Ari Melber Tells Trump That He Can Stonewall All He Wants, But The Facts Will Bring Him Down

In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, Donald Trump’s White House threw a tantrum about the ongoing impeachment inquiry, but no amount of presidential whining will alter the damning facts.

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The president and his dwindling team of defenders know this, of course. It’s why they’re waging war on the impeachment process right now instead of cooperating.

But as MSNBC’s Ari Melber pointed out on Tuesday, the stonewalling from the White House won’t change the cold, hard facts that we already know. In fact, it only indicates that the president and his team know they are toast.

“All of this suggests that the facts don’t help him when it comes to this alleged abuse of power,” the MSNBC host said. “It suggests the evidence will hurt him. It suggests he fears the receipts will bury him.”

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Melber said:

Today’s battle over testimony follows a string of officials that the White House is preventing from cooperating with these lawful subpoenas. You see them here. This goes even beyond Ukraine. Did you know that just today, Trump’s DOJ lawyers were in court trying to hold back key information from Mueller’s Russia probe? Now, there are some valid reasons and privileges for holding back information, to be sure. But as we’ve been reporting, the White House is now trying to hold back – what you see on your screen – all this information across basically every major department. And whether or not Congress is right to warn that that could technically be obstruction, that’s a debate. Think about, before you even get to obstruction, the most obvious problem for Donald Trump here. All of this suggests that the facts don’t help him when it comes to this alleged abuse of power. It suggests the evidence will hurt him. It suggests he fears the receipts will bury him. We’re not just reporting on that as an inference. I pressed this very point to the president’s lawyer himself, Jay Sekulow, in our interview last night. … That is the privilege argument. And that does not explain hiding this evidence from so many different people, let alone Ambassador Sondland today, who, and you don’t need me to tell you this, but just to be as logical as possible, who is obviously not the president. So you don’t have that presidential privilege argument. And his texts were trying to defend Trump. If you’re afraid of the guy who is defending you, if you’re afraid of what the guy defending you is going to say, well that means you’re more afraid of something beyond just encroachments on presidential legal privileges. You may be afraid of the receipts. Or, as Aubrey Drake Graham says so simply, ‘What’s that? Facts?’

Trump can’t hide from the facts

Donald Trump is hoping that if he stonewalls long enough and continues to relentlessly attack the impeachment process – since he has no defense against the actual substance of the impeachment inquiry – that this will all eventually go away.

But this is all so simple and it bears constant repeating: The president of the United States sought to extort a foreign power into meddling in the 2020 election.

These aren’t baseless allegations being peddled by far-left Democrats or some “deep state” spies. This is conduct Trump has already admitted to on live television, and it’s all laid out in a “transcript” released by the White House.

There is no question that Donald Trump will continue to throw a tantrum about this impeachment inquiry – it’s just who he is. But it won’t change the facts driving the inquiry – the facts that, as Ari Melber said on Tuesday, will ultimately bury him.

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Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.