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Lets start this piece with two provocative claims. The first, which is hotly contested by legal experts, is that President Donald Trump broke the law when he ordered an airstrike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a powerful Iranian paramilitary leader.

The second claim is that it doesnt matter.

Part of the reason why the legal question is academic is that, even if we assume the strike on Soleimani was illegal, its hardly clear whether the courts can do anything to remedy an illegal assassination. Its not like a judge could issue a writ of resurrection that restores life to the people killed in this American airstrike. And federal courts cant hold a criminal trial of anyone involved in the Soleimani attack unless an increasingly partisan Justice Department agrees to prosecute. Nor is a judicial order likely to calm tensions between the United States and Iran.

The killing of Soleimani is the latest in a series of escalations and retaliations that began with Trumps decision to pull out of the nuclear deal former President Barack Obama struck with Iran and includes Iranian attacks on American assets within the Middle East. Not long after the attack, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Irans supreme leader, threatened revenge.

Trump, meanwhile, threatened massive retaliation if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets. He claimed the US would target 52 Iranian sites some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture (intentionally targeting historic monuments, works of art, or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples is a war crime).

Although there are some theoretical actions the courts could take to deescalate this conflict its at least possible, for example, for the courts to order the military not to conduct future attacks on Iranian leaders without seeking congressional authorization such judicial intervention is unlikely.

The federal judiciary frequently defers to the presidents decisions on national security, even when those decisions shock the conscience far more than the attack on Soleimani. Just think about the Supreme Courts decision to uphold detention centers for Japanese Americans in Korematsu v. United States (1944), or its more recent ruling upholding Trumps travel ban despite the presidents own statements indicating that the real purpose of the ban was to target Muslims.

If the courts cant serve as a check on the executive branch, Congress could certainly step in. The Supreme Court established very early in American history, in Little v. Barreme (1804), that Congress may impose statutory limits on the presidents war powers. Congress could also take the more drastic step of removing Trump via impeachment if it determines he acted illegally.

But any congressional intervention would require the Republican-controlled Senate to play ball, and GOP lawmakers appear to be lining up behind Trump. As Scott Anderson, former legal adviser to the State Department and a current fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told me, The only meaningful check is a political one, meaning elections or maybe impeachment.

With impeachment unlikely to succeed, that leaves the 2020 election as the last remaining check on Trump. As a practical matter, the US has few enforceable checks against a reckless commander in chief. Unlike many of our peer nations, the US doesnt even have the ability to call an early election or replace our chief executive if they lose majority support in the legislature.

Theres a great deal of disagreement among legal experts regarding when a president may lawfully target another nation. Some believe that, with rare exceptions, Congress must vote to permit such a strike. Others take a more permissive approach, arguing the president should be able to act to prevent sudden attacks on US personnel.

Part of the reason this area of the law is unclear is that the courts are often reluctant to intervene in matters of national security. Neither the members of this court nor most federal judges begin the day with briefings that may describe new and serious threats to our nation and its people, the Supreme Court explained in 2008. Judges are often hyperaware of the fact that they know very little about matters of national security, so they typically defer to the elected branches in cases involving sensitive and weighty interests of national security and foreign affairs.

The stakes in national security cases are high, and no judge wants to hand down an order that prevents the government from stopping a terrorist attack. As Rachel VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School and former legal adviser to senior US military commanders, told me, Courts have been deferential because they dont want to screw it up and not have a country anymore.

One consequence of judicial deference is that there is fairly little case law explaining when the executive branch can and cannot take military action. Instead, most of the legal opinions in this space were drafted by executive branch officials. According to Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School who led the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel during the second Bush administration, Practically all of the law in this area has been developed by executive branch lawyers justifying unilateral presidential uses of force.

These lawyers, Goldsmith warned, view unilateral presidential power very broadly.

I heard similar concerns from Eugene Fidell, an expert on national security law who teaches at Yale Law School. We have drifted too far from the shore in terms of the limits that the Constitution imposes, he told me. The Constitution, Fidell argued, requires a declaration of war unless you have an attack or an imminent attack on the United States.

Congress, he added, has not declared war on Iran. And we dont know of any imminent threat to the United States.

VanLandingham, meanwhile, was more sympathetic to the view that the Soleimani strike is legal. She was also more sanguine about the idea that executive branch officials have taken the lead in interpreting much of our national security law. Many of these officials, she pointed out, are service members. VanLandingham further argued that the military tends to be risk averse because it is their people who are going to die.

She agreed with Fidell that the president may respond to an imminent attack or, as she put it, The president has inherent authority to repel sudden attack. But she also emphasized that the executive branch has consistently understood this authority to extend to attacks on American service members or diplomats overseas, and that Congress has not stepped in to prevent the executive from exercising such authority.

We dont know the intel. We dont know how imminent this attack would be, VanLandingham was careful to point out. But if the US had intelligence showing that Soleimani was about to execute an attack on American personnel, that would be sufficient to justify the airstrike. (The question of whether the US had such intelligence is disputed, even within the administration.)

Alternatively, the Trump administration might look to nearly 20-year-old laws authorizing military force during the Bush administration. In a letter to House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Eliot Engel last June, a State Department official suggested that 2001 and 2002 statutes authorizing military force against al-Qaeda and in Iraq might permit military force to be used against Iran when necessary to defend US or partner forces engaged in counterterrorism operations or operations to establish a stable, democratic Iraq.

But any claim that these old statutes permit an attack on Iran, according to Anderson, stretches the law to its furthest limits. The Iranian regime, he noted, is seen as apostates by al-Qaeda. He was also dubious that the US could open hostilities against a new nation based on an authorization of military force that dealt with different circumstances nearly two decades ago.

Nevertheless, Anderson agreed that the courts were unlikely to step in, and he warned that the statutes themselves are broad enough that it is hard to say whether the Soleimani attack is expressly prohibited by either the 2001 or the 2002 law.

One of the striking things about much of American national security law is that it vests extraordinary trust in the president. The 2001 authorization of military force, for example, provides that the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Does this mean Trump could announce that he has determined Canada planned 9/11 and claim legal authorization to invade our northern neighbor? When I put this question to some of the experts I spoke with, they recoiled from the suggestion that Congress accidentally authorized a future war with Canada. But its hard to find language in the statute itself that prohibits such a war.

A similar issue arose in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the travel ban case. One of the legal issues at question was whether Trump had the power to cut off travel from various nations under a statute that provides that:

Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Hawaii ruling, this statute exudes deference to the president in every clause. He wasnt wrong.

So much of Americas national security law was drafted on the assumption that the president will be a person of honor and integrity or, for that matter, a person of basic competence and judgment who will act to protect national security, even when many of us might disagree with their decisions.

Though VanLandingham takes a relatively broad view of the presidents ability to use military force, she insisted that something can be lawful but awful. Congress delegated vast powers to the president on the assumption that the White House will set up a process ensuring that the right information flowed to the appropriate decision-makers and that the president will make the best decision on hand.

But how can you trust a president who was just impeached for using Americas national security architecture to try to undermine a political rival? What is our system supposed to do with a president who, in the words of one recently retired Republican Congress member, is psychologically, morally, intellectually, and emotionally unfit for office?

This president, in VanLandinghams words, doesnt have the best track record for putting the best interests of national security first. Yet Trump still enjoys the same broad powers and massive deference enjoyed by presidents who did act in good faith.

Our country has, quite self-consciously, given one person, the president, an enormous sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war, Goldsmith, the Harvard professor, tweeted. That is our system: one person decides.

In such a system, we cannot rely on the courts to save us from the president, nor can we expect this Congress to do so. There is only one remedy remaining, and that remedy cannot be used until November.

Read the original:
Iran war: The only check on Trump is the 2020 election - Vox.com

Qassem Soleimani was not just an enemy of the United States and the peoples of the Middle Easthe was an enemy to many of our European allies, too.

Hundreds of European combatants died during the Iraq War. As a percentage of their population, the United Kingdom deployed more troops per citizen to Iraq than any other country, including the United States. Spain and the Netherlands deployed 1,300 troops each, Italy 3,200, and South Korea 3,600. Australias 2,000 troop contribution might look small, but it was 5 percent of the countrys active-duty personnel. The list goes on.

The general public seems to have forgotten that the Iraq War was a multilateral effort, with allies from across the world were involvedeven though very few of them had direct and immediate interests in Iraq. Nevertheless, these allies participated, some in small numbers, and others in larger ones, and they all paid human, financial, and political prices for their participationprices which Soleimani made sure would be as high as possible.

More recently, our European allies have had their societies and politics disrupted by the flow of Syrian civil war refugees, which was also a Soleimani project.

And yet, despite the fact that our allies had an interest in seeing Soleimani dead, their responses have been muted, at best. Why? Because they neither trust Donald Trump to act prudently throughout escalation, nor like the man.

They have good reasons, on both counts.

Podcast January 09 2020

On today's Bulwark Megacast, Sarah Longwell and Ben Parker join host Charlie Sykes to discuss the President's Iran speec...

From Japan to Australia to Germany to the United Kingdom, the response has been exactly the same: Please dont escalate!

Boris Johnsons statement was the closest to an endorsement of Trumps decision, in which Johnson said that he doesnt lament Soleimanis death. Frances minister for Europe came closest to an outright condemnation, saying that we have woken up to a more dangerous world. She continued by saying that Frances role is not to take sides.

Actually, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abes response was probably more unequivocal. Abe had been trying to mediate between the United States and Iran, and he said that he was humiliated by the strike.

Thus far, there are no reports of any direct talks about the Soleimani operation between Trump and foreign leaders. But Vladimir Putin is trying to make the most out of the situation by driving a wedge between the United States and its allies. He has invited German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Russia to talk about the situation and had a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron about the matter.

And instead of cultivating our allies, the Trump administration is making Putins job easier. Reflecting on the situation, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complained that the Europeans havent been as helpful as I wish that they could be. The Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did, what the Americans did, saved lives in Europe as well.

Who would have thought that three years spent constantly antagonizing Americas allies would result in those allies being not as helpful as America wishes?

Galaxy brain.

The hallmark of Trumps approach to foreign policy has been showing contempt for Americas allies and an affinity for Americas enemies.

He has made a habit of kicking Europeans left and rightmost recently leaving a NATO summit in the middle because his feelings were hurt. He openly admires Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un while imposing tariffs on our European allies.

Even in the conduct of the Soleimani operation itself, Trump treated our allies with contempt. The British foreign secretary says that he found out about the strike from the news. This was an operation that could have put British and other European citizens and diplomats in the region at risk and Trump did not even give Boris Johnsons government a heads up?

And if the Trump administration was worried that Americas closest ally might have warned the Iranians about the operation, then Soleimani was the least of our problems.

When it comes to Iran, nearly every action from this administration has been carried out over the objections of our European allies.

Geopolitics, like all politics, is a team sport and requires making compromises. America cannot delegate its national interest to Europe, but neither can it affront out allies without imposing costs.

Allies often need to compromise with one another, and goodwill and niceties go a long way in making these compromises less painful. Alliance management is one of the most, if not the most, difficult task in diplomacy. Donald Trumps to hell with allies and why are our allies not more helpful brand of diplomacy doesnt actually put America first. It makes Americas strategic situation more dangerous and uncertain.

It is often said that Donald Trump views the world not like a politician, but like a gangster. He believes that the weak owe the strong, and that people either cooperate with his wishes, or become targets of his ire.

The world can work that way, but only for a time. Eventually, the complexities of politics assert themselves. Trumps administration has been incapable of making meaningful compromise with Americas allies and now, at a moment of instability, our allies are nowhere to be found.

Thats bad enough. Whats worse is that our president and his secretary of state seem surprised.

More here:
Trumps Treatment of U.S. Allies Comes Home to Roost - The Bulwark

WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday night, becoming only the third American chief executive to be formally charged under the Constitutions ultimate remedy for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The historic vote split along party lines, much the way it has divided the nation, over a charge that the 45th president abused the power of his office by enlisting a foreign government to investigate a political rival ahead of the 2020 election. The House then approved a second charge, that he obstructed Congress in its investigation.

The articles of impeachment, the political equivalent of an indictment, now go to the Senate for trial. If Trump is acquitted by the Republican-led chamber, as expected, he still would have to run for reelection carrying the enduring stain of impeachment on his purposely disruptive presidency.

The president is impeached, Pelosi declared after the vote. She called it great day for the Constitution of the United States, a sad one for America that the presidents reckless activities necessitated us having to introduce articles of impeachment.

Trump, who began Wednesday tweeting his anger at the proceedings, pumped his fist before an evening campaign rally in Battle Creek, Michigan, boasting of tremendous support in the Republican Party.

By the way, he told the crowd, it doesnt feel like Im being impeached.

The mood in the House chamber shifted throughout the day as the lawmakers pushed toward the vote. Democrats spun lofty speeches, framing impeachment as what many said was their duty to protect the Constitution and uphold the nations system of checks and balances. Republicans mocked and jeered the proceedings, as t hey stood by their partys leader, who has frequently tested the bounds of civic norms.

The start of Trumps Michigan rally was delayed as the voting was underway in Washington but once he took the stage he boasted of accomplishments and complained bitterly about his foes for two hours, defiant rather than contrite. He called Pelosi names and warned the impeachment would be politically disastrous for Democrats. He has called the whole affair a witch hunt, a hoax and a sham, and sometimes all three.

Pelosi, once reluctant to lead Democrats into a partisan impeachment, gaveled both votes closed, seeing the effort to its House conclusion, even at risk to her majority and her speakership.

No Republicans voted for impeachment, and Democrats had only slight defections on their side. The votes for impeachment were 230-197-1 on the first charge, 229-198-1 on the second. To mark the moment, voting was conducted manually with ballots.

While Democrats had the majority in the House to impeach Trump, a vote of two-thirds is necessary for conviction in the Republican-controlled Senate. The trial is expected to begin in January, but Pelosi was noncommittal about sending the House articles over, leaving the start date uncertain. Senate leaders are expecting to negotiate details of the trial, but Democrats are criticizing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for saying he wont be an impartial juror and already knows the outcome.

What Pelosi called a sad and solemn moment for the country, coming in the first year after Democrats swept control of the House, unfolded in a caustic daylong session that showcased the nations divisions.

The House impeachment resolution laid out in stark terms the articles of impeachment against Trump stemming from his July phone call when he asked the Ukrainian president for a favor to announce he was investigating Democrats including potential 2020 rival Joe Biden.

At the time, Zelenskiy, new to politics and government, was seeking a coveted White House visit to show backing from the U.S. as he confronted a hostile Russia at his border. He was also counting on $391 million in military aid already approved by Congress. The White House delayed the funds, but Trump eventually released the money once Congress intervened.

Narrow in scope but broad in its charges, the impeachment resolution said the president betrayed the nation by abusing his high office to enlist a foreign power in corrupting democratic elections, and then obstructing Congress oversight like no president in U.S. history.

President Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, it said.

Republicans argued that Democrats were impeaching Trump because they cant beat him in 2020.

Said Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah: They want to take away my vote and throw it in the trash.

But Democrats warned the country cannot wait for the next election to decide whether Trump should remain in office because he has shown a pattern of behavior, particularly toward Russia, and will try to corrupt U.S. elections again.

The president and his men plot on, said Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., of the Intelligence Committee that led the inquiry. The danger persists. The risk is real.

The outcome brings the Trump presidency to a milestone moment that has been building almost from the time the New York businessman-turned-reality-TV host unexpectedly won the White House in 2016 amid questions about Russian interference in the U.S. election.

Democrats drew from history, the founders and their own experiences, including as minorities, women and some immigrants to the U.S., who spoke of seeking to honor their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Rep. Lou Correa of California delivered his comments in English and Spanish asking God to unite the nation. In America, said Hakeem Jeffries of New York, no one is above the law.

Republicans aired Trump-style grievances about what Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko called a rigged process.

We face this horror because of this map, said Rep. Clay Higgins of Alabama before a poster of red and blue states. They call this Republican map flyover country, they call us deplorables, they fear our faith, they fear our strength, they fear our unity, they fear our vote, and they fear our president.

The political fallout from the vote will reverberate across an already polarized country with divergent views of Trumps July phone call when he asked Zelenskiy to investigate Democrats in the 2016 election, Biden and Bidens son Hunter, who worked on the board of a gas company in Ukraine while his father was the vice president.

Trump has repeatedly implored Americans to read the transcript of the call he said was perfect. But the facts it revealed, and those in an anonymous whistleblowers complaint that sparked the probe, are largely undisputed.

More than a dozen current and former White House officials and diplomats testified for hours in impeachment hearings. The open and closed sessions under oath revealed what one called the irregular channel of foreign policy run by Trumps personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, which focused on investigating the Bidens and alternative theories of 2016 election interference.

The question for lawmakers was whether the revelations amounted to impeachable offenses.

Few lawmakers crossed party lines.

On the first article, abuse of power, two Democrats, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who is considering switching parties to become a Republican, and Collin Peterson of Minnesota voted against impeaching Trump. On the second article, obstruction, those two and freshman Rep. Jared Golden of Maine voted against. Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is running for president, voted present on both.

Van Drew sat with Republicans. And Rep. Justin Amash, the Michigan conservative who left the Republican party and became an independent over impeachment, voted with Democrats. I come to this floor, not as a Republican, not as a Democrat, but as an American, he said.

Beyond the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, this first impeachment of the 21st century is as much about what the president might do in the future as what he did in the past. The investigation of Richard Nixon ended when he resigned rather than face the House vote over Watergate.

Rank and file Democrats said they were willing to lose their jobs to protect the democracy from Trump. Some newly elected freshmen remained in the chamber for hours during the debate.

Top Republicans, including Rep. Devin Nunes on the Intelligence Committee, called the Ukraine probe little more than a poor sequel to special counsel Robert Muellers investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mueller spent two years investigating the potential links between Moscow and the Trump campaign but testified in July that his team could not establish that Trump conspired or coordinated with Russia to throw the election. Mueller did say he could not exonerate Trump of trying to obstruct the investigation, but he left that for Congress to decide.

The next day, Trump called Ukraine. Not quite four months later, a week before Christmas, Trump was impeached.

__

Associated Press writers Laurie Kellman, Matthew Daly, Alan Fram and Andrew Taylor in Washington and Darlene Superville in Battle Creek, Michigan, contributed to this report.

See the article here:
President Donald Trump impeached by US House, 3rd in history - The Associated Press

This is a breezy overview of the greatest hits and multiple failures of Donald Trumps foreign policy. Its full of gossip, much of it old, like Rex Tillerson calling the president a fucking moron, and some of it new, like Trumps sudden command to evacuate all American civilians from Seoul after noticing how close the South Korean capital was to the border with North Korea.

As with many of the presidents more outrageous requests, his aides simply ignored that one until he forgot all about it.

Author Peter Bergen is a former CNN producer Osama Bin Laden was his big get now a vice-president at a Washington thinktank, a sometime professor and a full-time Washington operator.

He has a nice origin story for one of the crucial relationships underpinning the presidents Middle East policy: the tender bromance between presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, better known as MBS, who are famous for messaging each other on WhatsApp. Kushner, Bergen writes, confided to an administration colleague that the young prince rushed me in ways that no woman ever had.

Not even the CIAs verdict that MBS probably ordered the assassination of a US-resident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, has diminished the warmth between the Kushner-Trumps and the Saudi royals. Bergen reports that Trump interrogated both the Saudi king and his heir about the murder of the Washington Post columnist but there was really only one detail that gave the president any pause: the sound of the saw used to cut up the victims body, picked up by a Turkish recording device.

If there was a bone saw, that changes everything. I mean Ive never had to take a bone saw with me

Was there a bone saw? the president asked MBS. Because if there was a bone saw, that changes everything. I mean, Ive been in some pretty tough negotiations, Ive never had to take a bone saw with me.

The princes only response: he didnt know whether a saw had been used, because the victims body was given to a Syrian.

Just a random Syrian walking around in Turkey? Trump asked.

Trump spurned an offer from his CIA director to listen to the audio, because its a suffering tape. Eventually the White House let MBS off the hook, blaming his Rasputin advisor, Saud al-Qajhtani, instead.

There are plenty of details here to reinforce an impression of terrifying incompetence throughout the administration. During Michael Flynns extremely brief tenure as national security adviser, a staffer asked: What does an America First foreign policy look like?

Flynn had no idea, so he asked his deputy, KT McFarland, to answer.

Wow! Look at all these people, McFarland replied. I didnt know there were so many people on the NSC staff

A former Fox talking head, McFarland explained what she really needed: I am a TV person. Give me the script and tell me what to say.

Could the blowhard billionaire from Queens also enjoy a reputational shift?

Confidence in the National Security Council isnt enhanced by Bergens quotes from a memo by Rich Higgins, an early director of strategic planning. It explained that deep state Marxists were embedded in the American government, allied to Islamists in a conspiracy including the European Union and the United Nations.

This is a form of population control, the memo said, by certain business cartels in league with cultural Marxists/corporatists/Islamists who will leverage Islamic terrorism threats to justify the creation of a police state.

That was too much even for the America Firsters. Higgins lasted less than a year.

Trumps one real foreign policy success in his first two years in office was the freeing of 20 hostages held around the world. But there were many, many more failures, from his fruitless efforts to convince North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to give up his nukes (even after Trump confessed he had fallen in love with him) , to his disastrous decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, destroying the last, faint hopes of peace with the Palestinians.

Reliable judgement is the most important thing a nonfiction author can offer, and there isnt always a lot of that here. Former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is described as a heavy hitter, rather than one of Americas most notorious union busters, while the neocon Elliott Abrams, an unsuccessful candidate to be deputy secretary of state, is a sharp observer of the Middle East instead of an actual American war criminal, as Eric Alterman has described him more convincingly in the Nation.

Then theres the famous mercenary Eric Prince, whose detailed plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan Bergen says seemed just a little self-serving, since Prince was one of the largest players in the war contracting industry.

Despite the ample evidence of catastrophe, Bergen is shy about making any final judgements. After all, Harry Truman was initially derided as a onetime haberdasher and Reagan was similarly dinged as a former actor before both of their reputations, especially Trumans, soared when they left the White House.

Could the blowhard billionaire from Queens also enjoy a similar reputational shift? Bergen asks.

With Trump becoming the third American president to be impeached, because of one of his most outrageous foreign adventures, the answer is surely a resounding: No!

See original here:
Trump and his Generals review: a White House of foreign policy horrors - The Guardian

WASHINGTON"My simple test for all of us: What if President Barack Obama had engaged in precisely the same behavior?" former Republican Senator Jeff Flakeasked hisSenate GOP colleaguesin a passionate Washington Post op-ed Friday, regarding President Donald Trump's upcoming Senate impeachment trial.

"I know the answer to that question with certainty, and so do you," he continued."You would have understood with striking clarity the threat it posed, and you would have known exactly what to do."

Flake wrote to his former Senate colleagues that not only is Trump on trial, but "so are you. And so is the political party to which we belong."

Trump was impeached Wednesday on two articles abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Some time at the beginning of the new year, the articles are likely to reach the Senate to begin deliberationon whether to removethe president from office.

More: As Donald Trump's impeachment process moves to the Senate, here's how it will all work

Trump is accused of putting pressure on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to open investigations into 2020 front-runner and former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who had ties to a Ukrainian energy company.

Flake said Republicans could either "reasonably conclude" whetherTrump's "actions warrant his removal" or they do "not rise to the constitutional standard required for removal."

However, he wrote, "There is no small amount of moral hazard with each option, but both positions can be defended."

"But what is indefensible is echoing House Republicans who say that the president has not done anything wrong. He has," Flake continued.

"Personally, I have never met anyone whose behavior can be described as perfect, but so often has the president repeated this obvious untruth that it has become a form of dogma in our party," Flake penned."And sure enough, as dogma demands, there are members of our party denying objective reality by repeating the line that 'the president did nothing wrong.'"

"My colleagues, the danger of an untruthful president is compounded when the coequal branch follows that president off the cliff, into the abyss of unreality and untruth," the former Arizona senator continued.

More: Amid impeachment fight, Trump and Pelosi agree on Feb. 4 for State of the Union address

Flake was one of thePresidents most visible GOP criticsin the Senate andannounced he wouldnt be seeking re-electionin 2017, citing the nastiness of Trump-era politics.

The former senator previouslysaid that he thoughtat least 35 Republican senators would vote for Trump to be removed from office if they could vote in private.

His latest op-ed comes as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., continues to look at sending the articles of impeachment from the House to the Senate, while Senate leadership debates how the trial should proceed. And partisanship appears to be running deep.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. R-Ky., stated recently that he believes there is "zero chance" the GOP-led Senate will remove Trump from office, and that he was in "total coordination with the White House counsel."He desires a quick trial and has already voiced opposition to including new witnesses.

Rudy Giuliani: Democrats 'want to execute me'

Following a meeting on Thursday with Minority Leader ChuckSchumer, D-N.Y., McConnell reiterated his desire for a quick trial and voiced his opposition to including new witnesses. Schumer instead wants to hear from additional witnesses who did not testify before either of the previous House committees investigating the charges. The leaders have yet to be able to come to an agreement.

Flake wrote that he doesn't "envy" his old colleagues, "Youre on a big stage now. Please dont accept an alternate reality that would have us believe in things that obviously are not true, in the service of executive behavior that we never would have encouraged and a theory of executive power that we have always found abhorrent."

McConnell: 'As of today, we remain at an impasse' - latest updates

"If there ever was a time to put country over party, it is now. And by putting country over party, you might just save the Grand Old Party before its too late," Flake concluded.

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Flake to GOP: What would you do if it were Barack Obama, not Donald Trump? - USA TODAY