The Impeachment Story Is Simple. Republicans Are just Trying To Confuse You. GOP leaders desperately want to lose you in the process and take attention away from what the president did. He repeatedly pressured a foreign government to meddle in the 2020 election to help him win. It’s all in the White House summary and it’s corroborated by the whistleblower complaint and Trump admitted it. He’s even asking other countries to do it on tv now. The Republican strategy to this is to create confusion, namely by focusing on the legal process of whistleblower law. Not only are their claims false, they are irrelevant to the facts of Trump’s abuse of power. The whistleblower did exactly what they were supposed to do.
Republicans are trying to paper over the facts with confusion, conspiracies and flat-out lies. “This is looking more & more like a deep state scheme,” House Republican Steve Scalise (R-La.)
tweeted Wednesday, invoking an
insane conspiracy theory as an explanation for how Schiff got wind of a whistleblower complaint before it was filed. He lied. The question is why?” McCarthy
tweeted Wednesday, falsely claiming Schiff had spoken with the whistleblower when he had not. GOP senators, meanwhile, have been spreading misinformation to try to smear the credibility of the whistleblower. They have argued that in order to be considered a “real” whistleblower, you have to have firsthand information of a situation, which is false. “By definition, he’s not a whistleblower because he was reporting hearsay,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) incorrectly told reporters last week. “I think that we are giving too much credit, to someone who does not meet the definition of a whistleblower.” “It’s not a whistleblower because he wasn’t in the room. He wasn’t on the phone call,” Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) said last week, also falsely. They were
publicly corrected on Tuesday by one of their own colleague, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “The distinctions being drawn between first- and second-hand knowledge aren’t legal ones,”. “It’s just not part of whistleblower protection law or any agency policy.” He added, “This person appears to have followed the whistleblower protection laws and ought to be heard out and protected.”