A Trump impeachment...conspiracy?

J.D Vance is the senator for Ohio, and just yesterday he published a memo that went viral on twitter, partly because it was amplified by Elon Musk. Essentially, he made the case that should Trump be elected, there’s already a congressional trap set for him if he were to try to end the war in Ukraine.

If President Trump were to withdraw from or pause financial support for the war in Ukraine in order to bring the conflict to a peaceful conclusion, "over the objections of career experts," it would amount to the same fake violation of budget law from the first impeachment, under markedly similar facts and circumstances.

Partisan Democrats would seize on the opportunity to impeach him once again.

It’s an interesting example of the topsy turvy world we now live in, in which the anti-war principle, something I’ve aligned with my entire life, is currently being fought for by the American right wing. I arrived at anti-war via Noam Chomsky, who is politically an anarchist! But here we are…

The full statement put out by Vance has currently got 23.3 million views on twitter, that’s not a small audience… so it begs a very important question: is the basis of Vance’s argument true? Thankfully, Vance has sourced every statement he has made, but unfortunately for us, at least three of those document exceed 300 pages each. As a journalist, this presents a problem, how much of my time is this really worth? Certainly not enough to read the terse findings of multiple government reports from four years ago. So perhaps we just take Vance’s word on this?

Senator Vance sourced his memo with plenty of very lengthy documents.

Obviously not. I have taken all the references from Vance’s statement and I’ve put them into this case at case.science. Even the documents exceeding 500 pages are happily vacuumed up into the AI reader which can help me - and now you - make sense of these rather long documents. What’s particularly helpful here is the ability to rapidly go from a birds eye view of these documents, right into detail.

Case hosted on case.science allows for detailed ‘cases’ of data to be collated and shared. This particular case contains documents relating to the impeachment of Donald Trump

So let’s get started with Vance’s first paragraph. He starts with a statement that Trump was wrongly impeached. Based on the references he shared in his statement, and therefore all the sources I added to the case, I asked case.science, “do you consider this a factual opinion, a valid opinion, or a lie?” Here is how the case.science responded:

So it’s a swing and a miss on the first point. But to be fair here - there is actually nothing in the case which could support the assertion that Trump was wrongly impeached. I don’t hold a view on that, and nor do I have the time to wade through documents, articles and interviews which might shed light on it, but by copy and pasting Vance’s initial statement into case, very quickly we can learn that the statement is only an opinion. If there is a case to be made that Trump was wrongfully/politically impeached, it would be very useful to put that together on Case so we can all explore the data that supports it.

Elsewhere in the statement, Vance says “The bill includes $1.6 billion for foreign military financing in Ukraine, and $13.7 billion for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. These funds expire on September 30, 2025”. It’s not immediately clear here what bill he’s talking about, but it wasn’t so difficult to dig it out. It’s here, and as an act of good will, I’ve added it to the case!

So, this money that’s signed off for Ukraine is where things get a little interesting. The document detailing the deal has this interesting statement, “$13.8 billion to allow Ukraine to re-arm itself through the purchase of weapons and munitions from the U.S. defense industrial base”

Did we read that right?

The aid for Ukraine is actually aid for the US military industrial complex!? The money flows out of the United States, to Ukraine who then presumably get some kind of weapons brochure, they take their pick of what’s available and the money flows back to US defence contractors?! Is that really correct?

Case.science agreed - Aid for Ukraine can also be understood as Aid for US weapons manufacturers.

I’m now way more sympathetic to Senator Vance’s argument. As readers of The Digger will know, show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. What is the incentive to end the conflict in Ukraine if there’s an entire industry siphoning off billions of dollars from it? There are billions of dollars being washed through Ukraine and right back into arms contractors in the United States, and of all the people, it’s Donald Trump who’s threatening to put and end to this.

Now - what about the idea that the impeachment was rooted in Trump defying career experts? When I asked the AI about this, using different combinations of government documents as the source material, the ‘party line’ I was read back was similar each time. The arguments being made ad-nauseum in the impeachment documents is that Trump did not act in the national interest when he suspended funds for Ukraine.

We’re now at a matter of perspective: ‘Democrat’ group think perhaps sees this as a wreckless president who defied congress for partisan gain over an issue they care deeply about. ‘Republican’ group think perhaps see this as opposition corruption coupled with shakey dealings of the President’s son in Ukraine. To really get to the bottom of this we would likely have to start building a case for both sides of the argument and see where we get.

But…

If we remove the partisan hat, our discovery about the strings attached aid allows us to see this in terms we’ve seen again and again over the past four years. There’s a huge industry dedicated to getting a profitable outcome, and regardless of the collateral damage of they may cause, they’ll find a way to get it. They’ll even manage to make some segment of society feel all morally accomplished for playing along.

Trump, the Democrats and all the moral grandstanding just obscure the huge magnetic force of the incentives. Is it possible that Trump would be impeached if he tried to stop the war in Ukraine? Perhaps, but the documents supplied don’t make a solid case for that. What’s more clear is that defying ‘experts’ on Ukraine (or perhaps any foreign policy matter) will land you in political hot water. It’s the system that defines what’s in the good of the nation, not the president. And since ‘the system’ is making millions of dollars prolonging the war, we can predict with high accuracy that any incentive to stop it will be made foggy.

The documents used for this article are all hosted on case here:

https://case.science/case/74

Can you find anything interesting in the documents using that tool? If you can, screen shot the response (with case.science included!) and share them. Comments open. Shares would be great. The Digger (and case.science) is barely being made possible by my paid subscribers who totally rock. Paid subscriptions are seriously appreciated.