SEN. ROB Portman’s recent op-ed in The Blade (“Why I will vote against these articles of impeachment,” Feb. 5) threw out a number of reasons why he voted to acquit President Trump in the impeachment trial.
None holds water.
Mr. Portman says he wants to get back to the Senate’s work. But the Senate has done almost nothing in two years. Hundreds of bills that have passed the House are just sitting on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s desk.
Mr. Portman says nothing illegal happened. That too is false. Holding up the Ukraine aid in the way Mr. Trump did violated the Impoundment Control Act, as people in the Trump Administration itself were frantically telling the President.
And Mr. Portman says that he has been consistently critical of the President amid the Ukraine crisis. False as well.
In fact, that false claim opens the door to the real problem with Rob Portman’s vote to acquit Mr. Trump, as well as his earlier votes barring additional witnesses or evidence.
And that is: Senator Portman should not have been voting at all. He had a clear conflict of interest from the beginning to the end of the trial and had an ethical duty to recuse himself.
In August, he knew something was happening, because his office asked the Trump Administration why the Ukraine aid was being held up.
But then his involvement became far more direct. On Sept. 12, just as the Ukraine scandal was starting to go public, Mr. Portman tweeted that the evening before, he had spoken with President Trump by phone — Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Vice President Mike Pence were also on the call — and that the aid had been released.
A few weeks later, he made a number of media appearances elaborating on that call. He explained that Mr. Trump released the aid to Ukraine because of his phone call, and he said that the holdup was solely because of a concern about Europe not doing its fair share.
Mr. Portman’s comments left a clear impression that nothing improper had happened.
This was such an important narrative that, a few days later, Mr. Trump himself cited Mr. Portman’s account in front of the entire national media.
The Ohio senator had “backed [him] up.” And Mr. Portman was “honorable,” Mr. Trump said, so his account should be believed. Later, the White House lawyers also included it in their Impeachment Memo to the Senate.
But this entire episode turned out to be a false cover story hiding what was truly happening — Mr. Trump’s shakedown of Mr. Zelenskiy to announce an investigation was what held up the aid, and concerns about illegality and the whistleblower forced the administration to release the funds in early September.
It also turned out that Mr. Portman’s claim about Europe was false — Europe actually has provided more support to Ukraine than the United States.
And Mr. Portman’s claim that his call led to the release of the funds also wasn’t true — Congress had already been notified that the aid was forthcoming before the Portman phone call took place.
Mr. Portman now acknowledges that the President’s actions were “inappropriate.” It was a quid pro quo after all, he admits.
But by doing so, Mr. Portman also is by definition admitting that his September media roll-out was a misleading account of what actually happened.
And this leads to several obvious questions for Mr. Portman: Why did you spread a misleading account in coordination with the White House as the Ukraine scandal went public? Did the White House lie to you in that September phone call, or did you know it was a misleading account? What did they tell you? Did they ask you to do those misleading media appearances, where Fox anchors had already been spoon-fed the false narrative?
In exchange for what?
No matter his answers, these questions alone make clear that Mr. Portman had a conflict of interest when it came to the impeachment trial itself.
He was directly involved, either as a participant or a witness, in the sequence of acts for which the President was impeached, having been entangled in that crucial moment — having been held up as a witness by the President himself — he could not later claim to be an “impartial juror” for a trial about those same facts.
Mr. Portman can spend years trying to justify voting against impeachment. That is a legacy he’ll have to live with.
But what is absolutely indefensible is that he voted at all in a trial while facing such an egregious conflict of interest.
Perhaps worst of all, when he voted not to allow witnesses or new evidence, Mr. Portman not only covered up for the President; he also hid information that would have allowed Ohioans and Americans to better understand his own role in early attempts to cover up the truth from the American people.
Of the 100 senators who voted, that stands out, uniquely, as a deeply unethical act.
David Pepper is chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party.
First Published February 7, 2020, 5:00 a.m.
