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"How can we possibly vote to remove the president without all the evidence we're voting not to see?" is a hell of an argument.

Holocaust row seethes as leaders gather in Israel

Peter Feuerman's birth certificate showed nothing of his real background.

His Jewish parents escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto while his mother was pregnant with him during the Nazi occupation of Poland.

The couple survived only after being smuggled into a gardener's building at the home of a contact they had made in the Polish underground.

Dr Feuerman was born in 1944 with what he described as "false so-called Aryan documents" to hide his Jewish identity.

His parents escaped before the Nazis demolished the ghetto, where at its height an estimated 400,000 Jews were trapped inside a 3.4 sq km (1.3 sq mile) area. Most were murdered at death camps or died of starvation or disease, among up to 3 million Polish Jews murdered by the Nazis.

Now he speaks of a "political game" over the legacy of the Holocaust - because as he nears his 80s the stories of mass murder and survival from the start of Feuerman's life are at the centre of a row about the distortion of history by rival nationalist leaders in Europe.

I sat down with Dr Feuerman and other Holocaust survivors and Polish Jews born soon after the war, as they met for their weekly get together at a cafe in Tel Aviv.

They ordered coffees but some sipped vodka and the talk turned to the Polish President Andrzej Duda.

Mr Duda has said he will not attend this week's Holocaust remembrance ceremony at Yad Vashem, the official memorial centre in Jerusalem.

His decision has threatened to overshadow the event which will bristle with world leaders and bring parts of Jerusalem to a standstill.

It marks the 75th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. More than a million people, mostly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

The event is one of the biggest political gatherings in Israel's history - President Macron of France, US Vice-President Mike Pence and Britain's Prince Charles are due to speak.

It will also focus on fighting anti-Semitism today, taking place four days before the annual remembrance service at Auschwitz itself, hosted by Poland.

The Jerusalem event was organised by the World Holocaust Forum Foundation, whose founder Dr Moshe Kantor is close to Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

Mr Duda complained that he has not been allowed to address the audience, whereas Mr Putin and other leaders will speak.

He has also questioned why it is taking place at all, saying the "main event" will happen in his country - which Mr Putin in turn will not attend.

Yad Vashem says it reserved the speaking podium for the allied powers that defeated Nazism - although Germany's president will speak too - while the Israeli government is trying to distance itself from the row, with one official telling me the invitation for Mr Duda to attend "still stands".

It has aggravated a bitter dispute between Russia and Poland - whose leaders have been armflexing over the war's legacy.

Mr Putin claimed recently that Poland was complicit in the outbreak of World War Two, and while excusing Russian dictator Stalin's early pact with Hitler he described Poland's 1930s ambassador to Nazi Germany as "a scumbag and an anti-Semitic pig".

Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki responded with a furious four-page statement accusing Mr Putin of lying about Poland and "trying to rehabilitate" Stalin for his political goals today.

Now the rival leaders stand accused of weaponising history.

World War Two has become "the most important battlefield" for Poland's nationalist government, according to Prof Paweł Machcewicz, a Polish historian.

"The goals they declared were to use history as a tool to strengthen the community… by focusing on mostly glorious, heroic elements of Polish history," he says.

Supporters of Poland's ruling Law and Justice party argue the war's devastating cost there is too often overlooked. Up to 1.9 million non-Jewish Poles were killed by the Nazis.

Polish resistance and suffering in the war were unquestionable, says Prof Machcewicz - but he believes both the Polish and Russian governments are distorting history to appeal to their nationalist bases.

Two years ago the Polish government made it illegal to say that the country was complicit in Nazi crimes during the Holocaust.


After an international outcry it later deleted parts of the law, but the controversy then engulfed Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He supported the partial u-turn by signing a joint statement with the Polish prime minister.

That move was condemned by Yad Vashem who said the statement contained "grave errors and deceptions" and harmed the "historical memory of the Holocaust".

Mr Netanyahu defended his move saying he had consulted Yad Vashem's chief historian.

But among his critics was the Israeli historian Prof Zeev Sternhell, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust in Poland who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto as a child with the help of two Polish families.

He accuses Mr Netanyahu of embracing ultra-nationalists in Europe because they provide a counterweight to the EU's "liberal wing" of France and Germany who are critical of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

"In order to get that alliance working he's ready to pay a heavy price… And the heavy price is a betrayal of the Holocaust," he says.

Either way, the feeling for some back at the Tel Aviv cafe is that this year's commemorations have become more about today's politicians than yesterday's crimes.

Jonathan Turley, the constitutional scholar at George Washington University whom House Republicans had chosen to testify in the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings, smacked down the White House’s legal argument in the Senate trial on Tuesday.

In an op-ed published in Washington Post, Turley took aim at White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow’s claim that the President cannot be impeached because he did not commit a crime when he withheld military aid to Ukraine while asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden.

“It is a view that is at odds with history and the purpose of the Constitution,” the legal expert wrote of Cipollone and Sekulow’s defense.

He warned that adopting their interpretation of impeachable offenses “would create lasting harm for the constitutional system” because it is “far too narrow.”...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Senate plunged into President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial with Republicans abruptly abandoning plans to cram opening arguments into two days but solidly rejecting for now Democratic demands for more witnesses to expose what they deem Trump’s “trifecta” of offenses.

Trump himself said Wednesday he wants top aides to testify, but qualified that by suggesting there were “national security” concerns to allowing their testimony.

“We have a great case,” Trump said at a global economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. In a press conference before returning to Washington, Trump said his legal team was doing a "very good job."

He appeared to break with Republicans efforts to block Democratic motions to immediately call witnesses and subpoena documents. Instead, Trump said he'd like to see aides, including former national security adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, testify as witnesses.

Trump said he'd leave the "national security” concerns about allowing their testimony to the Senate.

Trump himself said Wednesday he wants top aides to testify, but qualified that by suggesting there were “national security” concerns to allowing their testimony.

“We have a great case,” Trump said at a global economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. In a press conference before returning to Washington, Trump said his legal team was doing a "very good job."

He appeared to break with Republicans efforts to block Democratic motions to immediately call witnesses and subpoena documents. Instead, Trump said he'd like to see aides, including former national security adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, testify as witnesses

Trump said he'd leave the "national security” concerns about allowing their testimony to the Senate

In a way, it’s fitting that only hours after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sternly instructed the Senate to conduct itself as “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” President Trump went before the world in Davos and openly flaunted his demand that Senate Republicans turn the entire process into a sham devoted wholly to covering up his bottomless corruption.
Senate Republicans spent much of Tuesday evening aggressively advancing the coverup that Trump is demanding, and at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Trump went out of his way to cheer what they’ve already done to protect him.

The jarring contrast between Roberts’s admonishment and Trump’s cheerleading for the actual conduct of the Senate GOP captures a truth about our current moment. Neutral calls for both sides to adhere to a mutual set of reasonable standards seem hopelessly out of sync with the wildly lopsided imbalance we’re now seeing between the two parties’ approaches to a lawless, out-of-control president — one who just happens to head one of those two parties.

...Demands for civility are detached from current realities
Roberts’s interjection came after Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), a House impeachment manager, noted that Trump’s legal defenders had lied repeatedly to the Senate, that the legal theory used to close down witnesses is a travesty and that Trump has essentially placed himself above the law in numerous ways.
In his reply, Trump’s counsel Pat Cipollone oozed with phony high dudgeon as he accused Nadler of unfairly criticizing Trump and his team. But Nadler’s criticism was accurate. Cipollone and fellow lawyer Jay Sekulow just did tell repeated lies to the Senate, and it fell to Democrats to correct them.

Donald Trump obviously relishes the role of bully. But his greatest talent by far lies in playing the victim.

He’s a victim of Adam Schiff. A victim of Nancy Pelosi. A victim of all Democrats, really, and of his own seedy henchmen (Michael Cohen, Lev Parnas) and of the “deep state” and of the “fake news media” and of the entire establishment, whatever that is.

He’s a victim of so many forces so many times over that even “martyr” doesn’t do justice to his lot, which is what you get when you multiply Job in the Old Testament by Mel Gibson in “Braveheart” and add the protagonist of “Unbroken.”

No president has ever been treated so badly. I’m not being sarcastic. I’m taking dictation: He has made this exact claim — repeatedly.

His victimhood is front and center in his defense against the articles of impeachment and in the legal papers filed by his lawyers on Monday, as his trial in the Senate moved forward.

The lawyers write of a process “rigged” against Trump. They portray his Democratic accusers as unhinged tormentors, too consumed with his destruction to see how unimpeachably he has really behaved. The 171-page document is so soggy with Trumpian self-pity it weeps.

It’s so bloated with Trumpian hyperbole it waddles. On just one of those pages, his lawyers recount how Democrats exercised “shameful hypocrisy” as they “concocted an unheard-of procedure” and held those infamous “secret hearings in a basement bunker” while journalists “happily fed the public a false narrative” and the poor president was denied any rights whatsoever. This is the bodice ripper of political sob stories. It’s a Harlequin harangue.

It expands on — and continues in the precise spirit of — a preliminary legal brief that his lawyers filed last weekend. “The scream of a wounded animal” was how two legal experts who contribute to The Atlantic assessed that argument. They could as easily have been describing the rest of Trump’s presidency, the whole of his political career and much of his life.

He’s always right and yet always wronged. He demands that we marvel at his invincibility even as we tremble at his degradation. He can vanquish any enemy — and his enemies are legion! — but look at how he’s pushed around. Trump takes a textbook oxymoron and gives it presidential form. Behold, at the Resolute Desk, a jumbo shrimp.

“This goes all the way back to his childhood,” Michael D’Antonio, the author of “The Truth About Trump,” told me. D’Antonio said that at the military-themed boarding school that Trump attended, he was known for complaining to superiors about unfair treatment. “It’s a strategy for him. He believes and has said that whining is a way to get what you want.”

Timothy O’Brien, who wrote the Trump biography “TrumpNation,” recalled that in the 1980s, when Trump failed to get the support that he wanted from Mayor Ed Koch for an enormous development in Manhattan, he threw himself a pity party, railing that “the system and local government were conspiring against him.”

Trump similarly fashioned himself as a beleaguered hero battling dark forces when he bought into the fledgling United States Football League and sought to make it competitive with the National Football League. Goaded by Trump, the U.S.F.L. filed an antitrust suit against the N.F.L.

The suit was a bust; the N.F.L. was ordered to pay $3 in damages. But that didn’t throw him off his game, which he upsized for his presidential campaign.

As the conservative columnist Rich Lowry noted in August 2015: “By Trump’s own account, he’s the baddest, smartest thing going, except if you ask him a challenging question, in which case he kicks and screams and demands to know how anyone could treat him so unfairly.” Lowry crowned Trump “the most fabulous whiner in all of American politics.”

The CNN anchor Chris Cuomo subsequently asked Trump about Lowry’s words.

“I am the most fabulous whiner,” Trump conceded. “I keep whining and whining until I win.”

He whined operatically as November 2016 approached and it seemed that he’d lose to Hillary Clinton. “The election is going to be rigged,” he pouted, ever the victim. Then he beat Clinton — and still whined, insisting without proof that she’d done better in the popular vote because of millions of illegal ballots.

Woe is he, the object of a “witch hunt” regarding Russian assistance to his campaign, the butt of a “hoax” about improper pressure on Ukraine, the commander in chief of armed forces that the whole world takes advantage of.

In a key passage of the new book “A Very Stable Genius,” by the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Trump rants at top military brass about what he perceives as America’s exploitation by South Korea and by NATO allies, barking, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

It’s disgusting. It’s also part of his political genius. He has turned himself into a symbol of Americans’ victimization, telling frustrated voters who crave easy answers that they’re being pushed around by foreigners and duped by the condescending custodians of a dysfunctional system.

He’s their proxy, suffering on their behalf, and in that way he collapses the distance between a billionaire with multiple golf resorts and displaced factory workers struggling to hold on to their one and only homes.

But while it’s a fact that they’ve been dealt a bad hand, it’s a farce that he has. His fortune began with money from Dad. He has stiffed creditors, evaded taxes, attached his name to a bogus diploma mill, skimmed money from a fraudulent philanthropy, run afoul of campaign finance laws, signaled receptiveness to Russian interference in the 2016 election and tried to obstruct the investigation of that — all without any commensurate punishment.

Thanks to Republicans in the Senate, he’s poised to evade punishment again. We should all be such victims.

In his Senate trial as in all else, he’s a profile in persecution.

The last three presidents were regularly, and hatefully, denounced by the opposition.

Quote:

Jonathan Turley, the constitutional scholar at George Washington University whom House Republicans had chosen to testify in the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings, smacked down the White House’s legal argument in the Senate trial on Tuesday.

In an op-ed published in Washington Post, Turley took aim at White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow’s claim that the President cannot be impeached because he did not commit a crime when he withheld military aid to Ukraine while asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden.

“It is a view that is at odds with history and the purpose of the Constitution,” the legal expert wrote of Cipollone and Sekulow’s defense.

He warned that adopting their interpretation of impeachable offenses “would create lasting harm for the constitutional system” because it is “far too narrow.”...

TPM

No question that this opinion from Turley will be a focus of Fox coverage with a range of legal scholars weighing in carefully and honestly. No question at all.

You will hear crickets from FOX