Impeachment tourists

Meet the Trump impeachment tourists

In a half-filled room, a mishmash of activists, retirees, history buffs, interns, clergy and vacationers had come to watch impeachment unfold.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN

The leather chairs were more than half empty. The public spectators — a mishmash of activists, retirees, history buffs, interns, clergy and vacationers, smelling of cologne and cigarettes — sat blended together in the polarized stew that is America in 2019.

It was an unremarkable scene, given how remarkable the occasion was. In a first-floor room in the ornate Longworth House Office Building, the House Judiciary Committee was voting on articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump — an event that has only happened to three presidents in American history.

Such apathy would have seemed unthinkable just five weeks prior, when people lined up hours ahead of time to get a chance to witness the Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings. Even those who couldn’t score a seat stood outside in the bustling hallways, watching on their phones and laptops as a procession of witnesses testified just feet away about the president’s Ukraine pressure campaign.

But while presidential impeachments may be a rarity in Washington, it’s still no guarantee of big crowds at the Capitol.

Back in 1868, even as the Senate issued its first-ever gallery passes to control the flow of people who wanted to witness Andrew Johnson’s trial, reporters bemoaned the sluggish pace, saying they'd rather be back covering the Battle of Gettysburg. During Watergate, just a handful of public seats were available for the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Richard Nixon, which caused scores of people to make a beeline for the more spacious Supreme Court chambers as lawyers grappled over the president’s secret White House tapes. And while spectators for Bill Clinton’s Senate acquittal some 130 years later also needed special tickets, that was only after the House first voted for the Democratic president’s removal in a chamber where only half the public seats were filled.

As for Trump, who famously exaggerated the size of the crowd at his own inauguration, the verdict is still out on whether consistently large hordes will turn out to watch in person as the former “Apprentice” star fights to save his made-for-TV presidency. The fight will enter a new phase Wednesday when the House is expected to formally impeach Trump, pushing the battlefront to the Senate for a final confrontation next month in the form of an impeachment trial.

Among the early birds who lined up last Thursday before 7:30 a.m. (just in case!) to see Trump’s articles of impeachment approved was an ex-cop from California who had attended the Clinton impeachment proceedings two decades ago and whose wife happily booked him a cross-country plane ticket to see history unfold again.

“She wanted to get rid of me for a week and, you know, I wanted to do this,” said Tracy Molfino, who noted the trip had the advantage of also visiting a daughter and grandkids who lives in the D.C. area. “I've got plenty of time.”

So did many of the other members of the public whose attendance at the impeachment proceedings meant sitting sandwiched among a line of television cameras and scores of hunched up reporters pecking away at their laptops. It takes a certain kind of person to make the trek to Capitol Hill and sit through a congressional debate packed not just with partisan jabs but also a plethora of delays, interjections, points of order and requests to strike words from the record. It also means dodging the Capitol Police, who seemed to be lurking everywhere and quickly moved to shut down any apparent violations of their policies against picture-taking, eating or sleeping.

“I’m not sleeping!” snapped an elderly man who on multiple occasions could be seen with his eyes closed as the Judiciary panel methodically debated yet another never-going-to-pass amendment that would have removed one of the two impeachment articles against Trump.

Being in the room had its perks. Any spectators in the first row got an especially up-close look at the lawmakers who don’t serve on the committee but nonetheless obliged themselves of their own reserved spots to witness the debate from right next to the public section. Early on in the Thursday morning proceedings, for example, any attentive observer might have picked up part of the conversation happening within earshot when the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, came down from the rostrum to chat with two of Trump’s most vocal congressional allies: Reps. Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Lee Zeldin of New York.

Then there are those who have been there since well before the Ukraine scandal exploded into the news.

Chris and Roberta Reed, twin sisters who moved to D.C. a couple years ago to help their parents, have been fixtures for more than a year at many of the court proceedings connected to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

They started out attending Paul Manafort’s trial in Alexandria, Va., and then came back after his conviction and subsequent guilty plea when the former Trump campaign chairman learned he’d be going to prison for 7 1/2 years. They returned when Greg Craig, the former Obama White House counsel, stood trial over a false-statement charge. And they were there when longtime Trump political whisperer Roger Stone was tried and convicted for lying to Congress and witness tampering.

They got to know lawyers on both sides and met the defendants’ families. They picked up nuances in the dueling legal strategies.

“It just added so much more depth than what you get on TV and in the newspaper when you just see snippets of the events,” said Roberta Reed, an information technology and finance professional who has worked for Philip Morris, Kraft Foods and George Washington University.

And their visits have extended to Congress, where they caught the action in the room when former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski jousted with the Judiciary Committee Democrats during a September hearing.

That made their attendance during last Thursday's debate over the impeachment articles something of a capstone to their year-and-a-half of witnessing up close the fallout of Trump norm-shattering behavior.

“It’s fascinating to see the interaction of the people off the screen. You don’t realize how many times congressman leave their seats to talk to individuals in the hearing room and sometimes leave the back of the hearing room,” said Chris Reed, a management consultant who worked for Apple and GE.

In an era of hyperbolic cable news, several other audience members said they relished the idea of taking in the hearings for themselves to avoid the partisan filter.

“Watching it in person, I mean, there's no spin on it,” said Andrew Chavez, a pro-Trump evangelical minister from Paso Robles, Calif., who was in town with his wife and three kids to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. “You know, there’s no soundbites where it makes the one thing look worse than the other. You gets to see it straight off.”

The Chavez family had another reason for their visit. They homeschool their children, and catching Congress in the middle of impeachment pretty much made for the coolest civics class ever.

“I’ve definitely never seen anything like this in like a textbook,” said 14-year-old Jacob Chavez.

For others, it was simply an opportunity to be part of history.

“This doesn’t happen often, obviously,” said Tia Rodriguez, a House intern from Tampa whose job answering phones, drafting memos and researching legislation was approaching its end. “And the fact that they announced it while I was here, the fact that it’s going on while I’m here, it just feels surreal almost. I know I’m going to look back on this in like 10, 20 [years] and telling my grandkids I was there for when they showed it on TV. I was there for that.”

Trump’s impeachment has brought out the die-hards too, like Ruti Regan, a pro-impeachment rabbi who has been traveling back and forth from Boston for several weeks to watch the House proceedings. She said she’d gotten into most of the hearings, though on occasion she misjudged the public interest and was left watching from the hallway on C-SPAN.

The highlight of her experience: The moment that spectators — including herself — rose to their feet to applaud former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch at the conclusion of her five-plus hour testimony.

“You can't do that sitting alone in your room in front of a computer,” said Regan. “So I think it's important for people who are able to come to come, because there's something about bearing witness in person.”

These being impeachment hearings, and the president being Trump, many of the people who made it into the public gallery came with deeply personal political views.

Barry Wheeler, who served as a legislative assistant assigned to the Judiciary Committee in 1974 back during Watergate, said he’d traveled to Capitol Hill from his home in Eugene, Ore., to both visit a daughter who lives in the area and also “to get a feeling for the whole gestalt around the hearings.”

Asked to compare the two historic impeachment clashes, Wheeler said the House investigation into Nixon involved a “much more cordial” relationship among the two parties, including “very courageous Republicans” who crossed party lines to eventually support the president’s removal.

“There was openness to reason, to evidence, to facts,” he said. “And this is very distressing.”

Right behind him in line was Gerard Machado, a semi-retired Californian who also came to see the “living history” of impeachment. He backed Ohio Gov. John Kasich during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, but now supports Trump and opposes impeachment.

“It's a shame that three quarters of the impeachment hearings or attempts or whatever you want to call it have all occurred in my lifetime,” Machado said. He fretted that “the collegiality of the government is disintegrating,” and warned that the country itself was fraying.

“We may be close — in fact I've been saying this for about a year and a half — it's almost like a civil war,” he said. “But it's not over that specific issue of slavery in the past, or the North versus the South, but a political belief rather than be able to come to a compromise.”

And everyone’s to blame, Machado insisted. “Unfortunately, both sides, my political party as well as the opposite, sometimes dig their heels in more than they should.”

Chris Reed, the Mueller legal fanatic, said she picked up on the differing points of view among her fellow spectators by listening to their reactions as the lawmakers debated the impeachment articles.

“People sat behind us with their red hats on and they had the exact opposite reactions to what was being said then I had,” she wrote in an email after attending several hours of the Thursday debate. “It really shows how split this nation was/is!”

She was referring to two men decked out in pro-Trump T-shirts and hats and who said they’d raised money online to help make their trip to Washington so they could report as social media journalists on the hearings. One of the men, Will Johnson, on his biography says that he’s the West Coast correspondent for the conspiracy theory website InfoWars.

In an interview, Johnson said he thought physically attending Trump’s impeachment felt like something of a dud. “Here, it’s like really dry until they start getting into it,” he said. “It still seems a little more exciting on TV. Maybe because I could walk away and come back.”

Yet he couldn’t help but marvel at the thin crowds and meager line.

“I’m surprised it’s not out the door right now,” Johnson said. “I mean, they’re getting ready to impeach the president of the United States.”

Indeed, public attendance is expected to go back up in the new year when Trump’s fate is put before the Senate. That’s where the trial will happen, with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts presiding. So far, there’s been no official word yet on whether public seating will be reserved and if so how tickets will be dispersed.

Back during the Andrew Johnson impeachment, the decision to require passes for spectators to attend the Senate trial came in the aftermath of what transpired in the House. Media reports from the time describe throngs of men and women spectators streaming into the Capitol, snatching seats from reporters who were trying to cover the proceedings and filling up every other available space. Washington police were even called in as reinforcements.

The long arc of history was on Molfino’s mind when the ex-California police officer made a quick change to his itinerary after his first day attending a Trump impeachment hearings.

“The next morning, I went directly to the Archives to take a look at the Constitution and just stand there and think about it,” he said. “This is the very reason why they wrote it.”

“So the process, it’ll live on, we’ll live on,” he added. “Hopefully.”