Donald Trump's rampant misconduct in office and lifetime of criminal transgressions have left him, his lawyers, and his administration no choice but to declare him the ultimate unimpeachable, unindictable, uninvestigable, above-the-law sovereign. That's what White House counsel Pat Cipollone effectively did in a letter late Tuesday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which he dismissed the entire House impeachment inquiry as “illegitimate.”
"Given that your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections, the Executive Branch cannot be expected to participate in it," Cipollone wrote in a formal missive that nonetheless was nothing short of waving a giant middle finger at House Democrats.
Cipollone's letter, notably, has been disparaged by everyone who knows anything about the law and isn't a total partisan hack. MSNBC analyst Glenn Kirschner called it simply "the worst written work product ever coming out of the White House." The Washington Post's Paul Waldman said the document would "live on in infamy from this day forward as evidence of how profoundly Trump corrupted the office of the president and everyone around him." As Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, told Waldman, a blanket refusal to provide any information to Congress has "no place in a properly working constitutional democracy.”
And that is exactly the point. Trump has simply proven to be too corrupt, too criminal, and too unscrupulous to persist as leader of any functioning democracy, and so his White House and GOP allies are trying to break the democracy. They have done that through a series of bogus claims both in court and in response to Congress that declare Trump entirely off limits both politically and legally. In court, they argue that Trump cannot be indicted because the proper avenue for holding a president accountable is the constitutional impeachment process. And since a president cannot be indicted, he therefore cannot be investigated. But back on the Hill, Trump and Co. say he cannot be impeached because the process is too inherently political—meaning there is absolutely no avenue of accountability other than the upcoming election that Trump is actively working to illegally rig in his favor.
What this comes down to is the fact that Trump's actions are unequivocally indefensible, and so he has simply decided to lock down the Pandora's box of damning information that was opened the moment that news of a credible and urgent whistleblower complaint first came to light. Every new piece of information that has flowed from that revelation—including the rough transcript of Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the release of the actual complaint, and the texts exchanged by U.S. diplomats surrounding Trump's demands for investigations of the Bidens—has proven to be a disaster for Trump, simultaneously boosting support for the impeachment inquiry and steeling Democrats' resolve.
So Trump is just shutting it all down. He simply cannot afford to let anymore sunlight shine on his efforts to extort foreign allies for his own political gain and at great risk to U.S. national security. His actions were an all-out betrayal of the country and an inherent disqualifier in any functional democracy.