Even the whistleblower will not bring Donald Trump any closer to impeachment

Editorial: The process is a difficult and lengthy one – and to remove a sitting president requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate

The Watergate-era phrase “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up that gets you” springs readily to mind in the latest scandal to embarrass Donald Trump.

The “crime” itself is perhaps not the most serious that Mr Trump has been accused of, either in his political or in his business career. Complications surrounding his private life, tax affairs, relationship with Vladimir Putin, employment issues and much else have come and, occasionally, gone. Some of his increasingly bizarre tweets might be legally actionable, that is if they made any sense. Morally speaking, Mr Trump can safely be called a repeat offender.

Of course, as is being alleged, personally inducing a foreign power – Ukraine in this case – to gather damaging material on the son of a political opponent (Hunter Biden, son of Joe) is reprehensible. It is also, more to the point, unlawful to trade such intelligence for US tax dollars. Hence the calls for impeachment. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives and the nearest thing the Democrats have to a leader, has picked her moment.

There is plenty to pick over in the now published text of the whistleblower’s complaint, and more will follow when the transcript of the telephone call between President Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the former comedian elected in May as president of Ukraine, materialises. According to Mr Trump it was a “beautiful conversation”, but thus far only fragments and a summary has been made public. It seems inevitable that, given enough time and determination, the full gorgeous record will find its way into the public domain and the hands of Mr Trump’s opponents.

That will probably be bad enough, but now a second layer has been added the scandal – the official cover-up. As usual in the American securocracy, intersecting as it does the Trump White House, lines of command and responsibility are unclear. The central allegation appears to be that White House lawyers ordered the precise transcript of the phone call to be suppressed, and thus buried evidence that could incriminate Mr Trump in a high crime and misdemeanour, that is to say an impeachable offence – obstruction of justice.

A secondary question concerns what happened to the anonymous whistleblower’s original allegations about wrongdoing. The acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, should have sent the allegations to congress within seven days, but did not do so. Why?

A third, most recent one is what Mr Trump had in mind when he made these comments not intended to be made public: “I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information, because that’s close to a spy … You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Some lawyers might conclude that that amounts to intimidation of a witness, a further offence.

As things stand, six congressional committees are investigating the Zelensky affair, and their efforts will be unrelenting. Adam Schiff, chair of the House intelligence committee, says that the whistleblower has provided them with a “roadmap” for their inquiries.

Meanwhile, true to form, Mr Trump tries to dismiss the whole business as fake news, and the whistleblower as a spy/traitor or some sort of Democrat agent. Even if true, none of this would amount to a legal defence. This time, Mr Trump may have to do more than keep up the personal abuse on his tormentors to get away with whatever he may have done.

Still, the chances of a successful impeachment, with his removal from office and replacement by Vice President Pence are remote. The process is a necessarily difficult and lengthy one in any case, and to remove a sitting president requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. On the only two previous occasions an impeachment has proceeded that far – for Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998, party political loyalties ensured the case failed. In the highly partisan atmosphere in Washington today there seems even less chance of Mr Trump being kicked out.

The scope for damaging the president is there, but, as has been discovered before, often charges and allegations are simply disbelieved among the Trump base. Trump’s supporters either do not believe the reports, or they question the motives of those behind the stories, or they don’t care in any case. Much more important for them is what happens to the economy, and whether the president manages to bring back the jobs, build the wall and curb immigration in the way he promised in 2016. On all of these counts, the jury is still out.