belief that voters will reject Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to hold a vote to start an impeachment inquiry. Republicans argued in a legal brief on Thursday that the House had not in fact begun a real impeachment investigation because it had not authorized one with a full vote.

The strategy tracks with one the White House has considered, as top officials weighed sending a letter to Ms. Pelosi to inform her that they would not comply with demands for documents or witnesses until the full House voted to formally open an impeachment inquiry. But on Friday, aides in the West Wing were reassessing the move, first reported by the website Axios, worrying that it might only draw out the impeachment process.

Borrowing a page from Democrats during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, Republicans are also working to demonize the leaders of the inquiry. Mr. McCarthy is supporting a resolution by Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, to formally censure Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, who has taken a leading role.

Mr. Scalise rallied his deputies during a call on Thursday afternoon, saying he would lead a series of all-conference member briefings moving forward, according to a person on the call who insisted on anonymity to describe it. Representative Steve Chabot of Ohio, a manager during the Clinton impeachment, outlined what lawmakers could expect in the weeks to come.

“What members really want are all the facts because there are a lot of allegations that have been thrown around,” Mr. Scalise said.