We Still Don’t Know What Happened Between Trump and Russia
In the 1999 Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania declined to vote guilty or not guilty, instead announcing his verdict as “not proven,” an old Scottish legal formulation. (Chief Justice William Rehnquist opted to record the vote as not guilty.)
Twenty years later, with impeachment again in the air, that phrase comes in handy. In Washington today, the House Intelligence Committee heard testimony in an inquiry into President Donald Trump’s actions in the Ukraine scandal. Across town, a jury found Trump’s old friend Roger Stone guilty on seven counts of federal crimes, related to a previous scandal involving Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Stone’s trial is a sort of postscript to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that the president obstructed justice. The Stone trial suggests that a better way to summarize the alleged Trump-Russia connection might be: .
