Democrats try to boost a weak argument with hyperbole in impeachment effort

Eric Felten:

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Given that the House majority sat on its impeachment referral for almost a month before taking it to the Senate, the sudden urgency may come as a surprise – though not to students of argument and language. The Democratic case against Trump detailed in the much more extensive House impeachment report shows how language can be used to compensate for shortcomings in the evidence. A careful reading of the report shows that its authors – not unlike those who wrote the Mueller report to suggest guilt they couldn’t prove – are convinced that thin allegations can be bulked up if repeated often enough.

The repetitions that immediately stand out in the House report are the adjectives that dismiss the president’s defense well before that defense is made. Assertions or questions involving Ukraine made by Trump or his attorney Rudy Giuliani are typically prefaced with the words “debunked” or “discredited,” and usually followed by the characterization “conspiracy theory.” “Debunked” appears 22 times in the report; “discredited” 15 times; “baseless” 16 times and “conspiracy” 56 times. A few of those uses are by Republicans – Giuliani is quoted as saying the impeachment inquiry is “baseless” – but the vast majority are by Democrats to dismiss Trump’s claims.

For example, arguing that Trump had committed high crimes and misdemeanors, the report accuses the president of pushing a “discredited conspiracy theory alleging Ukrainian interference in the 2016 United States Presidential election.” (Editor’s note: Phrases are italicized for emphasis here and throughout.)

In describing the trip Giuliani planned to take to Ukraine last May, the impeachment report might have stated in a straightforward manner that he wanted to pursue information about alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. Instead, the authors wrote that the president’s lawyer was pursuing “debunked conspiracy theories about alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.” In the same way, the report says that Giuliani was hoping to chase down not just claims about the Bidens but “discredited claims about the Bidens.”

But what are the Ukraine interference theories that have supposedly been discredited? Yes, there are speculations that are “unverified” (to use a term that was often repeated when the Steele dossier was in vogue). But for a Ukraine question that has not been discredited, the president and his allies often point to a January 2017 article in Politico that said Kiev officials were “scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.” Politico reported that Ukrainian government officials “disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide [Paul Manafort] in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies [Democratic National Committee contractor Alexandra Chalupa] research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”

The majority report not only neglects to provide any evidence that debunks or discredits this reporting, it ignores it altogether.
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“Baseless” is another of the adjectives authors of the report put to use in extensive question-begging. They might have stated that in his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump made two demands for investigations. Instead they say the president made “two demands for baseless investigations.” The word is also put to work accusing Trump of giving “currency to a baseless allegation that Vice President Biden wanted to remove the corrupt prosecutor because he was investigating Burisma, a company on whose board the Vice President’s son sat at the time.”

The use of “baseless” in the report is so reflexive as to be redundant. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, for example, is said to have been the target of a “baseless smear campaign.” The very notion of a “smear campaign” is that it is untrue. If the allegations weren’t “baseless” they wouldn’t be a “smear.”
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The Democrats are invested in adjective abuse to boost their weak case.  They are too dismissive of alternative reasons for pursuing evidence of the corruption of Biden and others.  Their entire case amounts to a cover-up of the alleged corruption because it was engaged in by a Democrat who they consider to be "above the law."