ONCE AGAIN, last week, we learned that shameless
Trump supporters will say anything to protect his orange hide, even when—with
the most minimal effort—it would be easy to prove them wrong.
Even worse, if that shameless Trump supporter
should happen to appear on Fox News, the host of the show on which that
shameless supporter plans to speak, won’t fact check the guest at all.
Normally, the host will prove to be
an idiot too.
One egregious example could be seen
last week, when former Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker lumbered onto the
set of Laura Ingraham’s show and took a seat. He was
there to assure Ingraham and her loyal viewers that impeaching the president
thirteen months before an election was “not good for the Republic.”
(Neither was having a president bend U.S. diplomacy to place
personal interests ahead of the country. But let that go.)
*
In any case, I think Whitaker meant we should let Trump slide and
maybe he could pardon himself and everyone else
involved.
Naturally, Ingraham agreed. She works for Fox News. She would have
agreed if Whitaker had claimed that Trump had the right to practice polygamy in
the White House.
“Mueller failed” in a previous effort to bring Trump down, she
says, contributing to the dialogue in that way. Whitaker says that “global
elitists” are out to get the president, too.
Finally, he offers up this gem. “Abuse
of power is not a crime. Let’s fundamentally boil it down, the
Constitution is very clear that there has to be some pretty egregious behavior.”
In other words, Trump can’t be impeached.
Of course, if one were to take time to study
the U.S. Constitution, one would know it’s not that simple. You
might assume a former Acting Attorney General would know that, too, unless you
remembered that Whitaker was a typical Trump appointee.
As for those of us who are not complete and utter nincompoops, we know the
Constitution says only that an individual can be impeached for treason, bribery
and “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
*
Even the Founding Fathers couldn’t make up
their minds what that phrase should be understood to include. James Madison,
speaking at the Constitutional Convention, on July 20, 1787, favored a clause
outlining the power of the legislative branch to impeach a president. He talked
of a need to guard against the chief executive in cases of “incapacity,
negligence or perfidy.”
For example, a future president, Mr. Madison
warned, “might betray his trust to foreign powers.”
Impeachments: “A good magistrate will not fear
them. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them. He hoped the maxim would
never be adopted here that the chief magistrate could do no wrong.”
Elbridge Gerry
According to Madison’s notes from the Convention,
Mr. Pinckney (he failed to specify which “Mr. Pinckney,” and there were two)
“did not see the necessity of impeachments.” Mr. Edmund Randolph admitted that
“impeachment was a favorite principle with him. Guilt wherever found,” he said,
“ought to be punished.” “In some respects the public money will be in his
hands,” Randolph warned of any president. The temptation might prove too much
for ordinary men. Ben Franklin explained that the power of impeachment would
serve as a guard against more violent methods of removing a chief executive.
Elbridge Gerry also “urged the necessity of impeachments. A good magistrate
will not fear them. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them. He hoped the
maxim would never be adopted here that the chief magistrate could do no wrong.”
(Or pardon himself, if he
did?????????????????????)
Madison is considered the "Father of the Constitution."
Gouverneur Morris spoke last for that day. His
“opinion had been changed by the arguments used in the discussion,” he said.
Morris noted, for example, that “Charles II was bribed by Louis XIV.”
The president, in the system the Founding
Fathers envisioned, might more easily be tempted by riches, since he (or she,
in modern parlance) had no hereditary interest in government, as did royals.
Morris continued,
He may be bribed by a greater interest to
betray his trust; and no one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the
danger of seeing the first Magistrate in forign [sic] pay, without being able
to guard against it by displacing him…The Executive ought therefore to be
impeachable for treachery.
Nine state delegations (at the Convention in
Philadelphia in 1787, each state had one vote) voted in favor of the
proposition: “Shall the Executive be removable on impeachments &c.?”
Only South Carolina voted “nay.”
Six days later, as delegates hammered out
details of the new plan, Madison noted that it was agreed the Constitution
should specify removal of a president for “malfeasance or neglect of duty.”
That wording seemed too broad and it was refined on August 6. It was now
proposed that the Constitution specify impeachment of the president for
“treason, bribery, or corruption.”
“Corruption” was also considered to be too
broad.
Whitaker should have known.
On
September 8, delegates revisited the matter. At that point, as the proposed new
plan of government read, the president was removable only for “treason or
bribery.” George Mason argued for adding, after bribery, the words: “or
maladministration.” His motion was seconded.
Madison
warned that such a definition was “so vague” as to put any president in the
hands of a hostile Senate. Mason, withdrew his suggestion and substituted the
phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The vote was 8-3, the motion carrying.
(At the time, Rhode Island was not represented; and all but one member of the
New York delegation, Alexander Hamilton, had gone home in a huff.)
Yet
another adjustment was deemed necessary; and “the vice-President and other
Civil officers of the U.S.” were added to the list of those impeachable. That
list already included members of the legislature and federal judges. A
suggestion that members of the Supreme Court be granted the final vote in cases
of impeachment—not the Senate—was defeated.
On
September 14 one last proposal was made. It was suggested that such wording be
added to the Constitution: “that persons impeached be suspended from office
until they be tried and acquitted.”
This
was voted down, eight states against, three in favor.
So,
the question of what the term “high crimes and misdemeanors” means was not in
any way as simple as Mr. Whitaker was trying to make it sound on an evening,
more than two hundred years later, on a Fox News show—to the benefit of his
lord and master, Donald J. Trump.
And
you might think a highly-paid Fox News pundit would have sniffed out the
subtleties and enlightened her viewing public.
*
You
would be wrong, of course. Ingraham had sorted through all the issues related
to the testimony of half-a-dozen witnesses who had appeared before the House
Intelligence Committee. You could not put anything past Ms. Ingraham! Oh, no!
Her keen nose had sniffed out the key to the impeachment inquiry. Her defense
of President Trump would be rock solid. Yes, she was bothered by the
single-spacing of Ambassador Taylor’s fifteen-page, opening statement.
Fifteen
pages! Single-spaced! It put her in mind of some doltish young job seeker,
turning in a crappy resume. This, she said, would be a person you would “never
want to hire.”
Spacing!
Really.
This
blogger happened to catch a recording of the Whitaker/Ingraham discussion afterwards. It made
him wonder.
Would
you prefer to hire Whitaker, based on a double-spaced resume, if he included
the time he served as chief
counsel for World Patent Marketing? That company was found guilty of bilking customers
out of $26 million.
As
for Trump, would you prefer to hire him, if he double-spaced and listed bone
spurs, Trump University—shut down as a scam—multiple bankruptcies and hush
money paid to silence women he had had sex with outside of marriage?
And
who hired Ingraham, a woman so dense as to try to defend Trump, based on the
idea that Taylor’s “spacing” was what mattered?
With
such thoughts dancing in his head, this blogger went to bed Friday and
slumbered in bliss.
Pigs are the fourth smartest animal. A reasonably intelligent pig could deduce that Trump is guilty.
The Ukraine Debacle
President Trump’s Ukraine problems have deeper, more widespread roots
even most well-informed Americans realize.
Remember, anytime Trump or his defenders claim the president was
interested in “fighting corruption” in Ukraine and that’s why he delayed military
aid, and why he wanted the Biden family investigated. His 2016 campaign
manager, Paul Manafort, was the picture of corruption. Manafort made millions
of dollars doing lucrative dirty work for Ukrainian oligarchs. Money was what
motivated Manafort.
The same can be said of Trump & Company at all times, in all
places and all situations.
Ethics are irrelevant.
BACKGROUND CORRUPTION
(The Trump 2016 Campaign)
3/21/17:
Hacked phone messages from one daughter of Paul Manafort to the other indicate the
caller believes their father has given them millions in “blood money.” Dad “has
no moral or legal compass....You know he has killed people in the Ukraine?
Knowingly,” she warns.
Going forward, never lose sight of the fact
that Donald J. Trump surrounds himself with all types of shady characters.
We shall insert Ukrainian or Russian flags to indicate
questionable behaviors and lies told by members of Team Trump 2016 and
Team Trump 2020.
*
3/22/17: The Associated Press reports that
Manafort worked with a Russian billionaire
and friend of Vladimir Putin. He was paid as much as $12.7 million to “advance
the interests of Russia.”
*
3/23/17: Manafort is revealed to have had ties to a bank
in Cyprus that laundered money for the Russians.
He used 15 different accounts and
operated 10 different shell companies on the island.
*
6/17/17: The New York Times reports that
Rick Gates, another member of the Trump campaign, is under
investigation. Gates, Manafort’s righthand man, survived his mentor’s
removal after Manafort was accused of taking millions from Ukrainian
leaders with ties to Russia.
During the time Manafort worked in the Ukraine, Gates would fly to
Moscow to conduct business in his name. He would sign documents, including
those related to shell companies in Cyprus, and funnel payments to
Manafort and into secret bank accounts. One client was Oleg Deripaska, who
had been denied a visa to the United States, because of ties to organized
crime.
“Everybody has tried to take these instances of anyone in the
Trump orbit doing something in Russia,” Gates insists, “and then
fast-forwarding however many years, and then saying it is evidence of collusion
with Russia over the election. It’s totally ridiculous and without merit.”
(Gates, like Manafort, is now a convicted felon.)
*
3/19/18: Cambridge Analytica,
which did extensive work for the Trump 2016 campaign, comes under
investigation. Channel 4 News in Britain, where Strategic Communications Laboratories Group (SCL), the parent
company of Cambridge is located, begins
investigating SCL practices. An undercover reporter “posing as a fixer for
a very wealthy client” from Sri Lanka is sent to seek help from Chief Executive
Alexander Nix of SCL. Here’s how Nix explains [punctuation follows the British
rule] the way his company operates.
In one exchange,
when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they
could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian
girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.
In another he said:
“We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign…we’ll
have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post
it on the Internet.”
Caught in bed with Ukrainian prostitutes, or caught with bribes in
their hands, politicians are readily blackmailed.
*
5/23/18: Bloomberg reports
that Manafort made 17 trips to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, just before joining Team Trump. The purpose of
those trips was to perform lobbying work for the Opposition Bloc, a pro-Russia,
Ukrainian political group.
The magnetic pull of crook to crook was at work.
Manafort had been advising a corrupt Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who, when toppled in a popular uprising in
2015, fled to…Russia.
Meanwhile, Gates had pled
guilty and agreed to cooperate with the Mueller team. Bloomberg explained:
Gates worked with
Manafort for a decade in Ukraine, serving as a loyal wingman. In his guilty
plea, Gates admitted that he helped Manafort set up dozens of undisclosed
offshore bank accounts, hide their work as unregistered agents for Ukraine and
launder millions of dollars into the U.S. Manafort convinced Gates to help him
create false documents for banks, urged his son-in-law to lie to a bank
appraiser and misled lenders about the use of loans, prosecutors charged.
*
THE BBC reports on another secret meeting involving Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer.
Cohen took a payment of $400,000 from representatives of the president
of the Ukraine.
Ukraine suddenly stopped helping Robert Mueller.
In return he set up a meeting with Trump at the White House in
June 2017. Afterwards, the government of Ukraine suddenly stopped helping
Robert Mueller pursue linksbetween pro-Russian Ukrainian interests
and Manafort.
The BBC reports: “One source in Kiev said [Ukrainian President] Mr
Poroshenko had given Trump ‘a gift’—making sure that Ukraine would find no more
evidence to give the US inquiry into whether the Trump campaign ‘colluded’ with
Russia.”
According to the reporter for the BBC, “Last week in Kiev, the
prosecutor in charge of the case, Serhiy Horbatyuk, told me: ‘There was never a
direct order to stop the Manafort inquiry but from the way our investigation
has progressed, it’s clear that our superiors are trying to create obstacles.’”
*
7/25/18: Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s
ambassador to the U.S., says that during their Helsinki summit Trump and
Putin discussed a possible referendum in
separatist-leaning eastern Ukraine.
That could mean additional loss of territory for Ukraine, additional
gains for Putin—and all the result of his aggressive actions.
Plus, maybe the U.S. would ease up on sanctions.
*
8/23/18: Manafort is convicted on a
cornucopia of felony charges, includinghiding $30 million dollars
in offshore bank accounts to avoid taxes. He made most of that pile working
for Ukrainian politicians in the pocket of Vladimir Putin.
President Trump nevertheless tells reporters that Manafort is a
guy for whom he has “great respect.”
The witch hunt continues—and federal prosecutors bring another
witch to justice. This witch, like several others, pleads guilty and agrees to
cooperate with authorities. This time the man in the pointy black hat is W.
Samuel Patten, heretofore a little-known Republican lobbyist. What makes Patten
interesting in the Russia story (and now the Ukraine story) is that he has long
had ties with Manafort.
Patten also worked secretly for a pro-Russian, Ukrainian political
party, backed by Putin. In the process he earned a cool million dollars,
plus. If the Russians killed Ukrainians in attacks along the border, Patten
wasn’t bothered.
Patten pled guilty to funneling a $50,000 donation from foreign
sources to the Trump Inaugural Committee, which is for obvious reasons
illegal. That crime may not seem like much to Trump’s base. But Patten copped
to a single felony, while admitting to several others.
(Kilimnik later fled to Russia to avoid prosecution.)
*
2/5/19:
Federal investigators have questions they
hope to put to heads of three D.C. lobbying firms. All three powerhouse firms, including
two run by individuals with strong Democratic ties, were originally
recruited by Paul Manafort for the job in question. This lucrative
work involved burnishing the image of the Ukrainian government, which was
pro-Russian—and essentially anti-Ukrainian-people at the time.
Since thousands of Ukrainians were dying in
fighting with Russia, and since this work was shady, and since the three firms
didn’t want their efforts known, court records indicate they lied about how
much they were paid. They back-dated payments to try to obscure their
significance. They covered up a $150,000 check from a Ukrainian oligarch that
ended up in the hands of the Trump Foundation.
*
2/13/19: Another secret meeting with Trump
campaign people and Russians is revealed.
On August 2, 2016, we learn (more than two-and-a-half years
after it happened) that Manafort and Gates met for dinner with Kilimnik at a
Manhattan cigar bar, the Grand Havana Room.
“The people of Crimea…would rather be with
Russia.”
Among other topics, the three discussed a possible peaceful resolution
to the conflict in the Ukraine.
At this same meeting, it is alleged, Manafort turned over valuable
polling data to Kilimnik. This data would (in theory) help Russian hackers
target U.S. social media sites successfully during the 2016 election. It has also
been alleged that Manafort expected to be paid $2.4 million. After the three
men finished dinner, chatted, and smoked cigars, they decided it would be wise
to leave by three separate doors, just like any set of friends out for dinner
and conspiring to steal an election.
Something else interesting had happened the day before. Candidate Trump told George
Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s This Week, that, “The people of
Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where
they were.”
*
3/13/19: Having been torched in the
courts, Paul Manafort is sentenced to an additional 43 months in
jail, after a second trial.
(A jury convicted him on eight felony counts in an earlier trial.)
This gives him a total of seven-and-a-half years to ponder his
crimes and pray for a pardon from President Trump. Naturally, Trump tells
reporters he’s not taking a pardon “off the table” for Manafort.
He has a soft spot for felons.
“Lying to Congress and the American public.”
Judge Amy Berman Jackson roasts the defendant before handing down sentence.
Manafort’s lobbying work for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, which he kept
secret for years, “infects our policymaking,” Jackson says. “What you were
doing was lying to Congress and the American public,” she adds, noting that
Manafort made a “deliberate effort to obscure the facts.”
“If the people don’t have the facts, democracy can’t work,” she warns;
and “court is one of those places where facts still matter.”
A TIMELINE
OF EVENTS
April 21, 2019: Volodymyr Zelensky, running
on an anti-corruption platform, is elected President of Ukraine.
President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sends a
message soon after. He’d like to meet.
Zelensky puts him off.
*
May 6: U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie
Yovanovitch is unexpectedly recalled. The ambassador has a reputation as a
corruption fighter. Giuliani and several associates have been trashing her
reputation.
May 9: Rudy admits in an interview
with The New York Times that he’s planning to travel to Ukraine to press
for an investigation that he believes will turn up“information [that] will
be very, very helpful to my client.”
That is: helpful to Trump.
Sometimes Rudy confuses himself.
May 20: Zelensky takes the oath of office.
May 23: U. S. representatives who attended the swearing-in
try to convince Mr. Trump that the new Ukrainian leader is a committed
reformer. Trump complains that Ukraine is full of “terrible people,” who “tried
to take me down.”
*
June 13: In an interview with George
Stephanopoulos, President Trump says he’d take dirt on a political opponent
from a foreign country. “If
somebody called from a country,” the president explained—for example, “Norway,
[and said] ‘we have information on your opponent’—oh, I think I’d want to hear
it.”
He goes on to say that
“everyone” else does it.
June 19: Trump orders a hold on
military aid to Ukraine on or before this date. Few U.S. officials are told of
the decision.
June 21: Giuliani publicly calls upon
the Ukrainian government to investigate the Biden family and Hillary and the
Clinton people.
*
July 10: At a White House meeting
involving U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton and Ukrainian representatives,
U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland tells our allies that a
meeting between the two presidents will not happen until they agree to conduct the
investigations President Trump desires. Bolton ends the meeting abruptly.
In a quick follow-up conversation, Sondland again tells the
Ukrainians investigations will be necessary.
This time he specifically mentions “Burisma” and the “2016
election.”
July 12: Mark Sandy, an official with
the Office of Budget and Management, receives an email from an aide to Acting White
House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. According to that email, the order to
freeze military aid comes from the president, himself.
July 18: During a conference call
involving U.S. diplomats, a female “voice” identifies herself as an official
with the OMB. She announces that military aid has been halted. According to Ambassador
Bill Taylor, he and other diplomats, “sit around in astonishment.”
Aid has been on hold for a month; but none of the diplomats
knew it—and still have no idea why.
President Zelensky calls for snap parliamentary elections in an effort to fight corruption. July 21: The people of Ukraine deliver him a sweeping mandate.
July 25: President Trump calls
President Zelensky. He asks for a favor. Investigate the Biden family.
July 30: Olena Zerkal, Ukrainian deputy minister
of foreign affairs, is reading diplomatic cables when one catches her eye. American
military aid has been frozen. Word spreads among senior Ukrainian officials.
*
The quid
pro quo is already in the works.
August 9: The Ukrainians know military
assistance has been frozen. With the help of Ambassador Sondland, they begin
working on the language for a statement announcing that the investigations Trump
desires will be launched.
The quid pro quo is already in the works.
August 12: A whistleblower submits a complaint
to Inspector General Michael Atkinson of the U.S. intelligence community.
August 14: Dan Coats’ resignation as
Director of National Intelligence is effective at the end of this day. Joseph
Maguire replaces him, in an “acting” position, the next day.
August 16: Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman prepares
a memo for National Security Adviser
Bolton. The NSC, State Department and Defense Department all agree that military
assistance should be released.
The whistleblower complaint lands on Acting Director of
National Intelligence Maguire’s desk.
Late August 2019: White
House lawyers brief the president on the existence of the whistleblower
complaint. That is, the President of the United States has been tipped off.
Naturally, he begins to cover his tracks.
*
September 1: At a meeting in Warsaw,
Mr. Zelensky has a chance to talk to Vice President Pence. The first question
he puts to the vice president has to do with the freeze on aid. Meanwhile, plans
are afoot for an interview on CNN, during which Zelensky will announce that the
investigations Trump wants are coming.
September 7: Ambassador Sondland
speaks with Trump. The president tells himthere
is “no quid pro quo.” He doesn’t want anything from Ukraine.
Trump is well aware that a whistleblower complaint is in the
works and he knows it’s time to cover his tracks.
September 9: Chairman Adam Schiff of
the House Intelligence Committee is notified that the whistleblower complaint
has been filed. Contrary to U.S. law that complaint has not been delivered to Congress.
Schiff announces plans to investigate.
September 11: Trump releases military
aid to Ukraine.
September 13: A planned interview with
President Zelensky, on CNN, is scuttled. The quid pro quo is dead. Meanwhile, the White
House announces that Team Trump will not cooperate with the investigation in
any way.
It’s a total stonewall!
September 24: Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi agrees that an impeachment inquiry should move forward.
September 25: The White House
releases the call memorandum for July 25. President Trump says the call was
“perfect.”
*
October 3: The House Intelligence
Committee and two other committees start gathering documents and deposing witnesses.
Chairman Schiff decides witnesses should testify behind closed doors.
Republican lawmakers go ballistic! Witnesses should testify
in public!
President Trump kind of loses his cool—and calls on China to
investigate Joe Biden. (We all know what a great legal system China runs!)
October 16: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman,
two associates who have been working with Mr. Giuliani in Ukraine, are arrested
as they prepare to board a plane and leave the U.S. Both are carrying one-way
tickets at the time.
October 17: During a White House press
conference, Mick Mulvaney admits that military assistance to Ukraine was held
up until our allies agreed to commit to the investigations Trump wanted.
“I have news for everybody,” Mulvaney says,
glaring at reporters, “Get over it. There’s going to be political influence
in foreign policy. Elections have consequences. This happens all the time.”
October 18: The Trump administration refuses
to hand over any documents to the House Intelligence Committee.
Not even Post-It notes.
*
November 4-8: At least eleven
witnesses refuse to appear before Congress. Those who fail to
appear, per White House orders, include Energy Secretary Rick Perry, John Bolton
and Mick Mulvaney. Lev Parnas does not appear—but behind the scenes agrees to
cooperate with investigators.
November 13: The House Intelligence
Committee begins public hearings. Ambassador Bill Taylor, Ambassador
Yovanovitch and State Department official George Kent testify the first week.
Republicans go ballistic again! Public hearings, they decide,
are worse than closed-door hearings.
November 15-21: Defense experts and
diplomats Ambassador Kurt Volker, Dr. Fiona Hill, Lt. Col. Vindman, Jennifer Williams,
Laura Cooper, Tim Morrison, David Hale, David Holmes and Sondland all appear
and testify.
Go figure! Republicans go ballistic once more. The witnesses keep
making President Trump look bad.
*
In the following sections, we dive into the details of the
impeachment inquiry. Have fun reading.
THE WHISTLEBLOWER
SURFACES
9/18/19: The Washington Post first
reports that a whistleblower complaint has been filed with the Inspector
General for the U.S. intelligence community. Some unknown individual—working inside
the White House—has alleged that President Trump made a “promise” to a foreign
leader. If fulfilled that pledge might do serious damage to U.S. national
interests.
The Inspector General has found the complaint “credible” and troubling enough to be of “urgent concern.”
Trump responds the same way as always. He attacks the free
press. He insults his critics. The call he made, he insists, was “pitch
perfect.”
The “enemies of the people” keep nipping at his heels. First,
they report that the call focused on Ukraine. Next, they learn that the
problematic conversation—according to the whistleblower—or the “pitch perfect”
conversation according to the president—took place on July 25. The call went
from Trump to Volodymyr Zelensky, the newly-elected President of Ukraine.
Some details are clear from the start, but may need to be
restated for Trump’s loyal base, assuming members of his loyal base read this
“pitch perfect” blog.
1.Ukraine is a U.S. ally and has
been fighting a border war with Russia since 2014. That border war erupted when
Vladimir Putin seized Crimea.
2.President Obama placed the Russians under
sanctions as punishment for their territorial grab.
3.Russia is not a U.S. ally. Russia is a hostile
foreign power.
4.Putin is a murderous dictator who likes to have
critics bumped off in creative fashion. (Would you care for some radioactive tea?)
5.Trump said, when running for office, that he’d get
rid of sanctions if elected.
6.Putin loved that idea.
7.The Russians interfered in the 2016 election
because they wanted Trump to win.
8.Trump denied for years that the Russians
interfered in the election.
9.Trump holds to a conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered,
not Russia.
10.That narrative,
that it was Ukraine, has been pushed by Putin and Russian intelligence.
11.Trump’s July
25 call came one dayafter Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified in
front of Congress, outlining dozens of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians.
12.Trump
and his sycophants insisted Mueller’s testimony proved that the president would
never dream of colluding/conspiring with a foreign government to win an election!
13.The
Mueller Report laid out ten distinct cases of possible obstruction of
justice by Trump and his minions.
“Several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign
lied.”
The Mueller Report
That happy narrative—that the Mueller Report vindicated Trump—was
wildly oversold by pundits and politicians on the right. For example, from Page
9, Volume I, we had this:
The investigation established
that several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the
[special counsel’s] office, and to Congress, about their interactions with
Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation
of Russian election interference.
Going forward, as we endeavor to come to grips with what
happened with Trump and Ukraine, it is important to understand what came before.
That is, Trump and Russia. On page 182 of Volume II, we might read:
If we had confidence after a
thorough investigation of the facts that
the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so
state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are
unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude
that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him
[emphasis added].
Well, then, did the president attempt to obstruct? On page
182, of Volume II, the answer is laid out:
Frankly, Team Trump was a flock of felons. We know Sater and
Nader were felons when they went to work for Mr. Trump. Cohen, Flynn, Gates,
Manafort and Papadopoulos racked up felonies during the campaign. Nader is
under indictment again. Stone was convicted this fall.
The president’s efforts to
influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely
because the persons who surrounded the presidentdeclined to carry out orders or
accede to his requests.
…The incidents were often
carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the president sought to use
his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts
to remove the special counsel and to reverse the effect of the attorney
general’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of
the investigation; to direct and
indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their
testimony.Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate
their significance.
If obstruction failed it was because others refused to be
involved or because the president’s efforts were inept.
Attempted obstruction of justice is still
a crime, just as would be attempted murder or attempted rape.
We know that Donald Trump Jr. and Roger Stone, to pick just two from among this sleazy
band of brothers, denied any contacts with Russians. Both were forced to
amend their testimony eventually.
Stone, for instance, had the audacity to tell Congress that
he had never met with any Russians or even people who sounded Russian. When it
was revealed that he had met with a Russian, who sounded very much like a
Russian, and wanted $2 million to share dirt on Hillary, Stone claimed that the
F.B.I. had entrapped him. For some reason, he later threatened to kidnap the dog of a potential witness against him if that
gentleman testified in a fashion Stone found detrimental.
“We are not
aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with any foreign
entities before yesterday.”
Spokes
Hottie Hope Hicks
We know, further, that on November 10, 2016, two days after Trump defeated Clinton,
Spokes Hottie Hope Hicks, had this to say in defense of Trump and his motley
crew: “We are not aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with
any foreign entities before yesterday,” she assured the American people, “when
Mr. Trump spoke with many world leaders.”
To understand what a colossal
whopper Hicks was spinning, and what a colossal whopper the president-elect
knew was colossal, but did not bother to correct, feel free to dive again
into the depths of the Mueller Report.
Compare for yourself what
Hicks said under oath.
Hicks lied. Hicks knew she lied. Trump knew she lied, too.
*
WITH ALL THIS in mind,
Americans were treated to yet another round of revelations this summer,
indicating that when it comes to foreign help in U.S. elections, Team Trump is
still open for business. In a stunning interview on June 13, George
Stephanopoulos asked the President of the United States if he’d take dirt on a
political opponent from a foreign power in the next election.
Trump says he would take dirt from another
country.
If you are a patriotic
American, you are thinking, a guy who has already been accused of welcoming
Russian help to get elected, cannot be so stupid as to say….
“I think you might want to
listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening,” Trump replied.
NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wrong answer!
“If somebody called from a
country,” the president continued, “Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on
your opponent’—oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”
Would he go to the F.B.I. and
report it, Stephanopoulos wondered?
“If I thought there was
something wrong, I’d go maybe to the F.B.I.”
Yeah, maybe. Maybe if Norway
was offering help. Russia? China? North Korea? Why not! Besides, if you
contacted the F.B.I., Trump insisted, they don’t “have enough agents to take
care of it.”
Finally, he would do it—take a
dump truck filled with dirt if a foreign power had it—because everyone does it.
“When you go and talk, honestly, to congressman,” Trump claimed,
“they all do it, they always have, and that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo [opposition]
research.”
*
WHAT NO ONE could have
predicted, was that Trump might not just accept foreign help in a coming
election. He might go one impeachable step further and solicit foreign
help. He might ask for aid in gathering dirt (real or contrived) on a political
opponent. Namely: Joe Biden.
Here, then, the case stands.
President Trump, aided and abetted by Rudy Giuliani (and others), decided to
screw with Ukraine, even if that meant withholding vital military aid. Trump
and his toadies were willing to undercut U.S. security in furtherance of the
president’s personal gain.
“My only client is
the president of the United States.”
Rudy
Giuliani
As a former American history teacher, and a blogger hesitant
to say any impeachment case is a slam dunk, it would seem clear there were warning signs as early as May 2019. Giuliani, in the
role of Trump’s personal lawyer, told The New York Times that he
planned to travel to the Ukraine to press the newly-elected government of
PresidentZelensky
to investigate:
1.The roots of the Russia investigation, which
Trump believed could be uncovered in Ukraine and would prove Russia never
helped him in 2016.
2.The involvement of Hunter Biden, Vice President
Joseph Biden’s son, with a Ukrainian oligarch in a Ukrainian gas company, which
involvement Trump believed would reveal corruption. And that corruption might destroy
Vice President Biden’s chance to defeat him in 2020.
Fortunately, the “enemies of the people” were on the job. The
Times pinned Rudy down and allowed him to talk, probably Rudy’s second
favorite activity. (His favorite activity: cheating on wives.) Wasn’t what he
was planning to do the same as inviting foreign interference in the next
election?
“There’s nothing illegal about it,” he said. “Somebody could say
it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy—I’m asking them to do an
investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them
to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that
information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be
helpful to my government.”
Look. Rudy was clear. He was going after information that would
“be very, very helpful to my client.”
If it turned out to be “helpful to my government,” that would be
icing on the cake of election interference.
Rudy admitted to
the Times that he was going to Ukraine to turn up information that might
help Trump win in 2020. “He said his efforts in Ukraine have the full
support of Mr. Trump,” reporters noted. “He declined to say specifically
whether he had briefed him on the planned meeting with Mr. Zelensky, but added,
‘He basically knows what I’m doing, sure, as his lawyer.’”
Again, Rudy was clear. He was Trump’s lawyer. “My only client is
the president of the United States.”
Not “the” United States.
Trump.
*
THE FREE PRESS had struck a rich vein. That meant reporters would
keep digging. And in a free country that’s what you want. We soon learned that
the whistleblower complaint, aimed at the president himself, was deemed
“credible” and of “urgent concern” by the Inspector General of the U.S.
intelligence community. We learned that the IG was Michael Atkinson. He wasn’t
a member of the “Deep State.” He was appointed by Trump. It was next
reported that during the call to President Zelensky, Trump repeatedly asked him
to investigate Joe Biden and his son.
The
Wall Street Journal reports that Trump asked Zelensky “about eight
times” to work with Giuliani.
Practitioners
of a free press quickly learned that Rudy had traveled to Paris to meet with a
representative of the Ukrainian government. He traveled to Madrid on a second
occasion, for the same purpose. In both instances, Giuliani pressed the Ukrainians
to investigate Family Biden.
As more and more damaging detail came to light, Trump was
reduced to insisting that the whistleblower was probably a
“partisan.” Oddly enough, he then admitted he had no idea who the whistleblower
was.
Under growing pressure, the White House acknowledged that
Trump had a lengthy phone conversation with Zelensky on July 25. The president
insisted that this had been “a totally appropriate conversation. It was actually
a beautiful conversation.” He told reporters it didn’t matter what was discussed.
He could do diplomacy any way he pleased. For good measure, he added, “The
media of our country is laughed at all over the world now. You’re a joke,” he
said, waving his hand at the questioners. The White House insisted a
transcript of the call could not be released. A president must be free to
speak frankly to foreign leaders.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported, and the
Associated Press confirmed, that in the weeks before making that call,
Trump had frozen almost $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.
*
WITH STORM CLOUDS thickening, Rudy decided he might need to
go on TV and wave the lightning away. On Fox News, he claimedthat he got involved in the
affair when the State Department asked him to take a call from a top Ukrainian
official.
Another news organization checked. “When reached for
comment, a State Department spokesperson said, ‘Mr. Giuliani is a private
citizen and acts in a personal capacity as a lawyer for President Trump. He
does not speak on behalf of the U.S. Government.’”
Popping up again, for a secondact on Fox News, Giuliani said that
Trump never threatened to cut off military aid to Ukraine. Then he admitted, I “can’t
say for 100%.” As for talking to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, Rudy
was adamant. He wasn’t going to testify in front of any committee controlled by
Democrats. “I wouldn’t give Adam Schiff anything,” he said. Schiff was “completely
dishonest.”
9/20/19: Rudy was just warming up. Appearing
on CNN, he got into a heated argumentwith host Chris Cuomo. Giuliani
tried to explain why he decided to go to Paris and Madrid (secretly one should
note):
“I found out this incredible
story about Joe Biden, that he bribed the president of the Ukraine in order to
fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son.”
Cuomo asked Giuliani, “Did you
ask the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden?”
“No, actually I didn’t,”
Giuliani responded. “I asked the Ukraine to investigate the allegations that
there was interference in the election of 2016 by the Ukrainians for the
benefit of Hillary Clinton— ”
Cuomo pressed him, “You never
asked anything about Hunter Biden? You never asked anything about Joe Biden?”
Giuliani replied that “the only
thing I asked about Joe Biden” was to get to the bottom of how it was that the
prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate his son dismissed the case.
“So you did ask Ukraine to look
into Joe Biden,” Cuomo asked.
“Of course I did,” said
Giuliani.
Giuliani said he wasn’t ordered
by Mr. Trump to investigate Biden and didn’t inform the president of his investigation
until after the fact.
That last claim was meant, one would assume, to provide Trump
the cover of “plausible deniability.”
*
NEVERTHELESS, as we used to say in the Marine Corps, Rudy had
just stepped on his dick. In this case he mashed his dick flat. That is, he
messed up, with no one to blame but himself. The obvious questions were in
view: Why was a lawyer with only one client—Trump—asking a foreign power to
investigate the son of a potential opponent of his client in a coming U.S.
election? And did President Trump cut off military aid to an ally as a matter
of self-interest?
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff made clear
that he planned to subpoena Joseph Maguire, Acting Director of National
Intelligence. Maguire would be required to come before the committee and
explain his decision not to forward Inspector General Atkinson’s findings—that
the whistleblower complaint was credible and of urgent concern—to Congress.
The White House continued to hew to the Nixonian path, hoping
to “stonewall” Congress.
No way was Maguire coming to Capitol Hill!
No way in Hades would members of Congress be allowed to see
the whistleblower’s complaint!!
This stonewalling proved too much for Democratic lawmakers.
Both Speaker Pelosi and Chairman Schiff—who had been hesitant to impeach the
president—concluded it might be necessary. Ms. Pelosi announced that an
impeachment inquiry would commence, once there were enough votes (218) to go
forward.
On the Senate side, lawmakers voted unanimouslyin favor
of a resolution calling for the whistleblower complaint to be turned over to
congressional intelligence committees. That meant, at least on paper, that every
GOP senator, including Mitch McConnell, agreed with every Democrat in demanding
the Trump administration cough up the whistleblower complaint.
At that point, Trump stopped tweeting long enough to realize
he might get impeached for real.
AN
INVESTIGATION IS LAUNCHED
9/25/19: The White House decides, under
pressure, to release a call memorandum detailing the July 25 call.
Although not a transcript, what is revealed is damning enough, unless you really,
really love Trump.
You knew—if you had the brains god gave a bagel—that Zelensky
understood he was in a jam.
Highlights included President Zelensky telling Trump that he,
too, was working to “drain the swamp here in our country...You are a great
teacher for us and in that.”
Flattery.
Trump loves flattery. Good start.
“Well it’s very nice of you to say that,” Trump replied. “I
will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of
time.” By comparison, Trump continued, Germany talked about helping Ukraine but
didn’t really come through; “but the United States has been very, very good to
Ukraine. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are
happening that are not good but the United States has been very good to
Ukraine.”
You knew—if you had the brains god gave a bagel—that Zelensky
understood he was in a jam. He needed U.S. military assistance to fight Russian
attacks and had no choice but to agree. Germany, France and the European Union
helped, he said. But, yes, they could do more. “I would also like to thank you
for your great support in the area of defense,” he told Trump. “We are ready to
continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to
buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”
(The U.S. began delivering Javelins, state-of-the-art
anti-tank missiles, to Ukrainian military forces in 2018.)
Then came the kicker. Trump replied,
“I would like you to do us a
favor though [emphasis added] because our country has been through a lot
and Ukraine knows about it. I would like you to find out what happened with
this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…I guess you have one of
your wealthy people…The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of
things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself
with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call
you or your people and I would like to get to the bottom of it. As you saw
yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man
named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it
started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do
it if that’s possible.”
(Here, Trump was referring to the Democratic National
Committee server that U.S. intelligence officials say was hacked by Russian
agents. For some reason he believes the Ukrainians did the hacking.)
“We are ready to open a new page of cooperation in relations
between the United States and Ukraine,” Zelensky assured Trump. He reminded him
that “one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are
hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we
will meet once he comes to Ukraine.”
What Trump wanted was as obvious as the orange toner he
slathers all over his fat mug. He said he had heard that “a very good
prosecutor” in Ukraine was “shut down and that’s really unfair.” Vice President
Biden was involved in the shutdown. Rudy, on the other hand, “is a very highly
respected man.” Rudy would give Zelensky a call. So would Attorney General
William Barr.
Trump then hammered home the only point he cared to make:
The other thing, there’s a lot
of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of
people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney
General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the
prosecution so if you can look into it…It sounds horrible to me.
Okay, let’s stop a moment.
What does the president want?
He wants Ukraine to investigate: JOE
BIDEN AND HIS SON!
Zelensky promises that a new prosecutor will look into the
case, “specifically to the company [Crowdstrike] that you mentioned in this
issue.” If Trump has any “additional information that you can provide us, it
would be very helpful.” Zelensky thanks him for the invite [delivered in a
letter] to the United States and mentions that on a previous visit to New York
City, he stayed at Trump Tower.
Flattery. Trump eats it up.
“I also want to assure you that we will be very serious about
the case and will work on the investigation,” Zelensky adds.
“Good,” Trump responds. “Well, thank you very much and I
appreciate that. I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call. Thank you.
Whenever you would like to come to the White House, feel free to call. Give us
a date and we’ll work that out. I look forward to seeing you.”
*
COINCIDENTALLY, within hours of the release of the call
memorandum, Trump sits down with Zelensky on the sidelines at the United
Nations General Assembly in New York City. The Ukrainian leader has no desire to be stuck in the middle of a brewing
controversy. With TV cameras rolling, he jokes about the promise Trump made
during their now famous phone call:
Zelensky: And I want to thank you
for the invitation to Washington.
Trump: Right.
Zelensky: You invited me. But I
think—I’m sorry, but I think you forgot to tell me the
date. (Laughter.) But I think in the near future.
Trump (brushing off Zelensky’s request,
by referring it to aides): They’ll tell you the date.
Even
in a public setting, Trump can’t resist bashing Biden, talking about Hillary
Clinton doing yoga and nudging Zelensky again. “I gave you anti-tank busters
that—frankly, President Obama was sending you pillows and sheets. And I
gave you anti-tank busters. And a lot of people didn’t want to do that,
but I did it.”
I.
With Trump, that single word always explains any situation.
Then,
in another one of his patented tone-deaf moments, Trump indicates that Zelensky
and the Russians could easily work out a deal. “And I really hope that
Russia—because I really believe that President Putin would like to do
something. I really hope that you and President Putin get together and can
solve your problem,” Trump says. “That would be a tremendous
achievement. And I know you’re trying to do that.” Trump appears to have
forgotten about Crimea.
*
ALL DAY WEDNESDAY, worrisome details tumbled out. The free
press reported that no one at the State Department was aware Trump had plans to
delay the military aid. Not even Senate Leader Mitch McConnell knew what was ahead.
Democrats perused the call memorandum and opposition to impeachment collapsed.
By day’s end, they had the 218 votes needed, including one former Republican,
to advance an impeachment—if evidence would support it.
Trump is
the man with the smoking phone in his hand.
The transcript of the call reads
like a classic mob shakedown: — We do a lot for Ukraine — There’s not much
reciprocity — I have a favor to ask — Investigate my opponent — My people will
be in touch — Nice country you got there. It would be a shame if something
happened to her.
At this point, the craziest members of the Republican crew
lost their collective minds and insisted that Schiff was lying (see paragraph,
above) about what the call memorandum said. Schiff was a terrible human being.
Schiff was the problem—even though no one was accusing him of asking the
Ukrainians for help in the 2020 election. Schiff said he was simply dramatizing;
but Nunes & Co. still haven’t forgiven him for what he had done.
Then again, if you had the same sense as a lamppost, you
noticed that of the eight phrases and sentences in Schiff’s tweet, the second,
third, fourth, fifth and sixth are almost exactly what the president has said.
Meanwhile, Speaker Pelosi announced her decision to move
ahead with the inquiry, in a brief address to the nation. The:
…release of the notes of the
call by the White House confirms that the President engaged in behavior that
undermines the integrity of our elections, the dignity of the office he holds
and our national security. The President has tried to make lawlessness a virtue
in America and now is exporting it abroad.
Most GOP lawmakers decided to lay low. But Sen. Lindsey
Graham responded shortly after the summary was released. “Wow,” he tweeted. “Impeachment
over this? What a nothing (non-quid pro quo) burger.”
The ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Jim
Jordan of Ohio, went even further. He insisted that the call summary “shows no
wrongdoing” on the part of the president. The “real scandal” involved Biden and
his son. But Jordan obviously missed the salient point. Trump called to ask
another country to help him in the 2020 election.
Biden did not call.
Trump is the man with the smoking phone in his hand.
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah—once the GOP nominee for
president—sounded a note of true concern. He told NBC News he found the call
summary, “troubling in the extreme, deeply troubling.”
*
TRUMP, OF COURSE, took to TV to complain about how unfairly
life was treating him. As the nation watched, his lips started moving, and you
knew he was about to start lying. For some reason, he felt the urge to brag first
about the election magic he brings. That’s why the Democrats wanted to impeach
him.
They couldn’t beat him any other way!
(See: total popular vote in 2016; also total Democratic vote in congressional
elections in 2018. See also: almost every national poll related to the 2020 presidential election
taken, so far.)
Trump
election magic—not really magic at all.
As evidence of his own prowess at the polls, Trump mentioned
two special North Carolina elections for open seats in Congress, earlier in the
month. He insisted that it was his magic that allowed the Republican Party to
score two knockout wins. In one race, Republican Dan Bishop, was “down 17
points and ended up winning by a substantial margin.” In the second, the GOP
candidate was “up 1-2, won by 25…incredible…maybe two, maybe three, won by 25.”
The problem, of course, is that any fool can check out what
Trump said, including Trump, if he cared about facts.
Polls in North Carolina, before he visited to give Bishop a
boost, had the race dead even. Bishop wasn’t down 17.
He wasn’t down at all.
As for the second contest, Greg Murphy did sweep aside his
Democratic challenger, winning by nearly 25 (61.7% to 37.5%). But Trump’s magic
looked less magical if you considered previous results. In 2018 the GOP
candidate in North Carolina’s Third District, where Murphy cruised to the win, ran
unopposed. That’s how safe the seat for Republicans has been. In races
going back another decade, GOP congressional candidates in the Third polled
67.2%, 67.8%, 63.1%, 71.9% and 65.9%.
No help from Trump required.
Putting idiot lies aside, we can sum up the rest of the
president’s pathetic public whining in short order:
His phone call to Zelensky: “very innocent call.”
Reporters: “you people,” “lies.”
The call (again): “so innocent, so nice.”
People who worked for Trump: “tormented” by the press.
Torment (again): “they came here [to Washington D.C.] with
bright eyes, they wanted to make life better for other people,” “they wanted to
make the United States, and the world, a better place,” “they went home, they were
dark.”
The free press: “not only fake, it’s corrupt.”
Schiff: “Liddle Adam Schiff,” he and other Democratic leaders
go into a room “and laugh their asses off.”
Impeachment: “so bad for our country,” “Sean Hannity said it,
a lot of people,” “they don’t know if one man…or woman…could handle what I’ve
had to handle.”
And so, as the sun set on Wednesday, we could pretty much
assume the president was in a dark place.
9/26/19: At a private breakfast in New
York City, from somewhere deep down in that dark pace, the President of the
United States unloads on the media.
He labels reporters “scum.” The “scum” at the Los Angeles
Timesfile a story anyway and the “scum” at Fox News decideto cover his comments, as well. First,
Fox reports on what Trump said to his neo-fascist version of the Breakfast Club:
“You know, these animals in the press…they’re
animals, some of the worst human beings you’ll ever meet,” Trump reportedly
said. When someone in the room shouted, “fake news,” Trump
responded: “They’re scum. Many of them are scum, and then you have some
good reporters, but not many of them, I’ll be honest with you.”
The
Los Angeles Times picks up from there:
“Basically, that person [the
whistleblower] never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call—heard
something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw—they’re almost
a spy,” Trump said.
“I want to know who’s the
person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because
that’s close to a spy,” he continued. “You know what we used to do in the old
days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a
little differently than we do now.”
In other words, Trump had just issued a veiled threat against
the life of a whistleblower, sounding like his pal Putin.
Or: How’s the view from that fifth floor balcony? (See, for example, “Why Do Russian Journalists Keep Falling?”)
Meanwhile, the White House made the decision to cave in the
face of an impeachment threat. Acting Director of National Intelligence Maguire
would be allowed to appear on Capitol Hill. The whistleblower’s complaint
would be made available to lawmakers from both parties.
*
AS USUAL, lawmakers’ reactions fragmented along party lines.
There was a difference of opinion about how the whistleblower law should be
interpreted. The purpose of the law, however, was never in doubt. It was passed
to shield whistleblowers (see Trump rant, above) and ensure that intelligence
vital to U.S. interests would not be suppressed. The law requires that a
complaint be filed only where “a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, violation of the law
of Executive order, or deficiency” may have occurred. The Inspector General must
decide within fourteen days whether a complaint is credible and of urgent
concern. If the IG so decides, within seven days more the complaint “shall
be” forwarded to Congress.
That’s
the law; and IG Atkinson—remember, a Trump pick for the job—followed the law
all the way.
Once
matters passed from his hands all progress ground to a halt.
As
the story plays out Thursday, we learn that Maguire received Atkinson’s
findings in early August, but decided not to forward them to Congress.
Having now agreed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, Maguire told
lawmakers that he was informed by White House lawyers that in this case
different rules applied. This complaint fell outside his purview as DNI.
Here,
even the chronology was suspect. Dan
Coats, who served as Trump’s first DNI, resigned effective August 15, after
a series of disagreements with the Orange Boss. His second in command, Sue
Gordon, a woman with decades of experience in intelligence work, who normally
would have been elevated to take his place, was told she would be passed over
for the job.
At
Coats’ urging, she resigned.
Trump
then selected Rep. John Ratcliffe, a man with virtually zero intelligence
experience, to replace Coats. Even Republicans balked at the choice and
Ratcliffe was blocked. Trump picked Maguire instead, which meant Maguire had
served as Acting Director of National Intelligence for less than 24 hours,
when, on August 16, the whistleblower complaint landed square on his desk.
THE
WHISTLEBLOWER WAS RIGHT
So,
what did we learn from Maguire’s testimony on Thursday? Ratcliffe—yeah, that
guy, again—Rep. Jordan (him too)—Rep. Devin Nunes (of course)—and most
Republican members on the three committees involved—were mad as hell about god
only knows what.
Incontinence
issues?
Genital
warts?
The
1919 Black Sox Scandal?
I
admit, watching Maguire testify on television, I muted those three whenever
they started to talk.
When
I did listen, I learned that Maguire believed the whistleblowerfollowed
the rules and actedin good faith.
He said so repeatedly, under oath, when asked by Democrats and Republicans who weren’t
suffering from rabies.
It
was also clear Maguire knew he was in a tough spot. He tried not to say more
than he knew, while avoiding any appearance of intent to hide relevant facts.
The problem was that he had the unenviable task of explaining why he followed
directives from the White House and Department of Justice—those directives
seemingly serving only the president’s interests.
Democrats
brought up an array of important points, many of which were validated as
evidence piled up that day and the next. First, the whistleblower claimed he or
she was not alone in his or her concerns. “I have received information from multiple
U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using
the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign government
in the 2020 U.S. election,” the complaint alleged. That claim was clearly
supported by the call memorandum by this point in lawmakers’ hands. Second,
“The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure
in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved.”
By
this point, Giuliani had already admitted his involvement. So, the
whistleblower was right.
The
Department of Justice, however, issued a blanket denial, as far as Mr. Barr was
concerned:
The president has not spoken
with the attorney general about having Ukraine investigate anything relating to
former Vice President Biden or his son. The president has not asked the
attorney general to contact Ukraine—on this or any other matter. The attorney
general has not communicated with Ukraine—on this or any other subject. Nor has
the attorney general discussed this matter, or anything relating to Ukraine,
with Rudy Giuliani.
But
if the whistleblower was “wrong” about Barr, the whistleblower was wrong
because he or she believed Trump. Trump says during the call that Barr will
call Zelensky or Zelensky can call Barr.
“These
actions pose risks to U.S. national security and undermine the U.S.
government’s efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U.S.
elections.”
Whistleblower
complaint
The
whistleblower goes on to say that “over the past four months, more than half a
dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort.”
He/she
does admit, up front, on page one of
the complaint, “I was not a direct witness to most of the events described.
However, I found my colleague’s accounts of these events to be credible
because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns
that were consistent with one another.” The whistleblower noted that his or her
concerns related to a pattern of conduct that was “flagrant” and that “these
actions pose risks to U.S. national security and undermine the U.S.
government’s efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U.S.
elections.”
The complainant focused on the July 25 call; but there were
hints that there were other calls of a questionable nature. “Multiple White
House officials with direct knowledge of the [July 25] call informed me that,
after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of
the call to advance his personal interests. Namely, he sought to pressure the
Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President’s 2020 reelection bid.”
The whistleblower accurately described key elements of the
conversation. He or she went on to warn,
The White House officials who
told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the
phone call. They told me that there was already a “discussion ongoing” with
White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in
the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his
office for personal gain.
White House officials were described as having known from the
moment Trump hung up the phone that what the president had said posed serious
problems. A coverup commenced.
“In the days following,” the whistleblower alleged,
I learned from multiple U.S.
officials that senior White House officials had intervened to “lock down” all
records of the phone call, especially the word-for-word transcript of the
call that was produced—as is customary—by the White House Situation Room
[this word-for-word transcript has still never been seen]. This set of actions
underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had
transpired in the call.
The complaint further stated that “White House lawyers”
directed workers to load the transcript in a system “used to store and
handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”
According to the whistleblower, the cleanup commenced the
next day. U.S. envoys met with “Ukrainian leadership” to advise them on “how to
‘navigate the demands that the President had made of Mr. Zelenskyy [alternate
spelling].’”
The whistleblower says he/she learned that on “about 2
August, Mr. Giuliani traveled to Madrid to meet with one of President
Zelenskyy’s advisers, Andrey Yermak.” This meeting was a “direct follow-up” to
the July 25 call. “Separately,” the complaint alleged, “multiple U.S. officials
told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of
other Zelenskyy advisers.”
*
A SECTION of the whistleblower’s complaint focuses on
Ukrainian politics. That section is of little import for our story. The question
of Hunter Biden, and Burisma, the company for which he worked, is of relevance.
It’s not nearly as important as Trump and his defenders want the American
people to believe. In a perfect world—where every swamp has been drained—Hunter
Biden would not be trading on his name, doing work for a gas company in the
Ukraine, that company tied to a corrupt oligarch. Young Biden would not be earning
top dollar, reportedly $50,000 per month, even if his actions were, strictly
speaking, legal.
Then again, in a perfect world, Trump’s personal lawyer at
the time, Michael Cohen, would not have been negotiating for a Trump Tower
Moscow while his boss was running for president. Trump and his friends,
both in 2016, and moving toward 2020, clearly had and have money on their minds.
Trump fans have forgotten or choose to
ignore the glaring fact that Paul Manafort, Trump’s felonious former
campaign manager, was shown in a U.S. court to have made tens of millions of
dollars by leaping into bed with Ukrainian oligarchs of questionable repute.
And then—perhaps like Donald J. Trump, himself—he cheated
massively on his taxes.
If young
Biden had had sex with a llama.
In the final analysis, what Hunter Biden or his father may or
may not have done was irrelevant to the defense of the president. If young Biden had had sex
with a llama, it would not negate the fact Trump asked for Ukrainian
assistance in hopes of winning the next U.S. election. If Father Biden
dressed up in high heels and embarked on a career as a transvestite, it would
not justify Trump in directing his new personal lawyer (his old personal lawyer
having been sent to prison) to put the squeeze on an allied nation in order to
compel that nation’s help. Finally, neither former Vice President Biden nor his
son played any role—even if it could be proven that they cheated at checkers—in
what the whistleblower said was a wide-ranging White House effort to cover the
president’s fat, orange ass.
Two U.S. diplomats spoke with Giuliani “in an attempt to
‘contain the damage’” he was doing to U.S. national security.
Whistleblower complaint.
The whistleblower further alluded to the fact that on May 9,
2019, The New York Times reported that Giuliani was planning a trip to
the Ukraine to press authorities to investigate Biden and his son. The next
day, Trump said he’d talk to Rudy about the trip. On May 11, in the glare of
the free press, Rudy decided he didn’t want to go to the Ukraine after all.
“Starting in mid-May,” the complaint continues, “I heard from multiple U.S.
officials that they were deeply concerned by what they viewed as Mr. Giuliani’s
circumvention of national security decisionmaking [sic] processes.” Two U.S. diplomats,
Kurt Volker and Gordan Sondland spoke with Giuliani “in an attempt to ‘contain
the damage’” he was doing to U.S. national security.
“During this same timeframe, multiple U.S. officials told me
that the Ukrainian leadership was led to believe that a meeting or a phone call
between the President and President Zelenskyy would depend on whether
Zelenskyy showed willingness to ‘play ball’ on the issues that had been
publicly aired by…Mr. Giuliani.” This, the whistleblower added, was the general
state of affairs from late May to July.
We soon learned from other sources, that Rudy talked “maybe ten times” to one Ukrainian official. On
June 13, of course, President Trump made it clear in an interview with George
Stephanopoulos, “that he would accept damaging information on his political
rivals from a foreign government.” Eight days later, Giuliani tweeted that it
was time for the Ukraine to investigate “alleged Biden bribery” and “how
Ukraine was abused by Hillary and Clinton people.”
Meanwhile, for reasons unknown outside of a tight White House
circle, much-needed military aid to Ukraine had been cut off.
“According to multiple White House officials I spoke with,”
the whistleblower continued, “the [full] transcript of the President’s call
with President Zelenskyy was placed in a computer system” where “codeword-level
intelligence information” belonged. White House officials voiced concerns that
this was “an abuse of the system.” The whistleblower further stated, “According
to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under this
Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level
system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive—rather than
national security sensitive—information.”
Finally, the whistleblower noted, on “July 18, an Office of
Management Budget (OMB) official informed Departments and Agencies that the
President ‘earlier this month’ had issued instructions to suspend all U.S.
security assistance to Ukraine.” No one outside the White House knew why. In
two meetings, “on 23 July and 26 July,” OMB officials stated explicitly that,
instructions to suspend this
assistance had come directly from the President, but they were still unaware of
a policy rationale. As of early August, I heard from U.S. officials that some Ukrainian
officials were aware that U.S. aid might be in jeopardy, but I do not know
how or when they learned of it.
And, so—the complaint.
*
AS DARKNESS SETTLED over Washington D.C. on September 26,
signs of unease among Republicans multiplied. Vermont
Gov. Phil Scott and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker announced support for an
impeachment inquiry. When asked why Baker felt an investigation was necessary,
he replied succinctly, that he had seen how Trump conducted himself over the
last three years.
That conduct did not lead him to believe the
president could be trusted.
RUDY AND HIS SHITSHOW
On the other hand, Rudy wasn’t apologizingfor anything he had done.
He got busy on the phone. “It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero
and I’m not,” he shouted at Elaina Plott, a reporter for TheAtlantic.
“These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero!” He was the one exposing
corruption! He wasn’t the guy doing the corrupting, even if it seemed that way.
“I’m not acting as a lawyer,” he insisted, in full hero mode. “I’m acting as
someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government.
Anything I did should be praised.”
Alas, according to Plott, not everyone agreed. A former White House official told her
for the story that this whole Ukrainian mess was Giuliani’s fault: “Rudy
putting shit in Trump’s head.”
A current U.S. official agreed,
telling the Washington Post, “Rudy—he
did all of this. This shitshow that we’re in—it’s him injecting himself into
the process.”
Still, the critical point was
that Trump was all too ready to go along, if not actually lead the way. And you
can’t impeach Rudy just because he’s a fool.
But you can impeach Trump.
With night falling, NBC was reporting
“total panic” in the White House, as aides struggled to chart a course. One
official described the mood inside as “shell-shocked.” There was fear that as
pressure mounted, Trump might become even more “unmanageable” than he normally
was.
There appears to be rising “anxiety, unease, and
concern”—as one person close to the White House described the mood in the West
Wing—that the whistleblower’s allegationscould seriously wound the president and some of
those around him.
“There’s
not a lot of confidence that there’s no there there,” this person said.
9/27-29/19: Fast-moving developments on Friday, on into
the weekend, did little to improve President Trump’s dark mood.
The American Academy of Diplomacy lodges
protest.
The American Academy of
Diplomacy warnedthat his administration was treading on
dangerous ground in its treatment of former U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine,
Marie Yovanovitch. Ms. Yovanovitch had been removed from her post in May, apparently
because she was mucking up Rudy’s goofy plans.
The Academy, representing diplomats from past administrations,
Democratic and Republican, made its position plain:
The threatening tone of this
statement is deeply troubling. It suggests actions outside of and contrary
to the procedures and standards of a professional service whose officers, like
their military counterparts, take an oath to uphold the Constitution
[emphasis added]. Whatever views the Administration has of Ambassador
Yovanovitch’s performance, we call on the Administration to make clear that retaliation
for political reasons will not be tolerated [emphasis added].
Kurt Volker, one of two
diplomats who was reported to have tried to limit the damage Giuliani was
doing, resigned.
The president went on a
Twitter rampage, marked by a level of vitriol unusual even for a man always
prepared to hate. Thursday, for example, his fingers and thumbs had been flying
again. At 6 a.m. we had the first of a flurry of 21 tweets and retweets within
the hour. All his toadies were cited in retweets: Kellyanne, Rep. Jordan,
assorted Fox News hosts and Don Jr., of course.
During the 7 a.m. hour we had
21 more tweets, including Trump retweeting his own tweets. Then, at 7: 41, the
President of the United States bellowed in an all-cap rage (which we enlarge to
emphasize the point):
THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO
DESTROY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ALL THAT IT STANDS FOR. STICK TOGETHER, PLAY
THEIR GAME, AND FIGHT HARD REPUBLICANS. OUR COUNTRY IS AT STAKE!
To be clear, however, “our country” was not at stake. Trump’s
sneaky, orange ass might be in a sling.
But “our country” would be fine. In fact, “our country”
belongs equally to Trump supporters and non-Trump supporters alike.
And if we have our eyes and ears (and minds) open, we want
what the government does to be done in daylight.
Or: we want the free press to shine a light in the dark.
*
THE PRESIDENT was already in a lather when the sun rose again
on Friday. His first tweet focused—for some unfathomable reason—on a spelling
issue and CNN, and came at 6:02 a.m. “To show you how dishonest the LameStream
Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt
Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff,” in an earlier tweet. “Low ratings @CNN
purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small
but never ending situation with CNN!”
(And, yes, he spelled “describing” wrong, while complaining
about CNN, a missing hyphen, which was really an apostrophe, and how a juvenile
insult he had coined was properly spelled.)
I CUT THE SAVAGES TWEET….
The problem, of course, is that tweeting like a madman could
not make Trump’s problems disappear. He was almost sure now to be impeached;
and he was going to have to testify under oath.
And the bad news kept piling up.
“I think the Giuliani that I
know would prosecute the Giuliani of today.”
Jeffrey
Harris, aide to Giuliani
NBC reported that Giuliani’s former colleagues at the
Department of Justice believed he may have committed a series of crimes.
“This is certainly not the
Giuliani that I know,” said Jeffrey Harris, who worked as Giuliani’s top
assistant when he was at the Justice Department in the President Ronald Reagan
administration. “I think the Giuliani that I know would prosecute the Giuliani
of today.”
…NBC News reached out to seven
former colleagues of Giuliani’s. Of the six who offered comments on or off the
record, none defended him…
Bruce Fein, who worked at the
Justice Department with Giuliani in the early 1980s, said he believes Giuliani could
be prosecuted for breaking federal election laws.
“He was soliciting a foreign
government to help Trump’s 2020 campaign. That’s a problem,” said Fein, a
former special assistant to the assistant attorney general for the Office of
Legal Counsel under President Richard Nixon and associate deputy attorney
general under President Ronald Reagan.
“Federal election laws make it
illegal to solicit anything of value from a foreign government or persons to
influence the outcome of an election.”
Saturday and Sunday, the president took a series of swift
kicks to the nuts. We learned that the whistleblower was a C.I.A. agent
assigned to duty at the White House. He or she followed proper channels in
taking concerns to the director of the C.I.A. Another hit to the gonads
followed. The White House was forced to admit…okay…we did move transcripts of
conversations, including the one alluded to in the whistleblower complaint, to
a “more secure and classified computer system.”
Were any other records moved to the secure system—out of sight, out of mind,
as it were?
According to a former White House official, calls
involving Trump and Vladimir Putin were also moved.
“There would be
at least 35.”
There were fresh rumblings of discontent inside the GOP. Fox
News quoted former Sen. Jeff Flake as saying, during a
Q&A session at the Texas Tribune Festival, that if there was a secret vote
for impeachment in the U.S. Senate, Trump would be toast. “I heard someone
say if there were a private vote there would be 30 Republican votes. That’s not
true,” Flake said. “There would be at least 35.”
Rep. Mark Amodi, a Nevada Republican, was the first member of
his party in the House of Representatives to publicly support an impeachment
inquiry. To be clear, he wasn’t saying Trump was guilty. He was saying he was a “big fan of oversight.” “Using government agencies to, if it’s
proven, to put your finger on the scale of an election, I don’t think
that’s right,” Amodi explained.“If it turns out that
it’s something along those lines, then there’s a problem.”
Speaking to a reporter, Sen. Ben Sasse offered warning to GOP
colleagues. “Republicans,” he said, “ought not to be rushing to circle the
wagons to say there’s no there there when there’s obviously lots that’s very
troubling there.” In addition, he noted, “The administration ought not be
attacking the whistleblower as some talking points suggest they plan to do.”
It wasn’t just Democrats who sniffed a foul odor emanating from the Oval Office.
Gene Hartigan, former chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party, outlined for
reporters a path forward that might save the party he loved.
“There seems to be enough
material evidence to prove that what he did, he did,” Hartigan said [referring
to President Trump].
The former chair says
Republicans should realize that this is the end game for Trump—opening the door
for Mike Pence to take over the Oval Office, a more traditional Republican
Hartigan believes could work with Democrats to pass legislation and possibly
get elected president.
“I think it’s time for Mitch
McConnell to gather together enough Republicans to work with the Democrats in
the Senate to approve impeachment,” Hartigan said. “And I think that could
happen.”
Former Republican Gov. William Weld said the July 25 call was
“grounds for removal from office.”
Sen. Romney offered up the idea that most of his GOP
colleagues were still backing Trump, not because they approved of his conduct,
but for purely selfish reasons. “I think it’s very natural for people to look
at circumstances and see them in the light that’s most amenable to their
maintaining power and doing things to preserve that power,” he said. Profiles
in Courage it was not.
*
ON SUNDAY the drumbeat of bad news continued. It was revealed
that Rudy had planned on attending a conference in Armenia, sponsored by the Russian
government, where he was to be paid handsomely to give a speech.
Now, in the glare of publicity, he claimed he had no idea the
conference would include an appearance by Vladimir Putin.
On second thought, he said, he wouldn’t go.
One of the “enemies of the people” pointed out, cruelly,
perhaps, that if you checked the website for the conference it listed Putin and
several other Russian officials who planned to attend.
Meanwhile,
Rudy showed up on ABC’s This Week. Had he messed up in any way, the
host, George Stephanopoulos, wanted to know? Rudy demurred. “Everything I did was to defend my client and I
am proud of having uncovered what will turn out to be a massive pay-for-play
scheme,” he said.
Trump spent the last Sunday in September the way he spends
most Sundays in all the four seasons of the year. He skipped church, tweeted
religiously, and worked himself into a funk. By afternoon he was tweeting dire
threats aimed at…
Opioid manufacturers?
North Korea?
Putin?
Nope! His threats were directed at Chairman Schiff and the
whistleblower—and even if you liked Trump, you weren’t surprised.
First, Schiff:
His lies were made in
perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber. He
wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the
President of the United States. I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for
Fraud & Treason.....
Next,
the whistleblower:
....In addition, I want
to meet not only my accuser, who presented SECOND & THIRD HAND INFORMATION,
but also the person who illegally gave this information, which was largely
incorrect, to the “Whistleblower.” Was this person SPYING on the U.S.
President? Big Consequences!
If that wasn’t bad enough, the President of the United States
was so angry by bedtime that he decided it might be a good idea to threaten the
American people as a whole.
9/30/19: Monday proved to be another grim day for Team Trump, as September drew
to an ignominious close.
True. Home sales were up. Unemployment figures were great.
The stock market was strong. The economy was healthy.
True, the president remained stymied on the international
front. (Plus, he was about to get his dumb ass impeached!) First, nobody had
seen Jared Kushner’s “peace plan” for Israel and Palestine. Second, Trump had
torn up an existing nuclear deal with Iran. Now, as any fool could have
predicted, Iran was pushing back in the Persian Gulf. As for a Nobel Prize,
which the president said he’d win, “for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly,” North Korea
remained a nuclear threat fifteen months after he proclaimed that thanks to him
we were all safe.
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton, only recently
pitched out of the White House on his ear, lambasted the
president’s policy toward North Korea to wrap up the
month. Whereas, Orange Leader had insisted that Dear Leader was a fine fellow
and loved his people and was his friend, Bolton told an audience that Kim Jong-un
was the same homicidal maniac as always. “It seems to me clear that
[North Korea] has not made a strategic decision to give up its nuclear weapons.
In fact,” Bolton warned, “I think the contrary is true…[The] strategic decision
that Kim Jong Un is operating through is that he will do whatever he can to
keep a deliverable nuclear weapons capability and to develop and enhance it
further.”
Other voices were speaking out, too. And, as we shall see, Inspector
General Atkinson had already shot down a major Trump/Jim Jordan/Lindsey Graham
right-wing BS talking point late Sunday night. But no one got the message to
the president by the time he woke Monday and started tweeting like mad.
We were quickly treated to some of the president’s favorite
lines, refurbished for the latest scandal.
At 6:39 a.m. we had: “The Greatest Witch Hunt in the history
of our Country!”
At 7:03 a.m., Trump assured fans,
“The Fake Whistleblower
complaint is not holding up. It is mostly about the call to the Ukrainian
President which, in the name of transparency, I immediately released to
Congress & the public. The Whistleblower knew almost nothing, its 2ND HAND
description of the call is a fraud!”
That wasn’t even close to the truth, since the White House
initially insisted that the call could not be released. Only the dire
threat of impeachment had pried the complaint from Trump’s paranoid grip.
“Arrest
for treason?”
Still, the unhinged tweets kept coming. Even before most
Americans had time to pour milk over their corn flakes, Trump was in full dictator
mode. At 7:12 a.m., he tweeted this threat:
“Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made
up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most
important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to
Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the
call. Arrest for Treason?”
As always, Trump busied himself Monday morning, bingeing on
right-wing news. As a result, at 7:43 a.m. he floated an all-caps tweet, based
on a story he had just watched, hinting at a nefarious “Deep State” plot
supposedly afoot.
“WHO CHANGED THE LONG STANDING WHISTLEBLOWER RULES JUST
BEFORE SUBMITTAL OF THE FAKE WHISTLEBLOWER REPORT?” Trump demanded to be told.
Then: “DRAIN THE SWAMP.”
As Inspector General Atkinson had made clear the night
before, there was no “Deep State” at work and no “SWAMP” to drain. The
president and his allies had dinned it in supporters’ ears that they should
ignore the whistleblower complaint. It was nothing more than “hearsay” and
“secondhand” info. “Fake News” CNN, however, took the trouble to quote from a
statement by IG Atkinson. Was the entire complaint composed of “hearsay” and
“secondhand” information—and maybe brownie recipes? No. The statement by
Atkinson read:
As part of his determination
that the urgent concern appeared credible, the Inspector General of the
Intelligence Community determined that the Complainant had official and
authorized access to the information and sources referenced in the Complainant’s
Letter and Classified Appendix, including direct knowledge of certain
alleged conduct and that the Complainant has subject matter expertise
related to much of the material information provided.
It continues:
Although the Complainant’s
Letter acknowledged that the Complainant was not a direct witness to the
President’s July 25, 2019, telephone call with the Ukrainian President, the
Inspector General of the Intelligence Community determined that other
information obtained during the ICIG’s preliminary review [emphasis added] supported
the Complainant’s allegations.
Contrary to the president’s claim that rules had been
changed, the IG stated that no rules had been changed. A whistleblower had
never needed first-hand information before filing a complaint. It would only be
necessary for the IG to uncover, within fourteen days, firsthand information to
support any allegations made. In this case that step was unnecessary. “The
whistleblower stated on the form that he or she had both first-hand and other
information,” Atkinson explained.
Trump’s
intemperate threats only fueled greater unease. Andrew Bakaj, a lawyer for the
whistleblower, reminded the American people that retaliation against any
whistleblower was “a violation of federal law.”
Trump
admitted he had people
hard at work in an attempt to uncover the whistleblower’s identity.
And
the identities of anyone who spoke to him or her.
“We’re
trying to find out about a whistleblower,” he told reporters at the end of an
Oval Office meeting.
He
said he wasn’t worried, though.
His
call to President Zelensky “was perfect, it was perfect. But the whistleblower
reported a totally different statement.”
“I
made a call,” Trump reiterated. “The call was perfect…but the whistleblower
made it sound terrible.” His call was “so good,” the president continued, “it
was perfect…[and] this whole thing is a disgrace, and there’s corruption, and
we’re seeking it. It’s called drain the swamp.”
He
couldn’t stop rambling. “There’s been corruption on the other side. There’s
been corruption on the other side like you’ve never seen.” In fact, he
insisted, jabbing himself in the chest with a thumb for emphasis, there’s been
a lot of corruption in Ukraine “against us. And we want to get to the bottom of
it, and it’s very important that we do.”
“Nixon was a patriot. Of all the crazy things he did, he
never would have accepted help from a foreign power for his own personal
interest in an election.”
J. W. Verret, former Trump transition adviser
Nevertheless,
the problem was clear, if not to Trump. He was the guy who called Ukraine’s
president.
He
was the guy who asked his counterpart to investigate a political opponent.
He
was the guy who solicited foreign help in next year’s election.
Donald
J. Trump was the guy willing to withhold U.S. military aid to force an ally to
go along with his scheme.
Former
Trump transition adviser J.W. Verret appeared on
television Monday to sound an alarm. “People have made the analogy to
the Nixon-era scandals and Nixon’s resignation, but this is a lot worse than
that,” Verret said. “Nixon was a patriot. Of all the crazy things
he did, he never would have accepted help from a foreign power for his own
personal interest in an election, particularly one that would compromise the
U.S.’ strategic interests. This situation in Ukraine, “is much worse and I
think momentum continues toward impeachment.”
Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and organizer, suggested that, as in the days of Watergate, it might be time for the GOP to cut
its losses.
Dump Trump.
Presto, President Michael R. Pence! A leader you can be
confident won’t be banging porn stars.
Mike Pence's big chance.
CLOSED DOOR HEARINGS BEGIN
10/3/19: Today we consider some of the fast-breaking developments in the
investigation of President Trump.
Someone needs to explain the rule of law to Donald C. Trump.
That is, the latest investigation, involving his shakedown
call to Ukraine. Not the one involving the meeting with Russians and top
campaign guys in Trump Tower in June 2016. Or the one where he paid off a porn
star and lied about it. And not the one about his taxes. Or the one where two
dozen women accused him of sexual harassment and Summer Zervos is suing his
ass.
At this point it seems safe to say someone needs to explain
the rule of law to Donald C. Trump. (“C” for crooked.)
We learn that awful truth again this morning when the
president strides across the White House lawn and stops to inform reporters that
he wants China to investigate a political opponent and his son.
Yes, Trump fans. Your boy Don just said he’d like a commie
government to get the goods on American citizens. So, next time you’re shouting
bloody hell about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her socialist agenda, keep in
mind who some of your favorite president’s friends really are. You’ve got
Vladimir Putin who’s not such a bad killer. You’ve got Kim Jong-un who “cares about his people,” even the 120,000
he has locked up in reeducation camps, and whom Trump likes to quotewhen criticizing Joe Biden. Then, there’s Xi Jinping, who Trump thinks
has it made because he gets to be president for life. In fact, at the rate we’re going, it would not be a surprise if Trump
contacted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, another one of his bosom buds, and
asked where he might find a good bone saw, lightly used.
The president, of course, has been in meltdown mode for more
than a week, since it dawned on him that his blunders were likely going to lead
to impeachment. So the rule of law looms larger with each passing day.
A few examples:
Trump has suggested that the whistleblower may be guilty of treason. The punishment is death.
The president has said he wants to know who gave the whistleblower information and says those people are like
“spies.”
He has called the whistleblower’s complaint a “total fiction”
and insists it has no resemblance to the “perfect” call he made to the
president of Ukraine.
It doesn’t help, of course, that only 40% of Republicans believe
Trump mentionedJoe Biden and son during the July 25 call. Here, we can definitively say, that if
all Republicans read the call memorandum released by the White House, that number would shoot up to 92%, assuming the other
8% had crippling reading comprehension issues. If they also read the
whistleblower complaintthey would quickly see that the two documents mesh at nearly every
point.
In the meantime, our tangerine-tinted leader has been on a
roll. He fumed that Chairman Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee
(now nicknamed “Shifty Schiff”) should also be looked at for “treason” because
he misquotedTrump’s words in the call to President Zelensky.
Trump also told reporters “a whistleblower should be protected, if the whistleblower is
legitimate.” But the whistleblower who lodged a complaint against him is “a so-called
whistleblower,” “biased” and “a political hack.”
No protection for him or her!
In a snippet of positive news, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa)
pushed back on that idea—that only a whistleblower with the seal of approval from
Donald J. Trump should expect protection and anonymity. In a statement he
released on his U.S. Senate website, he explained:
This person appears to have
followed the whistleblower protection laws and ought to be heard out and
protected. We should always work to respect whistleblowers’ requests for
confidentiality. Any further media reports on the whistleblower’s identity
don’t serve the public interest—even if the conflict sells more papers or
attracts clicks….
When it comes to whether someone
qualifies as a whistleblower, the distinctions being drawn between first-
and second-hand knowledge aren’t legal ones. It’s just not part of
whistleblower protection law or any agency policy. Complaints based on
second-hand information should not be rejected out of hand, but they do require
additional leg work to get at the facts and evaluate the claim’s credibility.
In not-so-good “rule of law” news, President Trump clearly
missed what Sen. Grassley had said. Today, he stated publicly, without there
having been a trial, that a U.S. citizen, Hunter Biden, received “a payoff”
from the Chinese. He said that former Vice President Biden and his son were
guilty of corruption in Ukraine. “Nobody has any doubt,” he added. He said,
again without evidence, that the whistleblower complaint was no good, because
Chairman Schiff “helped him write it.” Ukraine, he told reporters—again, all
but begging a foreign nation to help him out in the 2020 election—should “launch
a major investigation” into Joe and his son.
Mike Pompeo “forgets” he was on the July 25 call.
Fresh revelations continued to dent the president’s defenses.
On September 22, we know Martha Raddatz asked Secretary of State Pompeo what he might know about the July 25 call.
Pompeo acted like she had hit him on the head with a croquet mallet and said
the call was news to him.
Apparently, it was quite a whack to the noggin.’ Ten days passed before Pompeo admitted yesterday, Oh, yeah. That call.
He was listening on that call.
At the same time, Rudy Giuliani’s name popped up all over the
news. First, he admitted that he had compiled a dossier of material, garnered
from Ukrainian sources, “proving” that VP Biden and his son had been up to no
good. Another source was Paul Manafort, currently lodged in federal
prison. Yes, Rudy admitted, he communicated with the prisoner through his
lawyer.
Let’s pause a moment and let that sink in.
We should also throw in some old news to spice up our story.
Don’t forget: President Trump said he could pardon himself! And don’t forget: Trump always admitted a pardon remained on the
table for Manafort, assuming that Manafort kept his mouth shut
about Trump.
(He did.)
*
ON THURSDAY, the former U.S. special envoy to the Ukraine
testified for hours behind closed doors. Not much information has leaked. But it
has been reported that Ambassador Kurt Volker specifically warned Giuliani
that his sources in Ukraine were no good.
Volker also told lawmakers he cautioned the Ukrainians not to
get involved with meddling in the 2020 U.S. election. That supports the
whistleblower’s allegation that Volker had “provided advice to the
Ukrainian leadership about how to ‘navigate’ the demands that the President
made.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), apparently in need of hearing aids,
emerged after several hours of testimony and informed reporters that he had not
heard a single syllable to support the idea that Trump withheld military aid to
an ally to leverage help in a U.S. election. This, despite the fact Volker supplied text messages involving communications with Bill
Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in the Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador
to the European Union.
Sondland, who made a fortune in the hotel business, but had
never been a diplomat, got the job by donating $1 million to Trump’s 2016 inaugural committee.
That’s fairly standard practice when it comes to awarding
ambassadorships to plumb nations: like England or France. Career diplomats get
to be ambassadors to countries like Mali or Tuvalu.
Or Iraq.
“I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help
with a political campaign.”
Ambassador Bill Taylor
The context of the emails is not entirely clear. But if what
ABC is reporting is correct, what Taylor was worried about is obvious.
(Volker
comes in late on a three-way talk.)
TAYLOR: The nightmare is they
[the Ukrainians] give the interview and don’t get the security assistance. The
Russians love it. (And I quit.)
(A
bit of cross talk takes place.)
TAYLOR: The message to the
Ukrainians (and Russians) we send with the decision on security assistance is
key. With the hold, we have already shaken their faith in us. Thus my nightmare
scenario.
TAYLOR (three minutes later):
Counting on you to be right about this interview, Gordon.
SONDLAND: Bill, I never said I
was “right”. I said we are where we are and believe we have identified the best
pathway forward. Let’s hope it works.
TAYLOR: As I said on the phone,
I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.
SONDLAND: Bill, I believe you
are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been
crystal clear: no quid pro quos of any kind. The President is trying to
evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms
that President Zelensky promised during his campaign. I suggest we stop this
back and forth by text. If you still have concerns, I recommend you give Lisa
Kenna or S a call to discuss them directly. Thanks.
TAYLOR: I agree.
In other words, Taylor, the professional, thinks it’s clear
military aid is being withheld in return for Ukrainian help in a U.S. political
campaign.
That’s what the whistleblower alleged.
10/4-6/19: After another crappy week, the president retreatsto Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls,
Virginia. There he can hunker down and tweet-hate on other Americans.
As for the need to hunker, Mr. Trump is feeling
the heat of the impeachment investigation. Even occasional voices at Fox News
have been raised against him, as evidence of shady dealings mounts. As a result
of recent leaks from his administration, we learn that Trump “pestered” Shinzo Abe
of Japan to recommend him for a Nobel Prize—due to his brilliant success
disarming North Korea—which in retrospect seems pathetic and needy. Trump
reportedly told the Saudis he’d back them for admission to the G-7, rambled on
in conversation with Chinese president Xi about chocolate cake, and made a fool
of himself on the phone with world leaders.
And there was growing evidence
that supported the Democrat’s decision to pursue an impeachment inquiry.
“It
strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically
motivated.”
Sen. Mitt
Romney
While most Republican
lawmakers chose to shelter in place all week, Sen. Romney made his position
plain, after the president called on China to investigate Joe Biden. “When the
only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation
is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process,” he
said, “it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than
politically motivated.”
Of
course, that meant Trump had to go ballistic on Twitter. At 6: 47 a.m. on
Saturday, we had this:
Somebody please wake up Mitt Romney and tell him that my conversation
with the Ukrainian President was a congenial and very appropriate one, and my
statement on China pertained to corruption, not politics. If Mitt worked this
hard on Obama, he could have won. Sadly, he choked!
That was followed at 9:17 by this:
Mitt Romney…is a pompous
“ass” who has been fighting me from the beginning, except when he begged me for
my endorsement for his Senate run (I gave it to him), and when he begged me to
be Secretary of State (I didn’t give it to him). He is so bad for R’s!
Meanwhile, multiple sources told Axios that the
president had spoken with Republican members of the House of Representatives.
Trump told them that even though his July 25 call was “perfect,”
he wasn’t to blame for making it. Energy Secretary Rick Perry made him punch
the buttons!
If this was Trump’s attempt to throw Perry under the bus, Perry wasn’t ready to be mashed. He told the Christian Broadcasting Network that, “as God is my witness,” when he
talked to Trump about a call to the president of Ukraine, “neither Joe or
Hunter Biden’s name ever came up.”
Also, he said he would soon be
resigning his post.
Trump’s defenses continued to
crack and crumble, including the claim the whistleblower had nothing but
second- and third-hand information. In fact, we learned there was a third whistleblower (if we include one who alleged misdeeds at IRS)
and the second tooting about the situation with Ukraine. This whistleblower had
first-hand information that backs up the first.
What about the idea that
Democrats were rushing to judgment? Down that defense went, too. We learned
that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wasn’t just “rushing” to judgment.
He had his mind made up.
In a video shot to solicit campaign cash, Mitch looked into the camera and
solemnly intoned, “Nancy Pelosi’s in the clutches of a left wing
mob.” They finally convinced her to impeach the president. “All of you
know your Constitution,” he continued.
“The way that impeachment stops is a Senate majority with me
as majority leader,” Mitch warned. “But I need your help. Please contribute
before the deadline.”
10/8-16/19: The Democrats continue to
press the inquiry and draw blood from Trump and his minions every day. Former
President Jimmy Carter offers advice to his successor, explaining how he might
extricate himself from this predicament. “Tell the truth, for a change,” Mr.
Carter suggests.
Trump just can’t do it.
So, what did we learn, as the days scrolled by? We learned
that Trump’s defenders were outraged because Chairman Schiff was holding
closed-door hearings. Witnesses came and went. Testimony was recorded. Most of
what they said remained secret. It is true, that what leaks we have likely
come from Democrats. Almost all make Trump look bad. But Trump fans
shouldn’t kid themselves. Republicans would be leaking like the Titanic,
if they had helpful information to leak. And you can be sure, behind the
curtain, Rep. Devin Nunes and his pals are leaking to the president. Trump has
to know that what is being said is badly damaging his position.
We also learned that Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who has
been dragged into the story, is resigning. If you like fossil fuels and global
warming, it’s a sad day for you—but not for your grandchildren. Climate change
is real. Our descendants are going to have to pay the piper, and the marching
band and the majorettes.
As The New York Times notes, “Mr. Perry told The Wall Street Journal in an interview on Wednesday that he was
in contact with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani about
Ukraine-related matters at the direction of Mr. Trump.” Or, to put it another
way, the president made him work with Rudy; whereas the president said
Perry made him make the July 25 call.
Once again, the “enemies of the people” were everywhere,
tracking down details and digging up facts. Reporters asked VP Pence if there was
any quid pro quo involved in negotiations with Ukraine. Oh, my heavens, Mr.
Pence replied, his head cocked slightly to the right, as is his wont. His
expression seemed to say, “Look, I’m sincere and judicious and I never lie.
But, frankly, I’m kind of dumb.” As for providing an answer, five times, he
refused to say.
“Of
course, no. No, it’s absolutely not.”
H.R.
McMaster, former National Security Adviser
H.R. McMaster, Trump’s second National Security Adviser—his
first is now a convicted felon—and his third has resigned in protest—was also
asked his opinion. Was it ever appropriate to pressure a foreign power to interfere in
the political processes of the United States?
“Of
course, no. No, it’s absolutely not.”
On Fox News, Joe diGenova, a former federal prosecutor,
appeared repeatedly, often accompanied by Victoria Toensing, his wife. The
couple were there for one reason: to defend President Trump. And the job of Fox News pundits
was to vociferously agree. The Democrats were worse than “suicide bombers,”
diGenova insisted at one point.
Only later, was it revealed that the couple had been working
with Rudy to pressure Ukraine to push the investigation into Hunter Biden. Even
better, they were handsomely paid by Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch
hiding out in Vienna. Charged with bribery and conspiracy in 2013, Firtash has been
fighting extradition to the U.S. ever since.
That meant, with a new president in town, it was worth it
to Firtash to pay diGenova and his wife $1 million to win him a “Get Out of
Jail Free” card. Also, Firtash and friends would help dig up dirt on…
Joe Biden and his son!
Do we see a trend???
Bloomberg News reported that part of
the $1 million diGenova and his wife were paid went to Lev Parnas, for his work
as their interpreter.
(More on him in a moment.)
The damaging revelations kept coming. It didn’t help, if you
believed in the innocence and purity of Don and Rudy, when federal
authorities arrested four of Mr. Giuliani’s associates. It was even less
helpful to learn those arrests were ordered by the U.S. District Attorney for
the Southern District of New York. That would be Geoffrey S. Berman, a Trump appointee.
Nor was it good for optics when the first two arrests came at Dulles International
Airport in Washington D.C. At the moment of their arrest Lev Parnas—yes, that
guy—and Igor Fruman, two fine fellows born in the former Soviet Union, but now
U.S. citizens, were about to board a flight bound for Vienna. For some reason the
two mengrasped one-way tickets in their mitts.
And the House Intelligence Committee had only just slapped
them with subpoenas the day before.
Once again, cold, hard cash was the root of all evil. Parnas
and Fruman were charged with funneling $325,000 in foreign money to a Trump
campaign Super PAC. They were also alleged to have directed funds to the
campaign of Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas lawmaker.
In return, Sessions pushed for removal of U.S. Ambassador to
Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Parnas, Fruman and Giuliani really wanted to see
get the boot.
And we’re supposed to believe Team Trump was interested in
cleaning up corruption in Ukraine!
Big
Bucks and Naftogaz.
It was ironic that Trump & Company were busy trying to
trash Hunter Biden, and by extension, his dad. At almost exactly the same moment,
Parnas, Fruman and Giuliani were trying to corner lucrative deals in Ukraine.
According to the Associated Press, Parnas and Fruman, aided and abetted
by Rudy, were hoping to convince the new president of Ukraine to replace the leadership of the country’s multi-billion
dollar state gas company, Naftogaz. Then they hoped to steer lucrative
contracts to companies controlled by allies and friends of President Trump.
Including…themselves.
Energy Secretary Perry was allegedly involved. In a series of
meetings, including one with President Zelensky, Perry suggested two fossil
fuel pals from Texas, Michael Bleyzer, a Ukrainian-American, and Robert Bensh.
They’d be perfect for the job of running Naftogaz. Ukrainian officials who
attended the meeting were stunned. According to the AP, “The person, who
spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said he was floored
by the American requests because the person had always viewed the U.S.
government ‘as having a higher ethical standard.’”
Another witness, to an earlier meeting, said the Ukrainians felt
they were being subjected to “a shakedown.”
And, at the risk of
redundancy, keep in mind. Rudy is working for Trump. He’s not working for
the United States.
He said that very clearly. That’s not “Fake News” or the “Deep State”
or leprechauns. Rudy said so. Rudy said it. If you fart the truth, and reporters prove you dealt it, the stench is on you.
The New York Times
explained why this story of self-dealing and election interference
mattered:
On Thursday, William F. Sweeney
Jr., the top agent in the F.B.I.’s New York office, said during a news
conference that “campaign finance laws exist for a reason.”
“The American people expect and
deserve an election process that hasn’t been corrupted by the influence of
foreign interests,” he said, “and the public has a right to know the true
source of campaign contributions.”
“Laws make up the fabric of who
we are as a nation,” Mr. Sweeney added. “These allegations aren’t about some
technicality, a civil violation or an error on a form. This investigation is
about corrupt behavior and deliberate lawbreaking.”
It didn’t get any better for Parnas and Fruman when they
showed up for their first court appearance. Both were judged to be flight risks.
Bail was set at $1 million each. Travel was also severely limited, and they were
ordered to wear GPS tracking devices.
Plus, former Rep. Pete Sessions was looking at a subpoena
from investigators, just to add to the fun.
*
THESE DEVELOPMENTS finally forced President Trump to break
down and tell the truth, just as Jimmy Carter had suggested.
Hahahahahahahahahaha.
Of course, he didn’t! Trump now claimed that he didn’t know either of those fellows who
had just been indicted. And you’d have to ask Rudy who they were. This line of
defense was quickly shredded, when Politico reported that Parnas had
attended Trump’s November 2016 election night celebration. At the time, Parnas
told a reporter that he and Trump were friends and neighbors in South Florida.
Rudy was at the party, too. So was Felix Sater, the twice-convicted felon, who
worked to get a Trump Tower Moscow deal done earlier that summer.
Politico also noted:
Parnas posted a photo of himself
with Trump at the White House on May 1, 2018, with a caption describing an
“incredible dinner and even better conversation,” according to a screenshot
captured by The Campaign Legal Center. Another picture Parnas posted from May
21, 2018, shows him with Fruman and Donald Trump Jr. in Beverly Hills, with the
caption “Power Breakfast!!!”
An even better picture was soon uncovered, with VP Pence,
Fruman, Parnas, Trump and Rudy smiling happily.
An appropriate caption might read: “One Stuffed Dummy and Four Crooks.”
Don Jr., unknown gentleman, Parnas and Fruman.
The last two suspects in this alleged illegal campaign finance scheme
were Andrey Kukushkin and David Correia.
CNBC told their story:
Two businessmen who allegedly
worked with associates of President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to make
illegal political donations are set to be arraigned Thursday in federal court
in New York.
David Correia and Andrey
Kukushkin are accused of conspiring to make donations to U.S. candidates—secretly
funded by an unnamed Russian national—in order to benefit a recreational
marijuana business venture.
They were indicted on a
conspiracy charge. Both men are U.S. citizens. Kukushkin was born in Ukraine,
and Correia was born in the United States.
As for Rudy, he was forced to admit that he had been paid
$500,000 for legal work performed for…Mr. Parnas. It was rumored that he
might still be the subject in an ongoing
counterintelligence probe.
*
IT DIDN’T HELP President Trump’s case to see a parade of U.S.
diplomats march up to Capitol Hill and testify under oath. Marie Yovanovitch,
who had been unexpectedly removed in May, was one of the first to appear. In
her opening statement, she alleged that it was the president who wanted her
removed. That would not be unusual. Nor would it be an abuse of power. But she
claimed, “there had been a concerted
campaign against me, and that the [State] Department had been under pressure
from the President to remove me since the Summer of 2018.”
“Why?” was the question.
“Individuals who have been named in the press
contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial
ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”
Ambassador
Yovanovitch
According to other witnesses—who testified in
days to follow—Yovanovitch had a reputation as a diplomat who had been pushing
the Ukrainians to clean up political corruption. Yet, it was that very same
corruption, Trump was claiming incongruously, that made him send Rudy to
Ukraine, to check out Hunter Biden, and help clean up the mess.
Yovanovitch told lawmakers that her superiors
explained to her that her removal was a result of political pressure. It was
not a removal “for cause.” She testified that she had had minimal contact with
Giuliani, who was pushing for her ouster. But several of Rudy’s pals in Ukraine
were the kind you’d want to avoid like lepers if ending corruption was your real
goal. “Individuals who have been named in the press contacts of Mr. Giuliani,”
she testified, “may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions
were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”
We don’t know everything Ambassador Volker said,
but what has leaked is bad for Trump and his devious pals. According to Rep.
Eric Swalwell, a Democrat, Volker testified that Giuliani ran a “shadow
shakedown” in Ukraine. As we have already seen, Volker brought along a cache of
emails to share. They paint a picture that—assuming details can be filled in—hint at
real danger for the president. On July 19, 2019, for example, Volker, Sondland
and Taylor discussed setting up a call between Trump and Zelensky. Volker tells
the others that he has talked with Rudy. Rudy is on board. “Most impt,” Volker
tells the others, “is for Zelensky to say that he will help investigation.”
If Zelensky wants to talk to Trump, everyone
knows what he must do. Investigate the Bidens.
The quid pro quo.
Two days later, Ambassador Bill Taylor (who
replaced Yovanovitch), contacts Volker and Sondland. “Gordon,” he says, “one
thing Kurt and I talked about yesterday was Sasha Danyliuk’s point that
President Zelenskyy [alternate spelling] is sensitive about Ukraine being taken
seriously, not merely as an instrument in Washington domestic, reelection
politics.”
Taylor says Zelensky doesn’t want to be “a
pawn.”
The diplomats keep pushing for a call between
Trump and Zelensky, which they feel is critical for a new government trying to
get its footing and fend off Russian attack. It will send a signal that the
U.S. is firmly on the Ukrainians’ side. Rudy agrees, assuming certain
conditions can be met.
On the morning of July 25, before the critical
call, Volker emails Andrey Yermak, a top aide to Mr. Zelensky. “Good lunch –
thanks. Hear from White House—assuming President Z convinces trump he will
investigate/ “get to the bottom of what happened” in 2016, we will nail down
date for visit to Washington. Good luck! See you tomorrow- kurt.”
This is not at all hard to comprehend—although
comprehension will elude GOP lawmakers who listen to a parade of witnesses on
Capitol Hill. The President of the Ukraine can have the call—and the visit to
D.C. he needs—but he must promise to carry out an investigation Trump wants.
It’s a quid pro quo. The quid is the meeting.
The quo is the investigation. Based on the
evidence we have, everyone involved knows what’s going on.
An investigation
of the 2016 election and Burisma.
Following the call, which Yermak tells Volker
“went well,” Yermak reminds Volker that Trump promised Zelensky an invite to
the White House and told him to choose the date. Yermak informs Volker that his
boss would like to visit the White House on September 20, 21 or 22.
Volker hears that plans for a visit are in the
initial stages and congratulates Sondland for getting the meeting lined up.
Sondland replies to Volker’s email, “I think potus really wants the
deliverable.”
That is: the investigation.
Volker, Sondland and Giuliani, who is not a
diplomat, but the president’s personal lawyer, discuss having the Ukrainians
issue a statement “announcing an investigation explicitly referencing the 2016
election and Burisma.”
Yermak tells the Americans he wants the Trump
administration to commit to a specific date for a White House visit before his
side puts any commitment in writing. But the Ukrainians clearly understand what
game is afoot. On August 13, Volker puts together a statement that he thinks
they might be able to use. If they agree, they will be committing to “a
transparent and unbiased investigation of all available facts and episodes,
including those involving Burisma and the 2016 U.S. elections, which in turn
will prevent the recurrence of this problem in the future.”
“Perfect,” Sondland replies.
Meanwhile, Trump has made the decision to hold
up U.S. military aid to Ukraine, even though Congress has appropriated the
money. By September 1, Taylor is deeply concerned. “Are we now saying,” he asks
Sondland, “that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on
investigations?”
A week passes. On September 8, Taylor, Volker
and Sondland talk again. Taylor informs the others, “The nightmare is they give
the interview [i.e. the Ukrainians agree to put out a statement about an
investigation] and don’t get the security assistance. The Russians love it.
(And I quit.)
Look, if you’re a Trump supporter, don’t be
stupid. Taylor clearly believes there’s a quid pro quo. Now the quid is U.S.
military assistance to an ally. If Trump blocks it, the Russians win big.
The United States suffers a huge loss and so do
our Ukrainian friends.
That’s Trump putting his own selfish interests
above those of the United States; and there’s your impeachable offense.
GEORGE KENT, a career
diplomat, appears next. He tells lawmakers that as early as 2015, he had
concerns about the work Hunter Biden was doing in Ukraine. According to CNN, Kent warned that
“it could undercut American efforts to convey to Ukraine the importance of
avoiding conflicts of interest.”
Point: Team Trump!
Or not.
Kent also tells lawmakers
that Trump & Co. made baseless claims against Ambassador Yovanovitch. Kent testifies that Acting White House
Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney oversaw a meeting in which regular State
Department personnel were sidelined. In their stead, three political
appointees, Rick Perry, Sondland and Volker would run the show.
“The Three Amigos,” Kent
said they dubbed themselves.
Volker, at least, seems
to have had the best interests of Ukraine at heart. Sondland is more
problematic.
Perry? Hard to tell. But money does talk.
And Naftogaz was BIG MONEY.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
*
KENT WASN’T the only career diplomat to point a finger at
Mulvaney. Dr. Fiona Hill—a member of Trump’s National Security Council—testified that her boss, National
Security Adviser John Bolton, was so alarmed by the president’s efforts to get
Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens, that he told her to lodge a protest
with John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the NSC.
According to Dr. Hill, Bolton referred to Rudy as “a hand
grenade” that was going to blow everyone to bits. Bolton wanted no part of the
“drug deal,” as he likened it, cooked up by Rudy and Mick, to hold up military
aid.
Hill told lawmakers that she consideredwhat was going on
to be a counterintelligence risk to the United States.
10/17/19: If the White House hoped for
relief, it would have to come when Ambassador Sondland, a longtime, bigtime GOP
donor, testified behind closed doors. Most of what he related remained
unknown. But Rep. Jackie Speier of California, a Democrat, told reporters his remarks
were “a lot of C.Y.A.” Even worse—or better, depending on where you stand on upholding
the rule of law—his testimony may have cracked the foundation of the Trump defense.
Yovanovitch, for instance, he called “an excellent diplomat.” Her departure, he
“regretted.”
As for Rudy’s role in Ukraine, Sondland seemed
mystified by why he was there. According to his opening statement (which
leaked), as The New York Times explained,
Mr. Sondland said Mr. Trump refused the counsel of his top
diplomats, who recommended that he meet with the new Ukrainian
president, Volodymyr Zelensky, without any preconditions. The president
saidthe diplomats needed to satisfy concerns that both he and
Mr. Giuliani had related to corruption in Ukraine, Mr. Sondland asserted.
“We were also disappointed by the president’s direction that we
involve Mr. Giuliani,” Mr. Sondland said. “Our view was that the men
and women of the State Department, not the president’s personal lawyer, should
take responsibility for all aspects of U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine.”
“I did not understand…that Mr. Giuliani’s
agenda might have also included an effort to…involve Ukrainians directly or
indirectly, in the president’s 2020 re-election campaign.”
Ambassador Sondland
“Please know that I would not have recommended that Mr. Giuliani
or any private citizen be involved in these foreign policy matters,” Sondland
said in his opening statement to the House Intelligence Committee. “However, given
the president’s explicit direction, as well as the importance we attached to
arranging a White House meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky, we
agreed to do as President Trump directed.”
“I did not understand, until much later,”
Sondland continued, “that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an
effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate
Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or
indirectly, in the president’s 2020 re-election campaign.”
Sondland was clearly
indicating that the main charge that could lead to impeachment was true.
*
BY SOME COSMIC MISCHANCE, Mick Mulvaney appeared
before reporters at the same time Sondland was testifying on Capitol Hill. The only
way to explain his performance is to assume that Mulvaney knew, via leaks from GOP
lawmakers, that what Sondland was saying was undermining the president’s defense.
That meant Mulvaney had to no choice but to go out and defend the
indefensible—to admit that part of the damning story was true, but not themost damning part.
Mulvaney acknowledged that military aid
to the Ukraine was held up because the White House wanted cooperation in what
he now insisted was a legitimate investigation by the Department of Justice. It
was, he added, the president’s prerogative to conduct diplomacy in any fashion
he liked.
(In short order, the DOJ went out of its
way to rebut Mulvaney’s claim. “If the White House was withholding aid from
Ukraine with regard to any investigation by the Justice Department, that’s news
to us,” a DOJ spokesperson said.)
It didn’t matter, Mulvaney told the press, if Team Trump was
pushing the Ukrainians to investigate matters related to the 2016 campaign. The
president wasn’t soliciting information to help him in 2020!
Oh, no.
Trump only wanted to clean up corruption.
He only wanted to know what had happened three years ago, even if investigating
the Biden family would help him win again next year. “I have news for everybody,” Mulvaney
said, thumping his lectern, “Get over it. There’s going to be political
influence in foreign policy. Elections have consequences. This happens all the
time.”
“Absolutely.
No question…That’s why we held up the money.”
What about the holdup of U.S. military assistance, reporters
wondered? Mulvaney was clear. There were “three issues,” involved. He held up
three fingers, while cameras rolled, and ticked them off. First, there was the
fear of ongoing corruption in the Ukraine. Second, there was frustration
because other European governments weren’t helping Ukraine more. Third, we had the
president’s demand that the Ukrainians investigate the issue, from 2016, of the
Democratic National Committee server.
“Did he also mention to me in passing the corruption related
to the D.N.C. server?” Mulvaney said, referring to Mr. Trump. “Absolutely. No
question about that. That’s why we held up the money.”
So, there it was. Donald J. Trump held up military aid to
force Ukraine to investigate some nutty conspiracy theory. Essentially, that
would be the theory that Ukraine,
not Russia, was involved in the 2016 theft of emails from the Democratic
National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Therefore, it would be proved that Trump never had Russian help in the election!
Mulvaney still wasn’t done. Asked by a reporter if what
George Kent said was true (that Mulvaney set up a meeting to put political
appointees in charge of diplomacy), Mulvaney played dumb.
Really dumb!
He said he had no idea who Kent was. Didn’t think he’d ever
talked to the man. Several times, when reporters pressed, Mick couldn’t recall
who U.S. diplomats were, making the casual observer wonder if he’d been
ingesting illegal drugs.
What about all the testimony from diplomats that seemed to
confirm everything the whistleblower had said? How did Mulvaney explain it? “What
you’re seeing now I believe,” he grumbled, “is a group of mostly career
bureaucrats who are saying, ‘You know what, I don’t like President Trump’s
politics, so I’m going to participate in this witch hunt that they are
undertaking on the Hill.’”
Besides, who were you going to believe? A bunch of “career
bureaucrats?” Who testified under oath?
Or career politicians, like Mulvaney? Who refused to testify at
all.
And Rudy, whose four pals were under arrest?
And Trump! Did reporters—and through them, the American
people—really believe Donald J. Trump would lie about all of this—just because
he had lied about everything else since taking office?
If Mulvaney’s performance was jaw-droppingly awful, it wasn’t
long before he realized he needed to clean up the mess he had just made. Shortly
after, he issued the following statement, blaming the free press for reporting
on the idiotic statements he had made. “Once again,” he complained,
the media has decided to
misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against
President Trump. Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between
Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election. The
president never told me to withhold any money until the Ukrainians did anything
related to the server.
Only Mulvaney did say what he said. He absolutely said the
Ukrainians had to investigate, or Trump would freeze the aid.
POSTSCRIPT: Mulvaney later appeared on Fox News; but his host was Chris Wallace, not
some stooge. That meant he ran into a buzz saw of questions. Mulvaney tried to
claim he never listed three reasons Trump held up military aid. There were only
two, and he ticked them off for Wallace again—leaving out any mention of an
investigation of the Biden family or any other issue from 2016. Wallace said he
was wrong and absolutely had said there were three.
10/18/19: Like a chain-reaction wreck on
a fog-enshrouded interstate, the president’s problems kept piling up like crumpled
cars and trucks.
A Fox News poll indicated that 51 percent of Americans supported his impeachment
and removal from office. Newsweekreported that 58 percent in another poll agreed with the
statement that Trump had definitely or probably done things that were “grounds for
impeachment.”
“I believe the effort to obtain damaging
information from a foreign government on a potential presidential candidate,
and contemporaneously withholding needed military equipment would constitute an
impeachable offense.”
Former Republican
Congressman William Cohen
Former
Gov. John Kasich of Ohio joined the call for Trump’s ouster. It was Mulvaney’s
admission that military aid had been withheld, he explained, that tipped him to that conclusion. There was
no excuse, he said, not when Ukraine “lives in the shadow of Russia, that’s got
troops on their land.”
Kasich
was not the only Republican willing to express his concern publicly. There were
reports that many more were privately appalled. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan joined in support of the
inquiry. “I don’t see any other way to get the facts,” he said. Having listened
to Mulvaney’s bumbling press conference, Sen. Lisa Murkowski made her disgust clear. “You don’t hold up foreign aid that we [Congress]
had previously appropriated for a political initiative. Period.”Former Republican lawmaker Bill Cohen, one of
seven GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee to vote for the impeachment
of President Nixon in 1974, went a step farther. “I believe
the effort to obtain damaging information from a foreign government on a
potential presidential candidate,” he told the Bangor Daily News, “and
contemporaneously withholding needed military equipment would constitute an
impeachable offense.”
Rep. Francis Rooney was the first Republican serving
in Congress to say he supported an impeachment inquiry. Rep. Adam Kinzinger joined
him in that principled stance. Neither said they had their minds made up on how
they might vote. Both felt an investigation was merited. “I’ve
been real mindful of the fact that during Watergate, all the people I knew
said, ‘Oh, they’re just abusing Nixon, and it’s a witch hunt,’” Rooney
explained. “Turns out it wasn’t a witch hunt. It was absolutely correct. I’m definitely at variance with some of
the people in [my] district who would probably follow Donald Trump off the
Grand Canyon rim.” He had, however, sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution.
The next day, Rooney announced that after two
terms in the House, he would not run for reelection.
10/21/19: Poll numbers indicate that revelations
in the impeachment inquiry, Trump’s desertion of the Syrian Kurds and
self-serving plan to host the G-7 summit at his private golf resort (plan now
canceled) aren’t selling well with ordinary Americans.
And, has Trump mentioned lately how much he hates reporters? At
least most of them. He decides to mention it again, near the end of a cabinet
meeting, with reporters watching and TV cameras rolling. He says his Democratic
foes are corrupt. But the press won’t say that, because “the media is corrupt
also. Much of the media—so much of it, such a big percentage of
it. It’s such a shame. Some great reporters and great journalists,
but some really bad people. So, that’s the story.”
Reporters are corrupt. Who
needs a free press, anyway!
Trump turned next in his nutty
little rant, to questions about the impeachment inquiry. He insisted the
Democrats had no reason to impeach him.
“Word for word, comma for comma.”
He made a call to President
Zelensky, “a perfect phone call. I made a perfect call—not a good call; a
perfect call.”
Trump wanted the American people to know who the real villain
was. It was “Shifty Schiff,” chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Schiff
had “fabricated” a story. He “made up a lie.” Trump was no chump. “So he made up a lie, and I released—they
never thought that I’d do this—I released a transcription, done by
stenographers, of the exact conversation I had. And now, the game was up.”
That “transcript,” he said,
was completely accurate, “word for word, comma for comma.”
Even that wasn’t true.
What had been released was a call memorandum, not “the exact conversation.” In fact, the
memorandum contained multiple ellipses.
“There was no pressure whatsoever,” put on Ukraine, Trump
said again.
Yet, for some strange reason, U.S. military assistance to
Ukraine was held up for months, just for fun.
Besides,
he continued, Democrats didn’t dare impeach him. The people loved him! In
Dallas, at a recent rally, he “had a record crowd.” His crowds were huge, he said. He filled “massive basketball
arenas.” And he filled them without bringing a band. “I don’t have a band,” he
blathered. “I set the world record for somebody without a guitar. Okay? I don’t
have bands. All right?”
Bruce Springsteen needs a
band.
Donald doesn’t have a
band.
Well, then, did Trump want to talk about “Shifty Schiff?” He
did! He’s “a phony guy, a corrupt politician,” Trump complained. Trump wanted
everyone to know. He wasn’t phony. He’s wasn’t corrupt. He hardly knew Rudy
Giuliani—or the four men Rudy was working with in the Ukraine.
A reporter asked another question. The president had said the
Republicans needed to fight harder to protect him. What about Democrats? Did
Trump have anything to say about them?
Yep.
Well, I think the Democrats
fight dirty. I think the Democrats are lousy politicians with lousy
policy. They want open borders. They don’t care about crime. They
want sanctuary cities. They don’t care about drugs. They don’t care
about almost anything.
The Democrats were, in other words, terrible human beings.
“It
could be Shifty Schiff. In my opinion, it’s possibly Schiff.”
Trump said he knew he might soon be facing impeachment. But
the real threat came from the people investigating. Those
Democrats! Trump hated them. And, also, he hated Sen. Mitt Romney. “They’re
vicious and they stick together,” he said of the opposition. “They don’t have
Mitt Romney in their midst, they don’t have people like that. They stick
together.”
Trump wanted to be clear. He hated whistleblowers almost as
much as he hated “Shifty Schiff,” and physical exercise of any kind, except
golf. “So do we have to protect somebody that gave a totally false account of
my conversation?” Trump asked rhetorically. The whistleblower lied. Not
Trump. “I don’t know. You tell me,” he persisted. “Do we have to protect
the informant? Now, I happen to think there probably wasn’t an
informant….So was there actually an informant? Maybe the informant was
Schiff. It could be Shifty Schiff. In my opinion, it’s possibly
Schiff.”
It was classic Trump.
By the same bizarre logic, it could “possibly” be Elvis, or
Jimmy Hoffa. It could even be—possibly—Melania. You could image the First Lady
wanting to blow the whistle on her philandering, fat, orange husband.
Remember, though: The Inspector General for the U.S.
intelligence community reviewed the complaint. He found it “credible” and of
“urgent concern.” Elvis didn’t write it. Neither did “Shifty Schiff.”
“I have
to fight off these—these lowlives.”
In Trump’s eyes, Schiff was shifty because he was gathering
testimony from a series of witnesses. “He’s a crooked politician,” Trump
grumbled. The entire impeachment inquiry was,
Very bad for our
country. This whole thing is very bad for our country. In the midst
of that, I’m trying to get out of wars. But we may have to get into wars,
too. Okay? We may have to get into wars. We’re better prepared than we’ve
ever been. If Iran does something, they’ll be hit like they’ve never been
hit before. I mean, we have things that we’re looking at.
But can you imagine I have
to fight off these—these lowlives at the same time I’m negotiating these very
important things that should’ve been done during Obama and Bush and even before
that.
Yes. Trump’s political foes were lowlifes. But he was a tough
guy—even if he weaseled out in Syria and deserted the Kurds. Don’t worry, he’s got
“things.”
He’s got plans.
*
TRUMP THANKS EVERYONE for listening and tries to wrap up
comments. Reporters keep firing questions.
Does he think he’ll be impeached?
“Well, the Democrats want to do it,” he says. But he has the
greatest economy ever. And the stock market “went through the roof” because
“they got rid of Obama, they got rid of Hillary.”
If any of the Democrats he’s watching in the debates were in
power, the stock market would “go down 70, 90, 80 [percent], you’d destroy the
country.”
That’s from the White House transcript. It reads, “70, 90, 80
[percent].”
Trump is making shit up, trying to make himself look good,
trying to fill some gaping hole in his soul. (The stock market went up 148%
when Obama was in charge, but his successor can’t admit it.)
The Democrats want to impeach him, Trump insists, because
that’s “the only way they’re going to win. They’ve got nothing. All they have
is a phone call that was perfect.” The whistleblower has “disappeared.” As for
all the diplomats testifying, the Democrats were “interviewing ambassadors who
I’d never heard of. I don’t know who these people are. I never heard
of them.”
You figure it might be a problem—if Trump really wanted to
deal with corruption in Ukraine—that he didn’t know his own diplomats. Well,
even though he didn’t know them, he added,
I have great respect for some of
them. One of them said, just recently—a very, very highly respected man—I’m not
going to get into their names, but a highly—said, “No, no. We were very,
very bothered by Joe Biden and his son back during the Obama administration.” He
said, “We were very…” He’s supposed to be their witness.
(Here, Trump is talking about Kurt Volker—but Volker will
soon torch the president in public testimony, too.)
Trump went on to suggest that the people saying he was
abusing his power were Obama people, and Clinton people, and “Never Trump”
people. “Those people might be worse than the Democrats—the Never
Trumpers. The good news is they’re dying off fast. They’re on
artificial respiration, I think.”
Finally, the president turned it over to his cabinet and
aides and they finished telling us how great the boss really is. Larry Kudlow talked
about “economic models” he said he’d been studying. They helped predict
electoral victories. Trump was on target, Kudlow claimed, to get between 289
and 351 electoral votes in 2020.
More, if the Ukrainians would help.
It was almost pitiful in the end—how needy the President of
the United States was. “Are they predicting who is going to win the election,
Larry? Is that what you’re saying?” Trump asked.
Yes, Kudlow told the boss. The economic numbers “are the
kinds of numbers that suggest a very substantial victory. A very
substantial victory.”
Trump beamed at last.
10/22-24/19: If Trump was having a
bad month, Tuesday and Wednesday were his worst days yet.
Or, the best days for this country in almost three years.
On Tuesday, another U.S. diplomat marched up to Capitol Hill
to testify behind closed doors. But what leaked, including his 15-page opening
statement, must have made the president poop his pajamas. That veteran
diplomat, Bill Taylor, was chosen—by Mike Pompeo—to replace the previous U.S.
Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Trump went out of his way to
dump.
Karma.
*
IF YOU AREN’T following the testimony, let’s just say that
what’s leaking isn’t making Trump sound like a saint. The president’s staunchest
defenders are outraged. Why are witnesses testifying behind closed doors! How
dare Democrats leak damaging details! Why hasn’t Speaker Pelosi called for an
official impeachment vote! Trump himself has called the inquiry a “kangaroo
court.” He’s not going to cooperate at all, and lawmakers can’t make him.
This
created a national security threat.
Still, the witnesses keep parading before Congress, and not
one has defended the president yet.
Trump took another right hook to the jaw when Michael McKinney,
a top adviser to Secretary of State Pompeo, resigned his post and appeared
voluntarily before the House Intelligence Committee. His opening statement,
leaked by someone (Democrats, we assume), makes his position clear:
The timing of my resignation was the result of
two overriding concerns: the failure, in my view, of the State Department to
offer support to Foreign Service employees caught up in the Impeachment Inquiry
on Ukraine; and, second, by what appears to be the utilization of our
ambassadors overseas to advance domestic political objectives.
I was disturbed by the
implication that foreign governments were being approached to procure negative
information on [the president’s] political opponents. I was convinced that this
would also have a serious impact on foreign service morale and the integrity of
our work overseas.
In other words, if you
were keeping track, Sondland and McKinney thought there was a quid pro quo. Dr.
Hill thought so, too. She believed this created a national security threat.
Kurt Volker thought Rudy’s efforts and the hold on military aid were a security
threat. George Kent worried about Hunter Biden’s work but wanted it to be clear
he thought it was fishy that regular diplomats were being pushed aside so Rudy
and his band of thieves could run amok. Ms. Yovanovitch wasn’t sure what had
happened to her, or why. She left Ukraine before the diplomatic doo hit the
fan. But she believed the people Rudy was working with were crooks.
*
FROM WHAT WE KNOW, Taylor may have knocked the president down
for a nine-count during his testimony. In fact, there would seem to be an
excellent chance, that when Chairman Schiff decides he has enough evidence to
open public hearings, the friends of President Trump will be sorry they asked.
“If Bill Taylor says it happened, it happened.”
Steven
Pifer, former Ambassador to Ukraine
We know Taylor had a distinguished career as diplomat. He
left public service some years back; but Secretary Pompeo convinced him to
return and take the position as charge d’affairs to Ukraine. Taylor is a West
Point graduate, and served during the Vietnam War. He was a company commander
in the 101st Airborne Division and was awarded a Bronze Star.
In 2006, President George W. Bush chose him to be Ambassador
to Ukraine. He served for three years, until President Obama replaced him with
an ambassador of his own choice. When Pompeo asked, Taylor, 72, told lawmakers
he was reluctant to return. But as he explained, a Republican
mentor he always trusted helped change his mind. “If your country asks you to do something, you do it—if you
can be effective,” Taylor testified his mentor had said.
As for character, Taylor
would be a hard man for Trump his toadies to attack. (But, as we shall see,
they still did.) A veteran diplomat from the Bush administration described him
as “a person of integrity with a strong, ethical base.” A former ambassador to
the Soviet Union agreed. “You
couldn’t ask for a more credible, universally respected, upright public servant
to testify on the facts of this case.” Steven Pifer, another former U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine, was even more confidant in what Taylor might say. “If
Bill Taylor says it happened, it happened,” he told reporters.
What exactly did Taylor tell lawmakers
on Wednesday? First, we learned that he’s a meticulous notetaker. He said he
shared his notes with the State Department, which refused to turn them over to
congressional panels involved in the inquiry. But Taylor kept a copy for
himself.
It didn’t take long for Ambassador Taylor
to start ringing alarm bells. In the first three paragraphs of his opening
statement he explained who he was. He was a Vietnam vet, a career diplomat with
fifty years of experience, and had served every U.S. president since 1985.
While I have served in many
places and in different capacities, I have a particular interest in and respect
for the importance of our country’s relationship with Ukraine. Our national
security demands that this relationship remain strong, However, in August and
September of this year, I became increasingly concerned that our relationship
with Ukraine was being fundamentally undermined by an irregular, informal
channel of U.S. policy-making and by the withholding of vital security
assistance for domestic political reasons [emphasis added].
Nor did Taylor feel that the U.S. could
afford to ruin its relationship with Ukraine. In his fifth paragraph, he
explained:
First, Ukraine is a strategic
partner of the United States, important for the security of our country
as well as Europe. Second, Ukraine is, right at this moment—while we sit in
this room—and for the last five years, under armed attack from Russia. Third,
the security assistance we provide is crucial to Ukraine’s defense against
Russian aggression, and, more importantly, sends a signal to Ukrainians—and Russians—that
we are Ukraine’s reliable strategic partner. And finally, as the Committees are
now aware, I said on September 9 in a message to Ambassador Gordon Sondland
that withholding security assistance in exchange for help with a domestic
political campaign in the United States would be “crazy.”
If Ukraine could break free of Russian
influence, it would be “possible for Europe to
be whole, free, democratic, and at peace.”
So, an American president could stand by Ukraine
and shape a better world. Or Trump could be Trump.
Taylor said he arrived in Kyiv (as he spelled it)
on June 17. He was carrying a letter from President Trump, inviting President Zelensky
to meet in the White House. What Taylor discovered on arrival was “a weird
combination of encouraging, confusing, and ultimately alarming circumstances.”
He was encouraged by Zelensky’s desire to root out corruption. He was confused
to find there were two diplomatic tracks in play, one “highly irregular.” On that track Rudy ran the train.
At first, he explained, all the American
principals agreed a meeting between Trump and Zelensky would benefit both
nations. As other witnesses had already
made clear, it was readily apparent that Rudy was tearing up the regular
diplomatic rails. If Mr. Zelensky hoped to meet with Trump, he was going to
have to push “the investigation of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference
in the 2016 U.S. election.” By July 10, Taylor was hearing from Ukrainian
officials who said Giuliani had told them a phone call between the two leaders
was not going to happen.
Unless.
They told Taylor they were “disappointed
and alarmed.” Eight days later, he heard another U.S. official say that “there
was a hold on security assistance to Ukraine but could not say why.”
The picture emerging was damning to
President Trump and Lawyer Rudy, in the extreme. So, Republicans fell back on
arguing that what Taylor was saying was “thirdhand hearsay.” And some of it
was.
And most of it wasn’t.
It was all about the
Bidens, father and son.
Subsequently, other U.S. diplomats and
officials told Taylor the hold on military aid and the hold on the meeting had
to do with White House insistence on certain “investigations.” During one
high-level discussion, Taylor learned, National Security Adviser Bolton became
so upset over the hold, that he terminated the discussion. Bolton told Hill—who
told Taylor—that he wanted no part of the “drug deal” Mulvaney and Giuliani
were cooking up. Bolton now opposed a call between
the two leaders “out of concern that it ‘would be a disaster.’” In a
conversation with Mr. Sondland on July 20, Sondland told Taylor he had recommended
a phrase for Zelensky to use if he did talk to Trump. “I will leave no stone
unturned,” he was to say, in pursuing the investigations Trump so badly wanted.
It was all about the Bidens, father and son.
Shortly thereafter, Volker and Taylor traveled to
the front lines, where sporadic fighting still flares almost every day. Looking
across a damaged bridge, where a river separated the two sides, Taylor could
see heavily-armed Russian forces. He thought of the 13,000 Ukrainian dead. “More
Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. assistance,” he realized at
that moment.
And that was how he explained it to members of
Congress.
“The security
assistance money would not come until President Zelenskyy committed to pursue
the Burisma investigation.”
Ambassador
Sondland
By late
August, his concern had intensified. Military assistance had been on hold for
weeks. On August 27, Bolton flew to Kyiv to talk to Zelensky. Taylor spoke to Bolton
about his worries. Bolton recommended sending a first-person cable to Secretary
of State Pompeo. Taylor did.
A top
Ukrainian official asked him about the aid delay on August 29.
“At that
point,” Taylor testified, “I was embarrassed that I could give him no
explanation for why it was withheld.”
“It had still not occurred to me that the hold on security
assistance could be related to the ‘investigations.’ That, however, would soon
change,” he told lawmakers. On September 1, he was told that Sondland had
warned the Ukrainians that “the
security assistance money would not come until President Zelenskyy committed to
pursue the Burisma investigation.”
So, was there a quid pro quo?
At one point, we knew from earlier testimony,
that Sondland had assured Taylor over the phone that Trump said there were no
quid pro quos. But Taylor told lawmakers, Sondland went on to admit that
there were. President Zelensky would have to announce he was investigating
Joe Biden and his son—or forget military assistance. “Ambassador Sondland said
that ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security
assistance,” Taylor explained.
“He said that President Trump wanted President
Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such
investigations.” Other diplomats made it clear that Trump was adamant. The
president claimed he wasn’t asking for a quid pro quo. But, as Taylor described
it, he obviously was. He was insisting “that
President Zelenskyy go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of
Biden and 2016 election interference.” On September 8 Sondland
told Taylor, that the U.S. and Ukraine
were in a “stalemate.” Zelensky would have to “clear things up.”
“I understood a ‘stalemate’ to mean that Ukraine would not
receive the much-needed military assistance,” Taylor told the committee, until
the Ukrainians committed to what amounted to interference in the next U.S.
election.
Quid pro quo.
Taylor might be a man of unflinching
integrity, according to peers. Yet, by Tuesday evening, White House Press Lacky
Stephanie Grisham was out with a statement. But for context, let’s first compare
Grisham to Taylor. She lost one job after she was accused of padding expense
accounts. She lost another in a plagiarism scandal. She has two DUI’s to her
name. And, of course, she failed to show up for court. But it was her job now—one
shady character working for another—to bash Taylor and a dozen other witnesses,
including those whom Trump had chosen to put in their positions. So, Grisham shamelessly
insisted that the president had “done nothing wrong.” The witnesses were part
of “a coordinated smear campaignfrom far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war
on the Constitution.”
None of the witnesses,
of course, were accused of any crimes. Grisham couldn’t care less. Trump hired
her to shill and shill she would.
Taxpayers paid her salary,
of course.
*
NEW EVIDENCE accumulated even as 25 GOP House members staged
a “lunch counter” sit-in that required neither the courage nor intelligence of
civil rights days. Determined to stop witnesses from testifying behind closed
doors, shouting angrily about how they were being kept in the dark, they
stormed the high security room where House Intelligence Committee meetings are
held.
Led by intrepid presidential ass smoocher, Rep. Matt Gaetz,
the “protesters” delayed the testimony of Laura Cooper, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, for five hours.
It was later noted by members of the free press that
Republicans weren’t really being kept in the dark. At least thirteen of the
protesters were already members of one of the three committees
involved in the impeachment inquiry. That meant those thirteen (and 34 other
Republicans on the committees) had the right to be in the hearing room any time
they chose.
Finally, just after 4:00 P.M., the last of Gaetz’s band of
sunshine patriots got hungry, or sleepy, or had to pee and left the room. With
that, Ms. Cooper had a chance to testify and answered questions for three
hours. The Defense Department had tried to block her testimony. But she was one
of several Defense officials who agreed military aid to Ukraine must go
forward.
“Watch
out for them, they are human scum!”
For once, there might have been a snippet of good news for
the president, if one were trying to guess what Cooper said behind closed
doors. According to Politico, Democrats emerged “tight-lipped” from the
hearing when she finished. This time, a Republican, Rep. Mark Meadows, seemed excited
to talk. He told reporters that parts of what Cooper said conflicted with the
account of Ambassador Taylor.
Whatever GOP lawmakers
were leaking to the president, though, the news clearly rankled. By lunchtime
on Wednesday, he was describing Taylor and the other witnesses as “Never Trumpers.”
At 12:48 p.m. he let rip on Twitter: “The
Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in
certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do
Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!”
Yes, the President of the United States
said that.
Human scum.
Dangerous for our country.
Anyone who cared about “our country”
should have been appalled. It was a statement worthy of the worst dictators in
recorded history: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Putin, Assad and Kim Jong-un.
By Thursday, Press Lacky Grisham had backed Trump up. Was the president right
to call his critics “human scum,” reporters inquired? Yes, she said. Yes, he
was. “The people who are against him and have been against him and
working against him since the day he took office are just that.”
It was that kind of week.
10/25/19: There were no witness scheduled Friday
in the impeachment inquiry. So, we had a chance to catch up on odds and ends in
the news. Let’s take them as they come. Trump? Can we trust him?
The president told reporters recently
that he had talked to Sen. McConnell about his telephone call with Mr. Zelensky.
“He
read my phone call [the memorandum] with the president of Ukraine,” Trump
claimed. “Mitch McConnell, he said, ‘That was the most innocent phone call that
I’ve read.’ I mean, give me a break.”
Alas, McConnell had to admit to reporters later
that he had never talked to Trump about his call.
McConnell now had fresh proof that Trump was a
practiced liar. That meant, the Senate Majority Leader had no choice but to tell a lunchtime gathering of GOP lawmakers that they were screwed and
Trump was going to jail.
No, I jest.
McConnell knew the facts of the case, so far,
were looking bad.
So, according to one Republican in attendance,
he told members, “This is going to be about process.”
Knowing it was going to be hard to defend the
president for holding up military aid to an ally, simply to force the leader of
that ally to interfere in a U.S. election, McConnell had a creative idea!
Republicans should complain about the way Democrats were running the inquiry.
Trump might be a liar in matters large, small
and medium-sized. But Democrats weren’t playing fair. They wouldn’t let
witnesses testify in public so that other witnesses could shape their testimony
accordingly.
We also learned that Sen. John Thune, the
second ranking Senate Republican, was unhappy with the way Chairman Schiff was running the inquiry. Well, then,
reporters asked, what had he been able to gather from the information so far
leaked or released? “The picture
coming out of it based on the reporting we’ve seen is, yeah, I would say it’s not
a good one,” Thune admitted.
On Friday, we learned that it’s likely to get
worse before it gets better. Tim Morrison, a member of the National Security
Council, made it clear that despite White House efforts to block him, he would
testify next Thursday. Morrison listened to the July 25 phone call. That would
put him in position to bolster the testimony of Ambassador Bill “Human Scum”
Taylor. And based on leaks so far, it seems Morrison will say he agrees with Ambassador
Scum.
*
LET’S WRAP IT UP, with one more right-wing nut making
headlines. Former Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker appears on Fox News. He
tells host Laura Ingraham that impeaching the president thirteen months before
an election is “not good for the Republic.”
(Neither is having a president bend U.S. diplomacy to place
personal interests ahead of the country.)
Naturally, Ingraham agrees. She works for Fox News. She would
agree if Whitaker said Trump had the right to practice polygamy in the White
House. “Mueller failed,” she says, in his effort to bring Trump down. Whitaker
says the “global elitists” are out to get the orange hero. Finally, he offers
up this gem. “Abuse of power is not a crime. Let’s
fundamentally boil it down, the Constitution is very clear that there has to be
some pretty egregious behavior.”
In
other words, Trump can’t be impeached.
*
IF
ONE TAKES the time to study the U.S. Constitution, one discovers it’s not
nearly that simple. You might assume a former Acting Attorney General would
know that, too, unless you remembered that Whitaker was a typical Trump
appointee.
As
for those of us who are not complete and utter nincompoops, we know the
Constitution says only that an individual can be impeached for treason, bribery
and “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Even
the Founding Fathers couldn’t make up their minds what that phrase should be understood
to include. James Madison, speaking at the Constitutional Convention, on July
20, 1787, favored a clause outlining the power of the legislative branch to
impeach a president. He talked of a need to guard against the chief executive
in cases of “incapacity, negligence or perfidy.”
For
example, a future president, Mr. Madison warned, “might betray his trust to
foreign powers.”
Impeachments:
“A good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of
them. He hoped the maxim would never be adopted here that the chief magistrate
could do no wrong.”
Elbridge
Gerry
According
to Madison’s notes from the Convention, Mr. Pinckney (he failed to specify
which “Mr. Pinckney,” and there were two) “did not see the necessity of
impeachments.” Mr. Edmund Randolph admitted that “impeachment was a favorite
principle with him. Guilt wherever found,” he said, “ought to be punished.” “In
some respects the public money will be in his hands,” Randolph warned of any
president. The temptation might prove too much for ordinary men. Ben Franklin
explained that the power of impeachment would serve as a guard against more
violent methods of removing a chief executive. Elbridge Gerry also “urged the
necessity of impeachments. A good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one
ought to be kept in fear of them. He hoped the maxim would never be adopted
here that the chief magistrate could do no wrong.”
(Or
pardon himself, if he did?????????????????????)
Gouverneur
Morris spoke last for that day. His “opinion had been changed by the arguments
used in the discussion,” he said. Morris noted, for example, that “Charles II
was bribed by Louis XIV.”
The
president, in the system the Founding Fathers envisioned, might more easily be
tempted by riches, since he (or she, in modern parlance) had no hereditary
interest in government, as did royals.
Morris
continued,
He may be bribed by a greater interest to
betray his trust; and no one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the
danger of seeing the first Magistrate in forign [sic] pay, without being able
to guard against it by displacing him…The Executive ought therefore to be
impeachable for treachery.
Nine
state delegations (at the Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, each state had
one vote) voted in favor of the proposition: “Shall the Executive be removable
on impeachments &c.?”
Only
South Carolina voted “nay.”
Six
days later, as delegates hammered out details of the new plan, Madison noted
that it was agreed the Constitution should specify removal of a president for “malfeasance or neglect of duty.” That wording seemed too broad and it was
refined on August 6. It was now proposed that the Constitution specify
impeachment of the president for “treason, bribery, or corruption.”
“Corruption”
was also considered to be too broad.
On
September 8, delegates revisited the matter again. At that point, as the
proposed new plan of government read, the president was removable only for
“treason or bribery.” George Mason argued for adding, after bribery, the words:
“or maladministration.” His motion was seconded.
Madison
warned that such a definition was “so vague” as to put any president in the
hands of a hostile Senate. Mason withdrew his suggestion and substituted the
phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The vote was 8-3, the motion carrying.
(At the time, Rhode Island was not represented; and all but one member of the
New York delegation, Alexander Hamilton, had gone home in a huff.)
Yet
another adjustment was deemed necessary. And “the vice-President and other
Civil officers of the U.S.” were added to the list of those impeachable. That
list already included members of the legislature and federal judges. A
suggestion that members of the Supreme Court be granted the final vote in cases
of impeachment—rather than the Senate—was defeated.
On
September 14 one last proposal was made. It was suggested that such wording be
added to the Constitution: “that persons impeached be suspended from office
until they be tried and acquitted.”
This
was voted down, eight states against, three in favor.
So,
the question of what the term “high crimes and misdemeanors” means was not in
any way as simple as Mr. Whitaker was trying to make it sound on an evening,
more than two hundred years later, on a Fox News show—to the benefit of his
lord and master, Donald J. Trump.
And
you might think a Fox News pundit would have sniffed out the subtleties and
enlightened her viewers.
You
would, of course, be wrong. Ingraham had sorted through all the issues related
to the testimony of half-a-dozen witnesses who had appeared before the House
Intelligence Committee. You could not put anything past Ms. Ingraham! Her keen
nose had sniffed out the key to the impeachment inquiry. Her defense of Trump
would be rock solid. Yes, she was bothered by the single-spacing of
Ambassador Taylor’s fifteen-page, opening statement.
Fifteen
pages! Single-spaced! It put her in mind of some doltish young job seeker,
turning in a crappy resume.
This,
she said, would be a person you would “never want to hire.”
This
blogger happened to catch a recording of the Whitaker-Ingraham discussion
afterwards. It made him wonder. Would you prefer to hire Whitaker, based on a
double-spaced resume, if he included the time he served as chief
counsel for World Patent Marketing? That company was found guilty of bilking
customers out of $26 million.
As
for Trump, would you prefer to hire him, if he double-spaced and listed bone
spurs, multiple bankruptcies, or hush money paid to silence women he had had
sex with outside of marriage?
And
who hired Ingraham, a woman so dense as to try to defend Trump, based on the
idea that Taylor’s “spacing” was what mattered?
With
such thoughts dancing in his head, this blogger went to bed Friday and
slumbered in bliss.
10/26/19: The well-rested blogger arose
again on Saturday and decided to pile up the wreckage from the week and prepare
to go out drinking. We know, for starters, that the president spent the day at
Camp David.
That afternoon, former White House Chief of Staff, Gen. John
Kelly, explained in an interview that he had warned President Trump not to hire
a “yes man” to replace him when he left his job. “I
said, whatever you do—and we were still in the process of trying to find
someone to take my place—I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’” Kelly
told the Washington Examiner, “someone who won’t tell you the truth—don’t
do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”
Kelly said he felt bad about his decision to quit
his post. “That was almost 11 months ago, and I have an awful lot of, to say
the least, second thoughts about leaving. It pains me to see what’s going on
because I believe if I was still there or someone like me was there, [Trump] would
not be kind of, all over the place.”
What Kelly was hinting at was that you wouldn’t
have Mick Mulvaney saying the decision to hold the next G-7 summit at Trump
National Doral was a great idea.
Or Mick admitting that Trump withheld U.S.
military aid to Ukraine, until the Ukrainians agreed to investigate the Biden
family.
Or Mick saying, to reporters and the American
people: “Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign
policy.”
Now, as the leaves continued to fall in the
nation’s capital, Kelly’s prediction appeared prescient.
*
DEMOCRATS in the House of Representatives
continued to bring in witnesses, including one more, Philip Reeker, on
Saturday. Step by step, they moved closer to the denouement: bringing a formal
bill of impeachment against the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
If ever anyone needed confirmation, regarding the words of
Gen. Kelly, that it would have been wise, in December 2018, for the president
to avoid surrounding himself with “yes men” (and “yes women”) there was fresh
evidence later that day. First, the president added another liar to his long
list of liars, who he insisted were lying when they said anything bad about him.
“He never said anything like that,” Trump told CNN, referring to Kelly. “If he
would have said that I would have thrown him out of the office. He just wants
to come back into the action like everybody else does.”
But it was a “yes woman,” White House Press Lacky Stephanie
Grisham, who most clearly illustrated the truth of General Kelly’s words,
albeit inadvertently. “I worked with John Kelly,” she responded, “and he was totally
unequipped to handle the genius of our great President.”
Let’s
put that line in very large letters, to prove Gen. Kelly’s point:
“I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to
handle the genius of our great President.”
Press Lacky Stephanie Grisham
If you thought Press Secretary Pinocchio Sarah Sanders was
bad, and White House Spokes Babe Hope Hicks was a tool, Grisham had now entered North Korean TV-propaganda-territory.
What next, crowds cheering in frantic unison?
*
ON NICOLE WALLACE’S afternoon show on MSNBC earlier the same
week, another retired general spoke his mind. Gen. Barry McCaffrey told Ms.
Wallace that, “we have a rogue presidency.”
It would be up to Congress and the American people, he said,
to keep the rogue under control. Fortunately, polls seemed to indicate that the
American people were warming to the task:
10/27/19: Jack Tapper, on Face the
Nation, talks to officers who served with Ambassador Bill Taylor, when he was a young
U.S. Army officer, dodging bullets in South Vietnam. In the view of men like
retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry, an old comrade, Taylor was a hero, not “human
scum.”
A true hero.
10/28/19: You figure the president is in
a surly mood to start the work week. He’s sweating all the witnesses who have
testified; and his administration is having difficulty blocking others, several
of whom have made it clear they would be happy to talk with lawmakers.
On Monday, under White House orders, Dr. Charles Kupperman,
fails to appear before Congress. Kupperman has asked the courts to rule. Does a
White House claim of executive privilege prevail—meaning he can’t talk? Or does
a congressional subpoena compel him to give evidence in the impeachment
inquiry?
The judges will have to rule.
Dr. Kupperman, of course, was on the July 25 phone call. You
figure if the call was “perfect” and “innocent,” as the president says, his
testimony might shine a ray of glorious light on all things Donald J. Trump.
Then again, it might not matter whether Kupperman talks. On Thursday, Tim
Morrison said he would testify, despite White House insistence that he could
not. Morrison, too, was listening in on the call.
Trump’s tall tale of a perfect phone call was not bolstered
when the lawyer for Ambassador Sondland told the Wall Street Journal
over the weekend that his client believed the president had offered a White
House meeting, and resumption of U.S. military aid, but only if Ukraine
would investigate Joe Biden and his son.
We also know that on Friday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell
ordered the DOJ to turn over Grand Jury testimony from the Mueller investigation
to the House Judiciary Committee.
Much of that testimony was redacted in the Mueller Report,
but redacted material might contain additional information to support an
“obstruction of justice” finding in the articles of impeachment that are likely
coming.
(One tantalizing theory holds that Donald J. Trump Jr.
refused to testify before the Grand Jury,
indicating that if called, he would plead the Fifth Amendment. If for no other
reason than the pure fun of it all, it would be a pleasure to those of us of a
liberal persuasion to find out if that was the case.)
10/29/19: If Trump was relatively happy
on Monday—not counting getting booed at the World Series—he was likely to have
ended up in a funk by lunchtime on Tuesday.
Late last night we learned that Lt. Colonel Alexander S.
Vindman was planning to go before the House Intelligence Committee. Even if
you’re following all the testimony in the impeachment inquiry (those portions
which have leaked), Vindman’s name may be new to you.
Yes. Yes. Yes. We know the leaks have almost all come from
the Democratic side. We know.
We also know, if Republicans had good news to leak, Rep.
Devin Nunes would be on the phone, leaking to reporters and the White House
like an octogenarian gentleman with bladder issues.
*
IN A PREPARED STATEMENT to lawmakers, already leaked to the
“Fake News” folks at The New York Times, Vindman appears ready to fire
at least two torpedoes into the hull of the already-listing U.S.S. Trump.
“I have a deep appreciation for American values and ideals
and the power of freedom. I am a patriot, and it is my sacred duty and honor to
advance and defend OUR country, irrespective of party or politics.”
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman
Lt. Col. Vindman is an immigrant. He and his family came to
the United States as refugees when he was three. He grew up here and joined the
U.S. Army. Vindman has served his adopted country for twenty years, did a tour
in Iraq and collected a Purple Heart after an IED exploded nearby. According to
the Times, he will lay out his background in his prepared remarks:
My family fled the Soviet Union
when I was three and a half years old. Upon arriving in New York City in 1979, my
father worked multiple jobs to support us, all the while learning English at
night. He stressed to us the importance of fully integrating into our adopted
country. For many years, life was quite difficult. In spite of our challenging
beginnings, my family worked to build its own American dream. I have a deep
appreciation for American values and ideals and the power of freedom.
I am a patriot, and it is my
sacred duty and honor to advance and defend OUR country, irrespective of party
or politics.
No bone
spurs for these men.
As we have long since learned, any man (or woman) who
believes in duty and honor is unlikely to be a friend of Donald J. Trump. So,
we should expect to see Press Lacky Grisham come marching out in front of the
cameras once again, to describe another war hero as “human scum.”
“For over twenty years,” Lt. Col. Vindman plans to say, he served
his country in “a non-partisan manner.” He has “done so with the utmost
respect and professionalism for both Republican and Democratic
administrations.”
He is prepared to describe communications involving top Trump
administration figures and representatives of Ukraine. Vindman was listening on
the crucial July 25 call. He will testify that he is “not the whistleblower.”
Nor does he feel comfortable venturing a guess as to who that person might be.
Like that whistleblower, he will say he had grave concerns on more than one
occasion, regarding Trump’s actions and those of his political pals. Like Dr.
Fiona Hill, who has already testified and launched a torpedo of her own, Vindman
was a member of the National Security Council. In that position he had
first-hand knowledge of what was going on inside the White House.
“Critical
to U.S. national security interests.”
“Since 2008,” he is prepared to say,
Russia has manifested an overtly
aggressive foreign policy, leveraging military power and employing hybrid
warfare to achieve its objectives of regional hegemony and global influence.
Absent a deterrent to dissuade Russia from such aggression, there is an
increased risk of further confrontations with the West. In this situation, a
strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security interests because
Ukraine is a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.
President Trump’s defenders have insisted since the start of
the impeachment inquiry that he did nothing wrong. They have claimed he held up
military aid to our ally out of concern about “corruption” in Ukraine.
Colonel Vindman will not support that construct:
In spite of being under assault
from Russia for more than five years, Ukraine has taken major steps towards
integrating with the West. The U.S. government policy community’s view is that
the election of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy [alternate spelling] and the
promise of reforms to eliminate corruption will lock in Ukraine’s
Western-leaning trajectory, and allow Ukraine to realize its dream of a vibrant
democracy and economic prosperity.
Vindman will tell members of the House Intelligence Committee
that he joined the NSC in July 2018. In an apparent slap at Rudy Giuliani, he
will explain that by the spring of 2019, he,
became aware of outside
influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the
consensus views of the interagency [the U.S. intelligence services]. This
narrative was harmful to U.S. government policy. While my interagency
colleagues and I were becoming increasingly optimistic on Ukraine’s prospects,
this alternative narrative undermined U.S. government efforts to expand
cooperation with Ukraine.
The colonel was one of several members of the NSC who
listened to an April 21, 2019 call between the two presidents. Vindman will say
that that call went well. Trump expressed a desire to work with Zelenskyy [his
spelling] and “extended an invitation to visit the White House.”
In May, the colonel was one of several members of the NSC to
attend Zelensky’s inauguration. The U.S. delegation came away impressed.
Zelensky and his top aides seemed committed to cleaning up corruption and
anxious to build a stronger relationship with the United States.
“Our partnership is rooted in the idea that free citizens should
be able to exercise their democratic rights, choose their own destiny, and live
in peace.”
Lt. Col. Vindman
On July 10, however, serious signs of trouble emerged.
[That day] Oleksandr Danylyuk,
the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council for Ukraine, visited
Washington, D.C. for a meeting with National Security Advisor Bolton.
Ambassadors Volker and Sondland also attended, along with Energy Secretary Rick
Perry. The meeting proceeded well until the Ukrainians broached the subject of a
meeting between the two presidents. The Ukrainians saw this meeting as
critically important in order to solidify the support of their most important
international partner. Amb. Sondland started to speak about Ukraine
delivering specific investigations in order to secure the meeting with the
President, at which time Ambassador Bolton cut the meeting short.
Following this meeting, there
was a scheduled debriefing during which Amb. Sondland emphasized the importance
that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens,
and Burisma. I stated to Amb. Sondland that his statements were
inappropriate, that the request to investigate Biden and his son had nothing to
do with national security, and that such investigations were not something the NSC
was going to get involved in or push.
Dr. Hill entered the room and broached similar concerns. But
she, Bolton and Vindman were deeply troubled. Their alarm grew exponentially
with the call of July 25. Vindman will testify that he listened, as did
colleagues from the NSC and the office of the Vice President.
“As the transcript is in the public record, we are all aware of
what was said,” his prepared remarks will note.
But if the transcript is in the public record—and it’s a call
memorandum, not a verbatim record—the reaction of patriots like Lt. Col.
Vindman should shake Trump fans.
I was concerned by the call. I
did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a
U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S.
government’s support of Ukraine. I realized that if Ukraine pursued an
investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a
partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan
support it has thus far maintained. This would all undermine U.S. national
security.
He will end his prepared marks with this:
The United States and Ukraine
are and must remain strategic partners, working together to realize the shared
vision of a stable, prosperous, and democratic Ukraine that is integrated into
the Euro-Atlantic community. Our partnership is rooted in the idea that free
citizens should be able to exercise their democratic rights, choose their own
destiny, and live in peace.
The colonel will then take questions and respond to the best
of his recollection for as long lawmakers would like him to stay.
In other words, Vindman is expected to lay out the case that
you could choose to work with the “free citizens” of Ukraine.
Or you could do what the President of the United States did. You
could make it clear you wanted the Ukrainians to investigate Joe Biden and his
son.
Or forget the military aid.
That’s the torpedo that should sink the U.S.S. Trump. It’s
“Russia, if you’re listening,” with a 2020 twist.
10/30/19: A veteran U.S. Army officer
and member of the National Security Council testifies in Congress. According to
leaks, he makes clear that in a call to President Zelensky of Ukraine, our
“favorite president” specifically asked Zelensky for help in digging up dirt on
Joe and Hunter Biden.
We already knew Trump asked because:
1.The original whistleblower said he did.
2.Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney
admitted Trump did and said everyone should “get over it.”
3.The call memorandum—which is not an exact transcript—even
though President Trump says it is (it says at the bottom of the first page
it’s not)—includes Trump suggesting he’d like Zelensky to investigate.
Now we had Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman appearing before
lawmakers and testifying that Trump told Zelensky there were tapes or
recordings of Joe Biden discussing corruption in Ukraine. And could he please
publicly announce, before he got any military aid, that he was looking for
those tapes, even if, in the end, he couldn’t find them?
Unlike Trump, who refused to sit for testimony under oath,
when Robert Mueller asked, Vindman testified eight hours. He told lawmakers
that the president’s comment about the tapes, and a number of others, were
omitted from the July 25 call memorandum. As part of his job, he tried to have
the transcript corrected. White House staffers blocked him. As per the whistleblower
complaint, Colonel Vindman said the more complete record was then locked away
in a special codeword-protected security system.
Naturally, Vindman’s testimony opened him up to attack from
the extreme right-wing. So, context might help. Vindman was wounded in combat
in Iraq in 2004. He has worn the uniform for twenty years. His two decades on
duty would equal all the years of service, combined, of Donald J. “Bone Spurs”
Trump, Donald J. Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka and Tiffany (women can serve),
Melania (Vindman is an immigrant), Fred Trump, the president’s father and
Friedrich Trump, the president’s grandfather (he ducked service in Germany
before immigrating in 1885).
Let’s go to the calculator.
Tap. Tap,
tap, tap.
Okay, combined, the “Fighting Trumps” have 0 years of
service.
Purple Hearts?
0.
How do
we know Laura Ingraham isn’t a spy?
This does not stop the nuts from attacking Vindman. The
colonel is Jewish, and his religion brings out the anti-Semites who inhabit the
fringes on the right. At Breitbart, fury is expressed because Vindman appeared on Capitol Hill in uniform! Wearing his medals! The
nerve!!
On Fox News, guest John Yoo agreed with Laura Ingraham on her
show, after she suggested that Vindman, who was born in Ukraine when it
was part of the Soviet Union, might be involved in “spying” or “espionage.” On
CNN, Sean Duffy, a former GOP congressman, wondered if Vindman cared more about
what was good for Ukraine than America. Brian Kilmeade, on Fox & Friends,
echoed Duffy’s theory. Yes, it could it be that Vindman was “simpatico” with
Ukraine.
God damn. Did these fools understand that it was Trump who
made the questionable phone call?
Vindman merely listened to what was said.
A little added context then. Ingraham’s maternal grandparents
were Polish immigrants. Using Ingraham-logic, we can agree that’s suspicious.
Her father was of Irish and English extraction. Did she grow up eating
crumpets! That’s not an American meal! How about a burger and fries! Even more
suspicious, Ingraham never joined the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines!
And she once worked for “Fake News” MSNBC! How do we know she’s not a commie?
And Yoo! Holy crap! He was born in South Korea! Using the
same approach that Yoo employed on Ingraham’s show, can’t we assume Yoo is
trashing Vindman because Yoo is a “spy” for his home country? Yoo never served
in the U.S. military at all.
What about Duffy? Did Duffy ever dodge bullets for our
country? He did not. He did, however, take up log rolling when he was five.
Finally: Kilmeade. He’s of Irish and Italian descent. Again,
if we use some Fox News-thinking, how do we know he’s not a member of the
Mafia? We have no way of proving Kilmeade is not a member of the Gambino family.
Someone should be looking into his background. Maybe Laura Ingraham! As for
serving in the U.S. military, the closest Kilmeade ever came to combat was as a
broadcaster, early in his career, covering the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Finally, just for fun, let’s consider Lt. Col. Vindman’s twin brother, Eugene. He’s career military and an
officer too.
You
don’t get a Purple Heart if you contract an STD.
Finally, we should remember that Lt. Col. Alexander S.
Vindman is not the first combat veteran President Trump and his supporters have
slandered. Trump famously said John McCain wasn’t a hero. Robert Mueller, a
decorated combat veteran during the Vietnam War, was a threat to the nation. Admiral William McCraven, a
former Navy Seal, wasn’t up to Trump standards. Neither was former Marine General James
Mattis, who Trump appointed to his cabinet, and later described as the “world’s most over-rated general.” Even
the mother of slain Capt. Humayun Khan was not immune from attack by “Fighting Lips” Trump.
And let’s not forget what Citizen Trump said, back in 1997,
in an interview with Howard Stern.
He had faced danger, he said. When he was single, in the 90s,
he could have picked up an STD.
“It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in
terms of that whole world,” he told Stern, “it is a dangerous world out there.
It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and
very brave soldier.”
Trump went on to tell Stern that women’s vaginas were “potential
landmines” and insisted “there’s some real danger there.”
Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, left, Lt. Colonel Eugene Vindman, right.
*
WELL, WHAT DO YOU KNOW, a Republican in Congress tweeted a
willingness to break with Trump over abuse of power! Oh, no, wait. Rep. Amash had to quit the
party, in order to retain his soul.
10/31/19: Today’s the day! The U.S.
House of Representatives will hold a vote and make it official. The impeachment
inquiry shall proceed.
“I don’t think that would be
in accord with our values.”
John
Sullivan
Yesterday, the president’s defense suffered a fresh dent when
John Sullivan, the #2 man at the State Department, testified during a public hearing. Sullivan made it plain
that Rudy Giuliani, serving as Trump’s personal lawyer, was responsible for
trashing former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.
Sullivan, now President Trump’s choice to become the U.S.
ambassador to Russia, was testifying at his confirmation hearing. Democrats had
a few questions they wanted to ask. Would the Washington Nationals win Game 7?
Would President Trump show up for the parade if they did, at the risk of being
booed? And did Sullivan believe it would be appropriate for the president to
demand that foreign countries investigate political opponents?
“I don’t think that would be
in accord with our values,” Sullivan replied.
(The New York Times has
posted a clip
of Sullivan responding to questions, lasting four-and-a-half minutes.)
*
THERE IS STILL a remote chance
that Donald J. Trump’s name will not go down in history as one of only three
presidents to be impeached. But one would not be wise to bet one’s pension on
that outcome. If we include Nixon, who resigned before he could be impeached,
Trump now joins the likes of Andrew Johnson, who avoided removal by one vote,
35 for it, 18 against (2/3rd’s needed), and Bill Clinton who “did
not have sexual relations with that woman.” But really did.
On a procedural vote to
formalize the impeachment inquiry, the House of Representatives votes in favor,
232-196. One former Republican, Justin Amash, joins 231 Democrats in the
affirmative.
Two Democrats join 194
Republicans in voting no.
October ends with a new poll
out, showing that 56% of Americans say the word “honest” does not describe
President Trump.
An even larger majority, 61%,
agree that Trump “has little to no respect for America’s
democratic institutions and traditions.”
A second poll shows that 93% of Democrats believe the
president has done something either illegal (69%) or unethical (24%) in his
interactions with the president of Ukraine. Seven in ten Independents (27% and
43%) agree. Even 36% of Republicans (8% and 28%) smell a rat in the Oval
Office.
11/4-5/19: Impeachment is in the air. That
means we can count on Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) to say something asinine.
On the floor of Congress, he warns that Democrats are “about to push this country to a civil war if
they were to get their wishes.”
Yes, if Trump were to be impeached it would be
time for all Trump fans to grab their guns and start blazing away at anyone not sporting a red MAGA cap. “And
if there’s one thing I don’t want to see in my lifetime, I don’t want to ever
have participation in,” Gohmert says, “it’s a civil war.”
As a good liberal blogger, I think I’ll just
google: “Bill Clinton supporters threaten civil war if president is impeached.”
Nothing turns up.
*
HAS
ANY PRESIDENT ever been involved in as many court battles while in office (and
before) as Trump?
Monday,
the 2nd U.S. District Court of Appeals rules that a lower
court order, requiring the president’s accountants to turn over his tax and
business records, as part of an investigation into possible campaign law
violations and fraud, should stand. Next stop: The U.S. Supreme Court.
The
president’s lawyers had argued that a president—any president—is immune from
any and all types of investigation while in office.
President
Trump’s plainly false statement.
Another
court win for the people of
the United States could be shaping up. Lev Parnas, who had been toiling away
with Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine, only to be arrested, has signaled that he will
comply with a subpoena from the House Intelligence Committee.
According
to Joseph A. Bondy, his new lawyer (Parnas had to fire his old lawyer), “Mr. Parnas was very upset by President
Trump’s plainly false statement that he did not know him.” Parnas has
claimed to have had extensive business dealings and contacts with the
president. So,
if the House wants documents, Parnas will produce them. If they want testimony,
Parnas will speak—the only caveat being that he will retain his right to plead
the Fifth.
And,
of course, we should not forget former Trump campaign gadfly, Roger Stone, who is
also battling federal charges. Stone has been accused of perjury, witness
tampering, and general skullduggery.
Something
tells me both Parnas and Stone may soon be joining the Team Trump Felons’ Club.
*
IF
THE LAW goes against him, perhaps God can save President Trump! For that
reason, he announces that he is adding Pastor Paula White to his team.
It’s easy to see why the president might want to have White
around, now that he’s facing almost certain impeachment. According to her interpretation
of the Bible, you can’t oppose him anyway. Even in the early days of
Trump’s presidency, she was arguing,
He is authentically—whether
people like it or not—has been raised up by God. Because God says that he
raises up and places all people in places of authority. It is God who raises up
a king. It is God that sets one down. When you fight against the plan of God, you
are fighting against the hand of God.
Well, then, if God raises Trump up, and we can’t “fight
against the plan of God,” doesn’t that logic hold for every ruler, past,
present, and to come? Doesn’t that mean it was wrong to fight against George
III? And to challenge Josef Stalin? And if Trump is impeached? Won’t that also
be the “hand of God?”
This liberal would argue from what he has read, that you
could find a million better Christians than White and find them with ease. He
would venture to suggest she’s really a fraud.
Beware
the mountain men.
White isn’t the only minister warning that if the president is
impeached, all the fiends in hell will be let loose. But Trump supporters will
drive them back! Pastor Rick Wiles explains that Trump fans are guys who know “how
to fight.” And they are “going to make a decision” and go to war for Trump and Jesus and fat tax cuts for
billionaires and a really big border wall. “Veterans,” he says, will rise up.
And “cowboys!”
And fucking “mountain men!!”
Wiles does not use the “f-word,” but, really, he should. Like
Louis Gohmert and Pastor White, he sounds nuts.
Cowboys are coming!
11/6/19: At a
rally in Kentucky, standing beside Fat Nixon (i.e. President Trump) Sen. Rand
Paul shouts that it’s time for the free press to “do your job.” Yes, Sen. Paul
wants the free press to………expose the whistleblower!
Name him (or her), he shouts.
For once, that threat proves too much even for GOP colleagues. There’s
a sliver of hope that we might be approaching our “Joseph Welch” moment.
This was the televised instant
in 1954, when Welch—representing the U.S. Army during congressional
hearings—reached a point where he had had all he could stand. Without evidence,
Sen. Joe McCarthy was attacking the reputation of a young lawyer on Welch’s staff.
Welch made his disdain clear. “Until
this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your
recklessness,” he said, with icy calm. When McCarthy tried to continue, Welch
interrupted. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done
enough. Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you no sense of
decency?”
Like
Trump, McCarthy did not.
“Whistleblowers should be
entitled to confidentially and privacy, because they play a vital function in
our democracy.” Sen. Mitt Romney
A
few Republicans dare, if not to stand tall, at least not to crawl. “We should
follow the law,” Sen. Lamar Alexander says. “And I believe the law protects
whistleblowers.” “The whistleblower statute is there for a reason,” Sen. John
Thune agrees. “And I think we need to respect the law where whistleblowers are
concerned. Eventually that person may decide to come forward voluntarily.” Sen.
Chuck Grassley, who has worked for years to build up whistleblower protections,
concurs. “All I can say is I expect whistleblowers to
be protected according to what the law gives them,” Grassley explains.
But Sen. Rand Paul stands
by his threat to name names; and Sen. Lindsey Graham backs his craven play.
Cowardice runs thick in
Republican veins.
*
MEANWHILE, one GOP
lawmaker hits the nail square on the head. There’s not much reason to go
hunting the whistleblower now. “It’s
kind of a moot issue,” Sen. John Cornyn says. “People can read the transcript
themselves.”
Yes,
they can. People are free to read the original nine-page complaint.
It won’t take all that long.
Or
they can dive into the transcripts of testimony by career diplomats and
military men. Even a cursory reading shows that the whistleblower complaint has
been validated on nearly every point. In other words, as Cornyn says, the
whistleblower’s identity is “kind of a moot issue.”
Rep. Jim Jordan cites two entire words from a
transcript.
You
can take your pick of transcripts, if you want to dig for the truth. Or you can
look for any fig leaf you can find to cover for Trump. Rep. Jim Jordan does
just that. He selects one transcript, and in a tweet cites two entire words of
testimony to “prove” that Donald J. Trump is the best man ever to plant a fat
fanny in the Oval Office.
Of course, if you really wanted to understand what was going
on, you could dive deeper. You had, for example, the 156 pages of testimony from Michael McKinley—who, by
the way, accused Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of lying. You could read
Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony, 317 pages in length, for fun. If you enjoyed
that, you could wade through 360 pages of testimony provided by Volker, not simply pluck
out two random words.
Or you could delve into the 379 pages served up for lawmakers by Ambassador Sondland.
That would include the four pages of amended testimony Sondland added
after his memory was jogged by testimony from Ambassador Taylor and National
Security Council official Morrison.
By the way, Sen. Graham, who really wants good Americans to
know the name of the whistleblower, has said that he’s not going to read any
of the witness testimony, because,
lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala…
He doesn’t care what the witnesses have said.
*
LET’S GO THE SENATOR one better and tax our brains and peruse
just the last four pages of amended testimony from Ambassador Sondland. His original
comments provided Trump at least a fig leaf of cover.
Now to remove that fig leaf and…….
Oh. My. God.
“As I said in my prepared testimony, security aid to Ukraine
was in our vital national interest and should not have been delayed for any
reason.”
Ambassador Sondland
Sondland testified originally that as early as May 23, 2019, he already understood
that,
a White House visit for
President Zelensky was conditioned upon President Zelensky’s agreement to make
a public anti-corruption statement. This condition had been communicated by
Rudy Giuliani, with whom President Trump directed Ambassador Volker, [Energy] Secretary
[Rick] Perry, and me…to discuss issues related to the President’s concerns
about Ukraine.
Sondland added, “I understood that satisfying Mr. Giuliani
was a condition for scheduling the White House visit, which we all strongly
believed to be in the mutual interest of the United States and Ukraine.”
So, last spring, there was already a quid and a quo, and
Sondland knew it. Zelensky gets the meeting. Rudy and his boss get an
anti-corruption statement—that they hope will damage Joe Biden.
Now, in his amended testimony, Sondland had even more to say.
This time he related a meeting in Warsaw, on September 1, involving Vice
President Pence and Mr. Zelensky. Three days earlier, the suspension of U.S. military
aid to Ukraine had been revealed by the free press. Now the suspension of aid
was openly discussed. “I always believed that suspending aid to Ukraine was
ill-advised,” Sondland made clear in his new testimony, “although I did not
know (and still do not know) when, why, or by whom the aid was suspended.”
Is this, then, a second and more critical quid pro quo?
Sondland explained, that in the absence “of any credible explanation for the
suspension of aid, I presumed that the aid suspension had become linked to
the proposed anti-corruption statement.”
Sondland’s amended testimony offers depth to our
understanding of what was happening behind the scenes. “President Zelensky had
raised the issue of suspension of U.S. aid to Ukraine directly with Vice
President Pence.” In fact, it was the first matter Zelensky brought up when
they talked. Afterwards, Sondland spoke briefly with Andrey Yermak, a top Zelensky
adviser. He told Yermak “that resumption of U.S. aid would likely not
occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had
been discussing for many weeks.”
Soon after, he learned that “the public statement would need
to come directly from President Zelensky himself.”
Zelensky gives Trump a statement he badly wants. Trump
unfreezes the military aid he desperately needs.
Quid.
Pro.
Quo.
Sondland goes on to say he cannot recall whether he had “one
or two phone calls with President Trump in the September 6-9 time frame.” He
does know this. “Despite repeated requests to the White House and the State
Department, I have not been granted access to all of the phone records, and I
would like to review those phone records, along with any notes and other
documents that may exist, to determine if I can provide more complete
testimony to assist Congress.”
11/7/19: The President of the United States rises from bed, already in a
black mood. He’s so depressed he doesn’t even feel like eating his Cocoa Puffs
for breakfast. The fact he is about to be impeached has finally penetrated his
thick skull.
Well, then, what to do?
Why not attack the free
press!
The Washington Post has just reported that Trump asked
Attorney General Bill Barr to announce that his call with the Ukrainians was
perfect, the stuff of legend, and no one should bother to run against Trump
in 2020. Because Trump is at the tippy-top of the best of the best.
According to sources at the Department of Justice, reporters
for the Post say this was a bridge too far for Barr.
If he wins
reelection, we’re screwed.
Clearly feeling the pressure, Trump explodes in a flurry of
fiery tweets. Sounding like Vladimir Putin, he refers to the free press as “the
Enemy of the People.” Then he insists, “Bill
Barr did not decline my request to talk about Ukraine. The story was a Fake Washington
Post con job with an ‘anonymous’ source that doesn’t exist. Just read the
Transcript,” he says. “The Justice Department already ruled that the [July 25] call
was good. We don’t have freedom of the press!”
Actually, we do. But we
might not for much longer, if the nutjob in the White House keeps this up.
If he wins reelection,
we’re screwed.
The next tweet is worse, with Trump using a word to describe
the free press he normally reserves for leaders of ISIS: “The degenerate Washington
Post MADE UP the story about me asking Bill Barr to hold a news conference,” he
says. “Never happened, and there were no sources!”
Finally, he names names.
The Amazon Washington Post and three
lowlife reporters, Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, and Carol Leonnig, wrote
another Fake News story, without any sources (pure fiction), about Bill Barr
& myself. We both deny this story, which they knew before they wrote it. A
garbage newspaper!
That’s dictator talk. Hitler Speak. And the MAGA crowd either
doesn’t get it—or doesn’t care if they do.
*
ABC ALMOST immediately reports that several sources have confirmed the report. Trump did ask Barr.
Even Fox News admits that the Wall Street Journal has verified
the Post story. Or, to put it plainly, even Fox reporters suspect Trump
is lying. They just don’t want to say it and upset their core audience.
*
YOU CAN SEE why Trump might be losing his grip, if you’ve
been following the release of witness testimonies. As of Thursday morning, the transcripts
of Tim Morrison’s testimony are unavailable. But his opening statement is out.
Morrison was one of the officials who sat in on the July 25 call.
He did say during his original testimony before the House
Intelligence panel, however, that, “I want to be clear, I was not concerned
that anything illegal was discussed.”
The president heard that one sentence and leaped on it like a
lion dragging a baby zebra down by the neck. “Thank you to Tim Morrison for
your honesty,” he tweeted as soon as those words leaked to the press.
Now we know Morrison had a great deal more he had wanted to
say. He went on to admit he had a “sinking feeling” when he learned
that Trump was asking the Ukrainians to publicly announce an investigation
of Biden and the Democrats.
What about the testimony of Ambassador Taylor? Taylor was
clear in saying that the fix was in.
“I can confirm” Morrison said, that the substance of Taylor’s
testimony “is accurate.”
“It is easy to forget here in Washington,” he continued, “but
impossible in Kyiv [Kiev], that Ukraine is still under armed assault by
Russia….United States security sector assistance (from the Department of
Defense and State) is therefore, essential to Ukraine.”
He also testified that soon after joining the NSC, Dr. Fiona Hill,
who he replaced, warned him Sondland and Giuliani “were trying to get President
Zelensky to reopen Ukrainian investigations into Burisma.” Morrison said he had
to google Burisma, “and learned it was a Ukrainian energy company and Hunter
Biden was on its board. I also did not understand,” he said, “why Ambassador
Sondland would be involved in Ukraine policy, often without the involvement of
our duly-appointed Chief of Mission, Ambassador Bill Taylor.”
Morrison, like Taylor, made this fundamental point. No
military aid was coming until the Ukrainians committed to one special investigation—involving
Burisma—and Hunter Biden.
And, by extension, his dad.
(It’s like Humphrey Bogart saying in Casablanca, “Of
all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Rudy Giuliani walks into
mine. And of all the people in all the world and all the investigations we
could launch, Rudy wants us to investigate the son of his most dangerous
political opponent in 2020.”)
Still, as already noted, Morrison did say he did not think
the president’s comments during the July 25 call were illegal.
Republican lawmakers probably wish they could have hit him with
a tranquilizer dart at that exact moment. Alas, Morrison kept talking. “I was
not aware that the White House was holding up the security sector assistance
passed by Congress until my superior, Dr. Charles Kupperman, told me soon after
I succeeded Dr. Hill.” In other words, he wouldn’t have known about the second
quid pro quo till August, himself. He said he wasn’t as worried about the call
as others who listened in, because he was confident, at the time, that the
Secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of the C.I.A. and the head of the
NSC, would step up. They would be able to “convince President Trump to release
the aid because President Zelensky and the reform-oriented Rada [parliament] were
genuinely invested in their anti-corruption agenda.”
He and Ambassador Taylor, he said, “had no reason to believe
that release of military aid might be conditioned on a public statement
reopening the Burisma investigation” until he talked with Sondland on September
1. He relayed word to Taylor. Republicans, including Trump, fixated on that comment—insisting
there could be no quid pro quo, unless the Ukrainians knew what the quid and
the quo were. Morrison added: “Even then I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s
strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by leaders in the
Administration and Congress, who understood the strategic importance of Ukraine
to our national security.”
In bluntest possible terms: Holding up military assistance to
our Ukrainian allies endangered U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY.
*
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S defenses suffered a pair of devastating
hits later that day when transcripts of Ambassador Taylor’s and top State
Department official George Kent’s testimonies—324 pages and 355 pages in
length—were released. Kent, for instance, lambasted Giuliani for mucking around
in Ukraine. Starting in March, Trump’s personal lawyer was “unmissable” in
Ukrainian affairs. Rudy was working with Yuriy Lutsenko, a former top Ukrainian official, who wanted “revenge”
for U.S. Ambassador Yovanovitch’s anti-corruption efforts.
That is, Kent was saying Rudy
wanted toditch a diplomat who was fighting corruption. Rudy and the
president weren’t working to fight corruption, as Trump and his fans like to insist.
“Mr. Giuliani, at that point, had been carrying on a campaign for several
months full of lies and incorrect information about Ambassador Yovanovitch,”
Kent explained,
“so this was a continuation of his campaign of lies.”
“I wrote a note to the file saying that I had concerns that
there was an effort to initiate politically motivated prosecutions that were
injurious to the rule of law, both Ukraine and the U.S.” George Kent
Kent
also made it clear he had no faith in the sources Rudy was using, describing
them as “if not entirely made up in full cloth, it was primarily non-truths and
non-sequiturs.”
As
USA Today describes it, Kent,
…told Catherine Croft, a
special adviser for Ukraine who has also testified, that “if you’re asking me,
have we ever gone to the Ukrainians and asked them to investigate or prosecute
individuals for political reasons, the answer is, I hope we haven’t, and we
shouldn’t because that goes against everything that we are trying to promote in
post-Soviet states for the last 28 years, which is the promotion of the rule of
law.”
Kent reiterated that he thought
the idea of using the desired investigations as leverage was “injurious to
the rule of law.”
Kent
did say he was concerned about the optics of Hunter Biden and his work with
Burisma in 2015. Apparently, that was the only sentence in more than 300 pages
of testimony that any of the GOP lawmakers heard.
Kent
was perfectly clear. He testified that Trump wanted “nothing less than
President Zelensky to go to the microphone and say investigations, Biden, and
Clinton.”
Quid
fucking pro quo.
*
THE PRESIDENT, of course, has been busy swearing that there
was no quid pro quo!!!! His call was perfect on July 25. Why, he never asked
the Ukrainians to investigate the Biden family if they wanted a meeting at the
White House. He would never do that! And he never made it clear, nor Rudy,
either, that if Ukraine expected vital military aid, they would have to agree
to investigate Hunter and Joe! Why, who could imagine he would ever stoop so
low!
When we read the transcript of the testimony of Ambassador
Taylor, we know who would imagine: Ambassador Taylor.
Assuming you’re retired and have hours of free time (as this
blogger does), it’s interesting to delve into the details. One notices, first,
that GOP lawmakers involved in the questioning of the witnesses, don’t dispute
facts. Basically, they complain. Why was Chairman Schiff holding hearings
behind closed doors? How will the public ever learn what witnesses say? (See
transcripts, mentioned above.) Where is the whistleblower now? Rep. Jordan keeps
insisting that Schiff knows who the whistleblower is—and he’s lying when he
says he does not. Minor points of order are raised, again and again, as if
minor points of order might negate what all the witnesses have said. “This
whole hearing is out of order,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas declares at one point.
Fed up at last, Rep. Val Demings, a Maryland Democrat
retorts, “You really don’t want to hear from this witness, do you?”
Roy insists that he does. He says he wants every member of
Congress to hear. He wants the American people to hear too.
Rep. Roy must now be content. All one needs do is go to the online
link and plow through 324 pages of Taylor’s testimony. But since few Americans are
going to do that plowing—including Sen. Graham—here’s a summary.
First, Taylor lays out his background: West Point graduate, etc.
As a diplomat he did stints in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and a previous tour
in Ukraine. He has been interested in Ukrainian affairs ever since. “However,
in August and September of this year,” he testified, “I became increasingly
concerned that our relationship with Ukraine was being fundamentally undermined
by an irregular, informal channel of U.S. policymaking and by the
withholding of vital security assistance for domestic political reasons.”
For slow readers—like Representatives Roy, Jordan and Nunes—this
was Taylor making clear he believed the Ukrainians were being asked to
interfere in a U.S. political campaign. That would be the 2020 campaign.
That is, a QUID PRO QUO.
Soon after arriving in Ukraine, Taylor began sniffing trouble.
On June 27, Sondland told him that “President Zelensky needed to make clear to
President Trump that he, President Zelensky, was not standing in the way of
investigations.” The next day, Taylor said he “sensed something odd” when
Sondland said he wanted to limit participation in a phone call to Zelensky.
Ambassador Sondland, Ambassador [Kurt]
Volker, Secretary [of Energy Rick] Perry, and I were on this call dialing in
from different locations. However, Ambassador Sondland said that he wanted to
make sure no one was transcribing or monitoring as they added President
Zelensky to the call. Also, before President Zelensky joined the call,
Ambassador Volker separately told the U.S. participants that he, Ambassador
Volker, planned to be explicit with President Zelensky in a one-on-one meeting
in Toronto on July 2nd about what President Zelensky should do to get the
meeting in the White House.
Again, it was not clear to me on
that call what this meant, but Ambassador Volker noted that he would relay that
President Trump wanted to see rule of law, transparency, but also, specifically,
cooperation on investigations to get to the bottom of things…
By mid-July, it was becoming
clear to me that the meeting President Zelensky wanted was conditioned on
investigations of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 elections.
It was also clear that this condition was driven by the irregular policy
channel I had come to understand was guided by Mr. Giuliani.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee will later
stress that Taylor had no direct knowledge of what was said on several calls,
including the July 25 conversation that touched off the inquiry. Testimony by
Vindman and Hill, however, will validate every statement Taylor has made. The
president will then be reduced to calling Taylor, Vindman and Hill, “human scum.”
“In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our
strong support for Ukraine was threatened.”
Ambassador Taylor
On Fox News, presidential ass smoocher Gregg Jarrett will
label those who gave testimony
“opinion witnesses” and “notorious gossipers.”
In the real world, where Taylor testified, he has already
said:
On July 10, in Kyiv [Kiev], I
met with President Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, Andrei Bohdan, and then-foreign
policy adviser to the President and now Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko, who
told me that they had heard from Mr. Giuliani that the phone call between the
two Presidents was unlikely to happen and that they were alarmed and
disappointed.
That’s firsthand knowledge there—and in early July the
Ukrainians are already aware that something is amiss.
During a conference call on July 18, Taylor added, a “voice”
from a woman at Office of Management and Budget announced that all military aid
to Ukraine was on hold “until further notice.” The reaction of the people
listening, he says, was pronounced. “I and the others on the call sat in
astonishment. The Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only
the training and weapons but also the assurance of U.S. support.”
Unbeknownst to our top diplomat in Ukraine, someone was
screwing with military aid to our ally.
According to that OMB voice, the directive to hold up aid had
come directly from President Trump, via Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick
Mulvaney. “In an instant,” Taylor told lawmakers, “I realized that one of the
key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened.”
Was the delay wise?
“At one point the Defense Department was asked to perform an
analysis of the effectiveness of the assistance,” Taylor explained. “Within a
day, the Defense Department came back with the determination that the
assistance was effective and should be resumed.”
On July 19, Taylor spoke with Dr. Hill and Lt. Col. Vindman.
Both said the hold came from Mulvaney.
In the same July 19th phone
call, they gave me an account of the July 10th meeting with the Ukrainian officials
at the White House. Specifically, they told me that Ambassador Sondland had connected
investigations with an Oval Office meeting for President Zelensky, which so
irritated Ambassador Bolton that he abruptly ended the meeting, telling Dr . Hill
and Mr. Vindman that they should have nothing to do with domestic politics.
“Needless to say, the two Ukrainians in the meetings,” Taylor
says, “were confused.”
Did the Ukrainians realize that they were being required to
help President Trump in the next election? Taylor is clear:
Also, on July 20th, I had a
phone conversation with Mr. Danyliuk, during which he conveyed to me that
President Zelensky did not want to be used as a pawn in a U.S. reelection
campaign. The next day, I texted both Ambassadors Volker and Sondland about
President Zelensky’s concern.
National Security Adviser Bolton flew to Kiev on August 27.
Taylor spoke to him about the “folly I saw in withholding military aid to Ukraine
at a time when hostilities were still active in the east and when Russia was
watching closely to gauge the level of American support for the Ukrainian
Government.”
Bolton suggested he send a cable directly to Secretary of
State Pompeo. This was something Taylor had never done in his career. Taylor
did so, making clear he might resign. By this time, we can safely assume,
President Trump knew diplomats and intelligence experts were on to his game.
(With the cunning of any practiced liar and crook, you could
expect Trump to start covering up. And he did.)
On September 1, Pence met with Zelensky in Poland. According
to the official readout, the Ukrainian leader “opened the meeting by asking the
Vice President about security cooperation.” In other words, our allies were
clearly worried about the inexplicable delay in military aid. In his
sworn testimony, Taylor said he spoke with Tim Morrison. Morrison “went on to
describe a conversation Ambassador Sondland had with Mr. Yermak at Warsaw. Ambassador
Sondland told Mr. Yermak that the security assistance would not come until President
Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.
“Everything
was dependent on such an announcement.”
Here, then, we come to Taylor’s most definitive statement.
Was there a quid pro quo?
I was alarmed by what Mr.
Morrison told me about the Sondland-Yermak conversation. This was the first
time I had heard that security assistance, not just the White House meeting,
was conditioned on the investigations.
Very concerned, on that same
day, I sent Ambassador Sondland a text message asking if we are now saying that
security assistance and a White House meeting are conditioned on
investigations. Ambassador Sondland responded asking me to call him, which I
did….
[Sondland] told me that he now
recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling Ukrainian officials to
whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelensky was dependent
on a public announcement of investigations. In fact, Ambassador Sondland said everything
was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance.
In other words, Sondland, now believed there was a clear quid
pro quo and shaped his diplomatic efforts in accord with that belief.
On September 5, Taylor hosted two U.S. senators on a visit to
Kiev. During this trip Sen. Ron Johnson and Sen. Chris Murphy met with the President
of Ukraine. “His first question to the Senators was about the withheld security
assistance.” Both lawmakers, “stressed that bipartisan support for Ukraine in
Washington was Ukraine’s most important strategic asset and that President
Zelensky should not jeopardize that bipartisan support by getting drawn into
U.S. domestic politics.”
On September 7, Taylor spoke with Morrison by phone. The
story of the delayed military aid had leaked and spread in the news. Morrison described
to Taylor a call between Trump and Sondland:
According to Mr. Morrison,
President Trump told Ambassador Sondland that he was not asking for a quid pro
quo. But President Trump did insist that President Zelensky go to a microphone
and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference,
and that President Zelensky should want to do this himself.
Taylor continued:
The following day, on September
8th, Ambassador Sondland and I spoke on the phone. He said he had talked to
President Trump, as I had suggested a week earlier, but that President Trump
was adamant that President Zelensky himself had to clear things up and do it in
public. President Trump said it was not a quid pro quo.
Okay. Got it. Trump was saying there was no quid pro quo. But
if Mr. Zelensky didn’t go public, there’d be no aid. (And remember, by now, the
story of the aid delay was all over the news. Even an orange buffoon would know
enough to try to start covering his noticeable tracks.)
Ambassador Sondland said that he
had talked to President Zelensky and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although
this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelensky did not clear things up
in public, we would be at a stalemate. I understood a stalemate to mean
that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance. Ambassador
Sondland said that this conversation concluded with President Zelensky agreeing
to make a public statement in an “interview with CNN.”
That is: the Ukrainians knew what the game was about and
under intense pressure they were about to cave.
The quid
and the pro had been discovered.
Taylor followed up with a text message, expressing his
reservations. “My nightmare is that the Ukrainians give the interview and don’t
get the security assistance. The Russians love it. And I quit.”
Ah…the Russians would love it!
(Where have we heard that before?)
Was there a quid pro quo, then? Taylor had no doubt. “I think
it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,”
he told Sondland and Volker the next day.
With the story spreading, thanks to a free press, the Trump
administration finally relented. The military aid, frozen since at least June
19, was unfrozen. The quid and the pro had been discovered—and the plan to get
the Ukrainians to interfere in the 2020 election was aborted.
11/8/19: The burgeoning Ukraine
scandal—with 1,500 pages of sworn testimony having been released—on top of more
than 400 pages of the Mueller Report—can bury anyone who tries to track all the
possible crimes of Trump and his pirate band. The president’s Twitter feed alone
stretches to 266,000 words. (That’s more than James Joyce required to write Ulysses,
and far less edifying.) And what Trump’s tweets reveal
is a cesspool psyche, a mind stunted by incuriosity, a soul polluted by
dishonesty and a heart readily provoked to hate.
The manchild in the White House is impelled by warped
impulses, which aides have been powerless to check.
“TREASON means long jail sentences, and this
was TREASON!” President Donald
J. Trump
We have, for instance, Trump tweeting about those who
investigate him as “treasonous.” Robert Mueller and his investigators,” the
president once claimed, were involved in a “Witch Hunt, a Treasonous Hoax.
That
is the Constitutional Crisis & hopefully guilty people will pay!”
The president later pedaled the false narrative that even his
predecessor should be brought to justice. “My Campaign for President was conclusively
spied on,” he howled. “Nothing like this has ever happened in
American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences,
and this was TREASON!” Yes, according to Trump, Barack Obama was guilty of
treason.
So were F.B.I. agents involved in the Russia probe.
The New York Times was
absolutely guilty, he yelped, of “a virtual act of Treason,” because the
paper published articles that were “bad for our Country.”
When Democrats supported the Russia investigation, they were
part of a “treasonous attack on our Country.”
Death to his foes!
Now we had the president insisting that Chairman Schiff, head
of the House Intelligence Committee, duly elected by the people, should be
“questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.....”
In fact, Trump had decided that Schiff was not alone. He had an accomplice,
House Speaker Pelosi. By her support of the impeachment inquiry, he claimed, “This
makes Nervous Nancy every bit as guilty as Liddle’ Adam Schiff for High Crimes
and Misdemeanors, and even Treason.”
DEATH TO HIS FOES!
Now, as damaging revelations pour out in sworn
testimonies, Trump’s weathervane mind spun in a different direction. “They shouldn’t be
having public hearings. This is a hoax,” Trump told reporters Friday. “This is
just like the Russian witch hunt. This is just a continuation.”
He’s
right.
He
deserved to be impeached for that too.
(We don’t treat
political foes as traitors in America, at least, not so far.)
11/10/19: Team Trump continues to keep
the legal profession of our country operating at full capacity. According to
the lawyer for Lev Parnas—in his client’s role as helper to Rudy in
Ukraine—Parnas passed a warning to the newly-elected government of Volodymyr Zelensky last May.
The Ukrainians would be
required to announce an investigation into the dealings of Joseph R. Biden Jr.,
and Hunter, his son. Or else! The United States would freeze military aid.
This revelation would destroy
the main line of defense of Trump and his GOP enablers, since they like to
insist that no one in the Trump administration ever pushed a quid pro quo.
And if they did hold up military aid—and they did—the
Ukrainians didn’t know it till September. That meant it wasn’t really a quid
pro quo!
Now, Parnas was saying the fix was in and the Ukrainians knew
about the quid pro quo starting in May.
11/11/19: If you haven’t been paying
attention, a tidal wave of negative testimony, damning to the President of the
United States, has been pouring out of the House Intelligence Committee.
Trump has been reduced to defending himself in idiotic
Twitter posts. For example, at 9:12 this morning:
Okay, first, is the president drinking? Is he spelling words
like they sound when his speech is slurred?
“Investigared?”
Secondly, just because the whistleblower’s lawyer made it
clear, when Trump was running for president, that he thought Trump was a bum,
that doesn’t mean the “Whistleblower” loses credibility. You’d have to be an
absolute dolt, or an avid fan of Sean Hannity’s show (that’s redundant) to miss
all the ways the whistleblower’s complaint has been validated so far.
Logic, however, does not compel the president to consider
what he’s posting. Eight minutes later, without a shred of evidence, he tweets:
Shifty
Adam Schiff will only release doctored transcripts. We haven’t even seen the
documents and are restricted from (get this) having a lawyer. Republicans
should put out their own transcripts! Schiff must testify as to why he MADE UP
a statement from me, and read it to all!
Yes, that statement Schiff read! Here it is again, in a
tweet:
The transcript of the call reads
like a classic mob shakedown: — We do a lot for Ukraine — There’s not much
reciprocity — I have a favor to ask — Investigate my opponent — My people will
be in touch — Nice country you got there. It would be a shame if something
happened to her.
Why that statement, all 51 words in length—why, yes, that negates
nearly 3,500 pages of witness testimony, now released.
And if any Republicans have proof that those transcripts are “doctored,”
let them expose Chairman Schiff at once!
(They won’t; that charge is absurd.)
11/13/19: The House of Representatives
holds its first day of public testimony in the impeachment inquiry. Aides
insist the president isn’t going to watch a single second, because it’s all a
witch hunt and a hoax, a swindle, a fraud, a joke and a goddamn con. Besides Mr.
Trump will be too busy working to make America great again. Or keep it
great.
Whatever.
Best of all, we learned that there were people in government
who might still make us proud.
The blogger
What did we learn if we weren’t “too busy working” to watch?
We learned that Rep. Jim Jordan is always angry when cameras are rolling and
probably yells even when ordering takeout. We learned that Rep. John Ratcliffe
had no idea how diplomacy plays out—but that his plan to defend the president
boils down to harassing witnesses, in hopes that stupid people watching will somehow
come to believe that Trump, himself, has been wronged. Best of all, we learned
that there were still people in government who might make us proud. We learned
that George Kent, Deputy Assistant for European and Eurasian Affairs, and
Ambassador Bill Taylor were men of honor and integrity. We learned that unlike Ratcliffe,
Jordan and Trump, they were fundamentally decent men. They had come forward to
tell their stories under oath because they were concerned for the safety and
security of the United States.
Taylor, for example, made it clear, under attack from Ranking
Member Devin Nunes, that he was not there as a witness for either political
party. He was appearing before Congress to tell the truth. Both he and Kent
smiled wryly at times, as lawmakers postured and tried to undercut the
testimony they provided. At least one GOP lawmaker, allotted five minutes for questioning,
per committee rules, wasted all five rambling on about why the Democrats should
burn to a crisp in political hell. Kent kept listening for an actual question,
puzzlement growing, until the congressman ran out of time and his harangue fizzled
out.
In fact, I don’t think in the four hours of testimony that I
was able to watch, that a single Republican asked a single question about
anything President Trump might have done wrong. They came in with their
minds closed—their mouths open—and their ears stoppered with wax.
I admit, however, that I usually muted Rep. Jordan when he
started to bark. If you’ve never watched him in these hearings, he looks as if,
at any moment, he’s going to get so angry he’ll suffer a stroke.
*
CHAIRMAN SCHIFF opened proceedings by laying out what he
believed was at stake. Congress, he said, must decide whether or not the
President of the United States denied the Ukrainians a meeting in the White
House and military assistance for selfish political reasons. Did Donald J.
Trump pressure our allies to dig up dirt on an opponent and thereby help him
win reelection? Had he placedU.S. national security at riskfor
no reason other than to get the foreign help he craved?
Rep. Nunes tipped the entire GOP plan in his opening
statement. This wasn’t going to be a hearing where testimony mattered. First, Nunes
cast doubt on the integrity of the dozen men and women who had testified behind
closed doors—all under oath. He felt compelled to bring up the Mueller
investigation. That investigation, he added, had been “a three-year long
operation by Democrats, the corrupt media, and partisan bureaucrats to overturn
the results of the 2016 election.”
The “Russian hoax” imploded on July 24, Nunes said, on the
day Robert Mueller testified publicly—again, we should note—under oath.
It was a hoax during which “any Republican who ever shook
hands with a Russian” was denounced.
You knew right away, there was no hope for Nunes—for people like
Nunes—or for people who liked people like Nunes. There was going to be no
admission that the Mueller Report cited ten examples of what was almost
surely obstruction of justice by the president and his sleazebag crew.
Nunes wasn’t going to admit that a half-dozen members of the Trump 2016
campaign had been convicted of, or pled guilty, to felonious activities during
that campaign. Not one of those six had been sent to prison for simply shaking hands
with a Russian.
I found myself wishing Schiff might put a palm in front of
his mouth and fake-cough: Cough. Roger Stone. Cough, cough.
(Two days later, a jury would find Stone guilty on seven
felony counts, for his fine work on behalf of President Trump.)
Devin Nunes was there for one reason and it had nothing to do
with facts. He was there to attack Democrats, even though no Democrat had been
accused of pressuring the Ukrainians to help in the next U.S. election. He
couldn’t justify what Trump had done. So, he must drag others down.
The Democrats, he alleged, had previously stooped so low as
to try to get “nude pictures of President Trump from Russian pranksters.” Yes,
“pranksters.” Harmless jokers.
In point of fact, Russian intelligence had interfered
extensively in the 2016 election and Mueller had indicted thirteen Russians, including Konstantin
Kilimnik, a bosom pal of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Kilimnik, of
course, fled to Russian rather than face prosecution.
(Let’s
not forget the thirteen potential felons who fled to Russia!)
But Nunes wasn’t worried about Russian intelligence agents
interfering in a U.S. election. He was worried about “nude pictures!” Even the
First Lady probably wouldn’t want to see those.
What we had before us, Nunes insisted, was part of an
“orchestrated media smear campaign.” These witnesses, suitable for television,
had been “put through a closed-door audition process in a cult-like atmosphere
in the basement of the Capitol, where the Democrats conducted secret
depositions, released a flood of misleading and one-sided leaks, and later
selectively released transcripts in a highly staged manner.” The Democrats
rejected witnesses the Republicans wanted to bring in, and the whole process
was a crime and a sham.
The real issues, according to Rep. Nunes, were,
First, what is the full extent
of the Democrats’ prior coordination with the Whistleblower and who else did
the Whistleblower coordinate this effort with?
Second, what is the full extent
of Ukraine’s election meddling against the Trump campaign?
And third, why did Burisma hire
Hunter Biden, what did he do for them, and did his position affect any U.S.
government actions under the Obama administration?
Nunes went on to tell the packed hearing room and thirteen million
watching on TV, that what they were about to see was a “theatrical performance
staged by the Democrats.” He insulted both witnesses, seated before him, ready
to swear to tell the truth, and nothing but. “Ambassador Taylor and Mr. Kent,”
he said with a smirk, “I’d like to welcome you here, and congratulate you for
passing the Democrats’ Star Chamber auditions. It seems you agreed, wittingly
or unwittingly, to participate in a drama,” he sneered. “But the main
performance—the Russian hoax—has ended, and you’ve been cast in the low-rent
Ukrainian sequel.”
And with that, we were off!
*
THE ESSENCE of the Republican strategy for the first day of
public hearings was to howl about the first “whistleblower” who touched off the
inquiry, and demand that he or she be unmasked. If Taylor—the witness seated before
them—gave testimony damaging to the president, they howled. If Kent spoke up,
they bayed and growled. Where was that damn whistleblower! Occasionally, they
would stop attacking Chairman Schiff and the media and pick at bits and pieces
of the previous closed-door testimony of Taylor and Kent (almost 700 pages of
transcripts combined) and quibble about inconsequential details of what they
had said. For example, Rep. Ratcliffe wanted to know if either man had ever met
President Trump?
No, said Kent.
No, said Taylor.
Aha, no firsthand knowledge! See! You expected Ratcliffe to
leap out of his chair and dance a jig right then and there.
“I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help
with a political campaign.”
Ambassador Bill Taylor
Then again, if you had a brain larger than a peach pit, you
could go to the transcripts and start reading, first Kent and then Taylor. If you did you could find countless
examples of firsthand knowledge, which the witnesses laid out. A lawmaker of
average intelligence or an ordinary
American could listen for at least some portion of the five hours of
televised testimony to come. Taylor, for instance, explained that he had talked
to Ambassador Sondland. Sondland, he had testified—and now testified again—told
him during a phone call that “everything” the Ukrainians wanted, a White House
meeting and critical military aid, was predicated on their agreeing to
investigate Hunter Biden and his dad.
That meant Sondland believed there was a quid pro quo.
Taylor did, too.
Taylor could cite the email he sent to Sondland in response: “I
think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political
campaign.”
He could explain that withholding vital military assistance put
both U.S. and Ukrainian national security at risk.
And if Nunes and his crew wanted more firsthand knowledge,
Sondland would testify publicly, next week.
*
IF OUR DESCENDENTS retain the freedoms we currently enjoy, if
an amoral president and his sycophants don’t win this critical fight, then not
a word Nunes or Jordan say will be remembered a hundred years from now.
The bravery of Kent and Taylor, however, will stand out. The only
bombshell of the day comes when Taylor reveals that another important phone call, not previously known, took place.
Since he had first testified in closed door session, an aide had informed him
of a call that took place on July 26.
That was the day after the call between President Trump and
President Zelensky, that touched off the inquiry.
Taylor offered, in part, a firsthand account of what
happened. He and Ambassador Volker had gone to the frontlines, to observe
Ukrainian forces battling Russian aggression. He told lawmakers—because he was
there—what a Ukrainian commander said to him. Taylor could explain why U.S.
military aid was critical to an ally’s defense. He mentioned that thousands of
Ukrainians had died fighting Putin’s invaders. One Ukrainian was killed and
four were wounded the day he visited the front.
Taylor was a decorated combat veteran. He knew what was at
stake.
Rep. Nunes, of course, had never served in uniform. Like the
president, neither had Rep. Jordan. If they cared about dying Ukrainians allies,
they buried their feelings deep.
Here’s how Ambassador Taylor told the story of the newly
revealed meeting—and this would not be firsthand knowledge—meaning Republican
lawmakers would surely howl again. “While Ambassador Volker
and I visited the front, this member of my staff accompanied Ambassador
Sondland” to a meeting with a top Ukrainian official at a restaurant in Kyiv
[Kiev].
Following that meeting, in
the presence of my staff at a restaurant, Ambassador Sondland called President
Trump and told him of his meetings in Kyiv. The member of my staff could hear
President Trump on the phone, asking Ambassador Sondland about “the
investigations.” Ambassador Sondland told President Trump that the Ukrainians
were ready to move forward.
Following the call
with President Trump, the member of my staff asked Ambassador Sondland what
President Trump thought about Ukraine. Ambassador Sondland responded that
President Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden, which Giuliani
was pressing for.
Nothing but hearsay, Rep. Jordan spent the next
four minutes—loudly and angrily—pointing out.
Then he “yielded back” one minute and Rep. Elise
Stefanik waved a copy of the transcript of the July 25 call. Read it she said,
speaking mostly to TV viewers who wouldn’t. This four-page document proves that
Trump is innocent of all crimes, at all times, past, present and to come.
*
THE POINT Nunes and the president’s enablers were
hoping to obscure was clear. If Taylor’s story of another questionable call was
correct, then the Ukrainians knew that they were expected to investigate the
Bidens if they wanted help from the United States. And they knew it no
later than the end of July. And it would seem clear Trump didn’t care about
“cleaning up corruption” in Ukraine, or even safeguarding U.S. national
security. He only wanted the Ukrainians to dig up dirt on the Bidens. He wanted
to win again in 2020.
And he didn’t care at what cost.
Not one Republican lawmaker, as far as I saw,
asked a single follow-up question about that newly-revealed July 26 call. Rep.
Ratcliffe demanded to know why Chairman Schiff shouldn’t be called as a witness
himself. Jordan barked again. Only Schiff, he claimed, knew who the
whistleblower was. And, by god, the whistleblower should have to come forward
and testify too!
Schiff said that he did not know who the
whistleblower was, and that Jordan’s statement was false.
Instead, he calmly announced that David Holmes,
the aide who had heard Trump’s voice on the phone, and who had asked Sondland
what the president said, would now be issued a subpoena.
“President Trump is welcome to come in and take a seat.”
It didn’t matter that fresh witnesses were coming
forward and willing to testify under oath. Jordan insisted again, at a high
decibel level, that the person responsible for this whole mess should be called
to testify publicly, should be unmasked, his or her identity exposed. He meant
the whistleblower, of course.
Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat, was quick with a
rejoinder. “I’d be glad to have the person who started it all, come in and
testify. Uh, President Trump,” he said, waving his hand toward the TV cameras
and the witness table, “is welcome to come in and take a seat right there.”
Welch then went on to say that if his GOP
colleagues really wanted firsthand information, perhaps they could convince
President Trump to stop telling most of his top aides not to testify or hand
over any documents whatsoever to Congress, despite a series of subpoenas
already issued.
As for Trump, himself, reporters later asked if he remembered that July 26 call.
Trump wore the same blank expression a husband accused of cheating by his wife
would try to adopt.
We know he’s had practice trying that expression
on.
I know nothing about
that. First time I’ve heard it. The one thing I’ve seen
that Sondland said is that he did speak with me for a
brief moment and I said, “no quid pro quo under
any circumstances.” And that’s true. But I’ve never heard
this. In any event, it is more secondhand information, but I’ve never
heard it.
By the end of Day 1 of testimony, much was clear. The GOP position
was already set in concrete. No parade of witnesses was going to open closed conservative
minds. Americans who watched thought Mr. Kent’s bowtie was cool and marveled at
the gigantic water bottle from which he occasionally swigged. Kent explained
that he had worked for three Republican and two Democratic presidents during
his 27-year career. His job as a diplomat was to implement U.S. foreign policy.
Nothing more, nothing less. We learned that Ambassador Taylor was most proud of
his “combat infantry badge” which he earned in Vietnam, and that he graduated
fifth in his West Point class of 800. We learned that both men were entirely
credible witnesses. And we learned that their testimony in no way helped
President Trump.
11/14-15/19: Ordinary Americans were
left to digest the testimony of the first witnesses in the impeachment inquiry
on Thursday. But all day, and again on Friday, important news spilled out. On
Friday, a third witness, Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, testified
for several hours.
They say you can’t change the leopard’s spots. Nor can you
keep the president’s itchy trigger fingers off the Twitter buttons. Friday
morning, at 10:01 a.m., with Yovanovitch just beginning her testimony,
the President of the United States decided he must insult her—as he has done
several times before.
Let us pause a moment, before discussing Ambassador
Yovanovitch’s public testimony, to remember public testimonies in years past.
You had, for instance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton answering questions
for eight hours as part of the Benghazi hearings. That testimony came on
October 22, 2015, in an era before Republicans started screaming about “perjury
traps.”
And there was, of course President Trum….…No. Wait. Trump
refused to testify publicly as part of the Mueller investigation. In fact, his
lawyer—Rudy—made it clear the president would have to jump over his lifeless
corpse, before Rudy would allow him to stick either foot, or both, in any
“perjury trap.”
(Your humble blogger would note that a “perjury trap” exists
any time President Trump moves his lips.)
“Well, I want to let you know, Ambassador, that some of us
here take witness intimidation very, very seriously.”
Chairman Adam Schiff
Now, we had Trump insulting a witness—at a moment when that
witness was set to testify. Chairman Schiff halted proceedings when alerted to
that fact. He read the following tweet out loud.
Then he asked,
Ambassador you’ve shown the
courage to come forward today and testify notwithstanding the fact you are
urged by the White House or State Department not to, notwithstanding the fact
that as you testified earlier the president implicitly threatened you in that
call record [of July 25]. And now the president in real time is attacking you.
What effect do you think that has on other witnesses’ willingness to come
forward and expose wrongdoing?
There were gasps in the hearing room and Yovanovitch let out
a loud puff before she could respond.
“Well, it’s very intimidating,” she said.
“It’s designed to intimidate, is it not?” Schiff continued.
The ambassador pondered her answer. She had an air of dignity
and long training as a diplomat had taught her to choose words with care. “I
mean, I can’t speak to what the president is trying to do,” she responded, with
a slight roll of the eyes, “but I think the effect is to me intimidating.”
“Well, I want to let you know, Ambassador,” Schiff said,
“that some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously.”
Republicans on the panel spent most of Friday morning
ignoring what Yovanovitch said. Instead, they blasted Schiff and the Democrats
for how the hearings were being conducted. But they were careful not to attack
Ambassador Yovanovitch, and almost effusive in her praise after lunch. They’d been
tipped to the fact that the president’s attacks on an active witness were not
playing well with the viewing public. Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio gently asked
Yovanovitch, for example, if it were not true: Couldn’t a president remove any
ambassador he might like?
“I
obviously don’t dispute that the president has the right to withdraw an
ambassador at any time for any reason,” she agreed, before adding, “but what I
do wonder is why it was necessary to smear my reputation also.”
Clearly
caught off guard, Wenstrup replied lamely, that that was not the question he had
asked.
It was, however, the question Yovanovitch answered. The
president could have removed her at any time. Why, then, had it been
necessary for Giuliani and his team (four members of which are under arrest),
and the president and his media allies at Fox News, to tear her reputation
down?
All Americans—not counting the 109,300 fools who “liked”
Trump’s tweet—should demand an answer to that question.
Asked later about that Twitter post, even Rep. Jordan, didn’t
defend it. When a reporter wondered if it was appropriate for Trump to smear
Yovanovitch, Jordan reverted to GOP Talking Point #1. Where’s the whistleblower,
he demanded? We have to hear from the whistleblower. We have to expose him or
her. A whole pack of cowardly Republicans stood behind Jordan when the reporter
asked again: Should a president ever smear a witness? Rep. Stefanik spoke up
suddenly, as if a random thought had popped into her head. “We’re not here to
talk about tweets,” she said.
It was not a proud moment for Stefanik.
It was another repulsive performance by Jordan, a man without
shame. The lawmakers gathered round looked like a class photo for cowards.
And anyone with a passing understanding of the Constitution knew
the President of the United States was once again threatening the rule of
law.
When the hearing ended, and Chairman Schiff announced that
the witness was free to go, Yovanovitch rose slowly from her seat. As she
headed for the exit, the audience gave her a round of applause.
A sixth
member of Team Trump 2016 racks up the felonies.
Meanwhile, the American people learned that Rudy Giuliani was
under investigation himself.
And at the very moment when Yovanovitch was testifying, a
sixth member of Team Trump 2016, Roger Stone, was found guilty of a series of
crimes in federal court. In his case, a jury of his peers convicted him on
seven felony counts.
Ponder that a moment.
Stone had been charged with seven. The jury judged him guilty
on all charges and did so with ease. One count, carrying the stiffest penalty,
was witness intimidation. (See also: President Trump, above.) Other felonies
involved lying to Congress and lying to Mueller’s investigators. The prosecutor
pointed out that all of Stone’s lies had served to protect President Trump.
Indeed, in judging Team Trump 2020, it would seem logical to
remember that Stone wasn’t even the member of Team Trump 2016 to rack up the
most felonies. That dishonor would go to Paul Manafort—convicted by a jury on
eight counts—avoiding ten more convictions only because a single juror held
out. That would be Paul Manafort, campaign chair in 2016. That would be Paul
Manafort, campaign chair—later admitting that he was guilty of those ten
counts, but not being charged, as part of a plea deal—then being convicted of two
more felony counts—including witness tampering—after he started screwing around
in secret again. So: ten felonies for Manafort! And when and where did most of
this felonious activity occur? During a time when Manafort was working for
corrupt politicians and sleazy oligarchs in Ukraine!
In second place—with eight felonies—we have Trump’s old
lawyer, Michael Cohen. Two counts involved lying to protect then-Candidate
Trump. Cohen had been trying to help Trump cover up $280,000 in payoffs to
a porn star and Playboy Bunny he banged, both while he was married to the
current First Lady of the United States. Meaning: Citizen Trump cheated on all
three of his wives. Meaning: You had to be blind, deaf, dumb, unable to write
or speak English, with your head in a large, brown paper sack—or a Republican
on the House Intelligence Committee—to miss the obvious. Team Trump 2016 was a
band of crooks, led by a habitual liar.
Team Trump 2020 was shaping up to be the same, only with
different players filling the roster.
Its leader was the same habitual liar.
*
THE BAD NEWS for Team Trump 2020 kept piling up as the week
drew to a close. A new witness, an official at the Office of Management and
Budget, agreed to testify next week, despite White House efforts to block
testimony. A second witness came forward to say she had also heard Ambassador
Sondland’s July 26 call with the president. In fact, the first witness
testified in a closed door hearing that afternoon; and that witness’s opening
statement quickly leaked. It’s a safe bet to say the leaker was a Democrat, or
at least no fan of Trump. It’s an equally safe bet that if the statement had
bolstered the president’s defense, Rep. Nunes would have been running down the
streets of D.C., looking for a friendly reporter he could hand it to.
Ambassador Taylor had first explained, under oath, that he
had been told that Sondland said, after the call, that Trump cared more about
the investigation of the Biden family than he did about Ukraine. Nunes and his
GOP colleagues were at great pains to note that all Taylor had was “second- and
third-hand information.” Jordan got angry again and tried to make the case that
all Taylor had were a few words, heard sixth-hand, from his wife’s
brother-in-law’s second cousin, twice removed. Something like that. Let’s just
say it can be difficult to follow Jordan’s logic.
Trump had already told reporters he didn’t remember the call.
Add that to a mountain of material about which he seemed clueless and
uninformed. As a result, the president was forced to play Whack-a-Mole with
witnesses. He said he barely knew Ambassador Sondland. So, add Sondland to a
list of people Trump couldn’t pick out of a lineup, that list including Taylor, Kent, Vindman (Trump: “Why are
people that I never even heard of testifying”) and Yovanovitch (I “really don’t
know” her, Trump had said, even though he threatened her in the July 25 call).
At any rate, by Friday evening, the opening statement of
David Holmes was in the hands of the people who do the “Fake News.”
Only Holmes’s opening statement was real. In it, he alleges
that he was at the table when Ambassador Sondland called Mr. Trump from a
restaurant in Kiev. This was one day after the infamous July 25 phone call,
during which our president asked the Ukrainian leader to do him a “favor,” and
also threatened that Ambassador Yovanovitch was “going to go through some
things.” Sondland apparently had to hold the phone away from his ear, because
Trump was loud. Holmes could hear part of what the president said and
recognized his voice.
We’ll save most of what Holmes says until transcripts are
released. But if what he testified to is true, another main prop supporting
the president’s defense has been kicked aside. Holmes explained that in his
job as a top aide at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv [Kiev], he took notes during two
important meetings on July 26. In the second, he said that President Zelenskyy,
stated
that during the July 25 call, President Trump had “three times” raised “some
very sensitive issues,” and that he would have to follow up on those issues
when they met “in person.” Not having received a readout of the July 25 call, I
did not know what those sensitive issues were.
Not long after, Ambassador Sondland and Mr. Holmes went to
lunch. Two embassy staffers joined them. “Ambassador Sondland selected a bottle of wine that he shared
among the four of us,” Holmes explained, “and we discussed topics such as
marketing strategies for his hotel business.”
“So, he’s gonna do the
investigation?”
President
Trump
Once the wine was finished, Sondland announced he was going
to call the president and brief him on a recent, one-on-one meeting he had held
with a top Ukrainian aide to Mr. Zelenskyy.
Holmes continued:
I
heard President Trump then clarify that Ambassador Sondland was in Ukraine.
Ambassador Sondland replied, yes, he was in Ukraine, and went on to state that
President Zelenskyy “loves your ass.” I then heard President Trump ask, “So, he’s
gonna do the investigation?” Ambassador Sondland replied that “he’s gonna do
it,” adding that President Zelenskyy will do “anything you ask him to.”
An unrelated topic was introduced and discussed. When the
call ended, Holmes followed up with a question.
Ambassador
Sondland remarked that the President was in a bad mood, as Ambassador Sondland
stated was often the case early in the morning. I then took the opportunity to
ask Ambassador Sondland for his candid impression of the President’s views on
Ukraine. In particular, I asked Ambassador Sondland if it was true that the
President did not “give a s—t about Ukraine.” Ambassador Sondland agreed that
the President did not “give a s—t about Ukraine.” I asked why not, and
Ambassador Sondland stated that the President only cares about “big stuff.” I
noted that there was “big stuff” going on in Ukraine, like a war with Russia,
and Ambassador Sondland replied that he meant “big stuff” that benefits the
President, like the “Biden investigation” that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.
So, was there any evidence that Trump wanted to clean up
corruption in Ukraine before granting military aid?
None.
*
IN RELATED NEWS, Bloomberg reported that Rudy Giuliani
might soon become the second consecutive personal lawyer of President Trump to
be indicted.
11/16/19: This morning the Great
Firewall of Trump (see comparison to Communist China) was breached.
Mark Sandys of the Office of Management and Budget showed up to
testify in a closed door session, despite White House efforts to thwart his
appearance. Sandys is said to have information about how the decision to
withhold nearly $400 million in vital military aid to Ukraine was made. Based
on what we’ve heard from witnesses, and read in transcripts, you figure Acting
White House Chief of Enabling Mick Mulvaney has his fingerprints all over this
deal.
Speaking of witnesses, Don Jr. proves that—like father, like
son—he’s a giant asshole on Twitter.
11/17/19: Trump is losing his shit. Having learned
that Vice President Jesus’s top security adviser told lawmakers his July 25
call to President Zelensky was “unusual and inappropriate,” he lashes out.
“Tell Jennifer
Williams, whoever that is, to read BOTH transcripts of the presidential calls,
& see the just released ststement [sic] from Ukraine,” he tweets. “Then she
should meet with the other Never Trumpers, who I don’t know & mostly never
even heard of, & work out a better presidential attack!”
What
next? Trump accuses Melania of being a “Never Trumper?”
*
Meanwhile,
Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican on the congressional panel conducting the
impeachment inquiry, starts to give
ground.
“Well,
of course, all of that is alarming.”
Rep.
Mike Turner
Appearing
on Jake Tapper’s Sunday show, State of the Union, he admits that the
testimony he has heard has not been, shall we say, flattering to the president.
“Well,
of course, all of that is alarming,” he admits in response to a question by Tapper.
“As I’ve said from the beginning, I think this is not OK. The President of the
United States shouldn’t even in the original phone call be on the phone with
the president of another country and raise his political opponent. So,
no, this is not OK.”
What about those tweets attacking Yovanovitch, as she was
testifying, Tapper asked? Did that rise to the level of witness intimidation?
“It’s certainly not impeachable, and it’s certainly not
criminal and it’s certainly not witness intimidation. It certainly wasn’t
trying to prevent her or wouldn’t have prevented her from testifying, she was
actually in the process of testifying. But nonetheless, I find the President’s
tweets unfortunate,” the congressman said. “I think along with most people, I
find the President’s tweets, generally, unfortunate,” Turner added.
In other words, the latest Republican line of defense boils
down: Trump is an asshole. But you can’t be impeached for that.
Could
the First Lady be a “Never Trumper!”
11/18/19: A second week of public testimony begins. It would be safe
to say the first week ended with President Twitter Thumbs in a dark place. His
mood is unlikely to improve if aides let him see the results of an ABC poll. Seven in ten
Americans believe his efforts to get Ukraine to dig up dirt and help him win
the 2020 election were wrong. Nearly six in ten (57%) believe he should be
impeached, including 6% who think he should be impeached but allowed to remain
in office.
Only
1 in 4 Americans believes the president did nothing wrong. Even the First Lady
probably knows he did.
See:
Stormy Daniels, et. al.
Pelosi invites
Trump to come tell his side of the story.
We
can expect that number in favor of impeachment to continue to rise if Speaker
Nancy Pelosi manages to call the president’s bluff. Republican lawmakers have
been insisting that the whole impeachment inquiry is rigged and wrong and an
abomination. Why can’t the president (and a lawyer or two to tag along) defend
himself? Pelosi has now invited Mr. Trump to do
just that. Come before the House Intelligence Committee and tell your side of
the story.
“If he has information that is exculpatory, that means ‘ex,’
taking away, ‘culpable,’ blame, then we look forward to seeing it,” she said
during an appearance on Face the Nation. The president, she explained, “could
come right before the committee and talk, speak all the truth that he wants if
he wants.”
And
like a lemming rushing for the cliff—if a lemming knew how to tweet and had the capacity to lie—Trump has
said that he just might do it!
It
took a pair of tweets to say so, but
you could feel the fury in the president’s thumbs as he tapped:
Our Crazy, Do Nothing (where’s
USMCA, infrastructure, lower drug pricing & much more?) Speaker of the
House, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, who is petrified by her Radical Left knowing she
will soon be gone (they & Fake News Media are her BOSS), suggested on
Sunday’s DEFACE THE NATION....
....that I testify about the
phony Impeachment Witch Hunt. She also said I could do it in writing. Even
though I did nothing wrong, and don’t like giving credibility to this No Due
Process Hoax, I like the idea & will, in order to get Congress focused
again, strongly consider it!
To
sum up: Trump will “consider it.” This is reminiscent of his claim that he
looked forward to testifying under oath in the Mueller probe but never did.
Pelosi is “crazy.” The “Fake News Media” is terrible, because they keep
reporting what witnesses say. And the whole inquiry is a “No Due Process Hoax,”
even though Republican lawmakers had equal time to question whatever witnesses said.
*
SPEAKING
OF TESTIMONY: Now that additional sections of the Mueller Report are unredacted
(as a result of the conviction of Roger Stone), leaders in the House of
Representatives are looking at possible charges of perjury to
be leveled against the president. In checking his written answers to questions
in the Russian investigation against evidence revealed in the Stone trial, it
would seem Donald J. Trump might not have told the whole truth, and nothing
but.
“Did the president lie? Was the president not truthful in his
responses to the Mueller investigation,” House General Counsel Douglas N.
Letter asked rhetorically, in explaining why lawmakers were considering charges.
“The House is trying to determine whether the current president should remain
in office,” Letter added. “This is unbelievably serious and it’s happening
right now, very fast.”
He cited the example of Michael Cohen, one of six Team Trump
2016 players so far to have been convicted of at least one felony. Like Stone,
he was found guilty of lying to Congress. Like Stone, Cohen’s lies served one overarching
purpose. He lied to protect the president. So did Stone.
Now, unlike their boss, both are headed for, or already in, prison.
11/19/19: Most Americans have struggled to
keep up with all the impeachment news. A dozen or more witnesses have testified
behind closed doors. Their combined depositions, for ten witnesses so far,
total 3,500 pages. Now we have the opportunity to watch the public hearings. But
even if you do your best to keep up, you have to endure Rep. Jim Jordan’s
constant yelling. Seven in ten Americans say they are trying to keep up. The
other three are napping, getting ready for Thanksgiving, or kicking themselves
for believing the Cincinnati Bengals might win a game this season.
“I would also like to thank you for your great support in the
area of defense.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky
For starters, today, let’s go back to the White House transcript of the July 25 call. Even Rep. Jordan, the most
obnoxious of all the president’s defenders, readily admits that Donald J.
Trump, speaking to President Volodymyr Zelensky, asked the Ukrainian leader “to
do us a favor.”
At that point in the call, Mr. Zelensky has just said to Mr. Trump:
“I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of
defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps
specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States
for defense purposes.”
That comment comes at the very bottom of page two in the call
memorandum. Javelins are high-tech anti-tank missiles and the Russians have
been careful about attacking Ukrainian forces since the first shipment arrived. (In March 2018, the Trump
administration okayed a $47 million sale of 210 of the shoulder-fired weapons,
with launchers.) The Javelin is a “fire and forget” armament, allowing a
soldier to launch it and take cover immediately. With a range of up to 4,000
meters, it has an infrared guidance system. The Javelin is designed to strike
tanks from above, where armor is thinnest. They’re deadly to Russian vehicles
and a terror to crews.
Okay: Good job, for once, President Trump!
At any rate, Trump responds immediately on that call, “I
would like you to do us a favor though.”
Zelensky wants arms.
Trump wants Zelensky to launch an investigation.
At the top of page four, Trump tells the Ukrainian leader,
“Rudy [Giuliani] very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy.
If you could speak to him that would be great.”
The man who controls vital U.S. military aid is asking the
newly-elected President of Ukraine to talk to his personal lawyer. Rudy
will let him know what he needs to do.
*
FOR CONTEXT, suppose this were Russia in 2016. Trump is asking
the Russians to talk to Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer.
Oh, wait, he already did that! And Cohen’s current address
is:
Mr. Michael Cohen
Federal Correctional
Institution
2 Mile Drive
Otisville, New York 10963
Anyway, Ukraine: “The
other thing.” Trump continues. “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that
[then Vice President Joe] Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people
want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General
would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so
if you can look into it…It sounds horrible to me.”
This is not difficult to grasp. Mr. Potato Head could
understand it. Trump is telling the new Ukrainian head of state that under the old
head of state, a company called Burisma, for whom Hunter Biden worked, should
have been investigated. Vice President Biden, who just so happens to be the
gravest threat to Trump in 2020, interfered
with the investigation.
Could he look into that?
Zelensky’s response is opaque. But he seems to indicate he’ll
do as Trump demands. “First of all I understand and I’m knowledgeable about the
situation,” he assures the President of the United States. He goes on to add,
“the next prosecutor general [akin to our Attorney General] will be 100% my
person, my candidate….He or she will look into the situation, specifically the
company that you mentioned in this issue.”
Here’s how one witness summed up the crux of the matter on
Tuesday. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman told lawmakers, “It doesn’t take a
rocket scientist to see the political benefits of the president’s [Trump’s]
demands.” That’s why Vindman is there, testifying under oath. That’s why a
State Department expert on Ukraine, Jennifer Williams, assigned to the staff of
Vice President Mike Pence, is there, seated to his right. That’s why three
witnesses last week testified, and two more would on Tuesday afternoon, after
Vindman and Williams were excused.
Rep. Jim Jordan, of course, doesn’t grasp the truth, or does,
but doesn’t want the American people to grasp it. Jordan keeps insisting that
there are four “facts” the Democrats can’t get around.
Rep. Jordan.
He’s loud and angry every time he ticks them off and he ticks
them off several times each day:
1.Trump says the call was great, even if the White
House meeting Zelensky wanted was clearly tied to an investigation; and by
golly (Jordan uses “by golly” when he talks; but the phrase still come out as a
shout), there was no quid pro quo involving an investigation in return for
military aid.
2.Mr. Zelensky has said he felt no pressure to
investigate.
3.The Ukrainians never carried out an
investigation. So, no harm, no foul.
4.The Ukrainians eventually got the military aid.
End of the whole impeachment debate!
Again, it’s not hard to knock Jordan’s defense to pieces,
even before we go digging deeper into testimony.
Point First: We all know Trump lies with incredible
regularity and even a kind of warped skill. Scientists now say that
pigs are the fourth most intelligent animal species, trailing only chimps,
dolphins and elephants. A pig listening to Trump would know he’s lying.
Point Second: President Zelensky still needs U.S. military
support. He still wants to meet in the White House. He’s not going to say
anything bad about Trump, so long as that’s the case.
Point Third: As of September 1, President Zelensky was
preparing to announce the start of the investigation Trump wanted; and
he was going to do it in an interview on CNN.
Fareed Zakaria, a reporter for CNN, explains what happened: “We
had been negotiating with President Zelensky and his office for a while, for
months, to try to get an interview with him anyway, ever since he was elected
President.”
Once news of the whistleblower complaint surfaced, “it
became clear to us that the interview was off.”
In stark terms, the “quo” was about to be delivered, and the
“quid” would then be coming, once Trump got his favor. But the free press blew
up the story, and the favor had to be scrapped.
Point Fourth: The military aid to Ukraine was held up starting
on June 19, at the latest (both Vindman and Williams testified on Tuesday that
they learned about the hold on July 3), until September. So, why was the aid
finally released?
Here, suppose we try a comparison a pig could comprehend.
Imagine that President Trump has just been caught by the First Lady, planning
to have sex with a porn star. He has sent the porn lady a text message: “Meet
you at 7:00 tomorrow at your place. I’m going to boink you like you’ve never
been boinked before. Bring a copy of Forbes with my picture on the
cover. I want to be spanked.”
The First Lady stumbles upon the text. She accosts her faithless
husband. Trump defends himself, insisting, “But, Melania. Since you caught me
and no boinking has occurred, there’s no reason to be mad. I’m innocent, don’t
you understand?”
“Trust me,” I think the First Lady would reply, “there will
definitely be no boinking for you.”
So, that’s how you knock down Rep. Jordan’s four
points—which, I’m sure, if you watch any of the testimony this week he will
loudly and endlessly repeat.
*
IF YOU HAVEN’T watched a minute of the hearings, I can assure
you, the first five witnesses should make you proud. (I didn’t have a chance to
watch the last two, save briefly, Tuesday afternoon.) Ms. Williams knew she was
risking her career when she agreed to come before Congress. And as surely as
pigs like to roll in the mud, Trump insulted her on Twitter because she did.
Still, she answered lawmakers’ questions with a quiet dignity of her own.
Lt. Col. Vindman showed bravery equal to hers. He’s shown
bravery before. He wears a combat infantry badge and a Purple Heart on his U.S.
Army uniform, both earned in Iraq in 2004. And before we continue, let me say,
as a former Marine—who volunteered to go to Vietnam twice—but through dumb luck
was never sent—I was appalled by the gutless attacks GOP lawmakers launched against
him. One congressman questioned Vindman’s right to wear a uniform to the
hearings. Vindman calmly explained. Army officers on duty and appearing on
Capitol Hill are expected to wear the uniform. At the White House, he’d be
in a suit and tie.
The most craven line of attack came from Steve Castor, the Republican
counsel, who does the opening round of questioning for his side. Was Vindman, Castor
wondered, perhaps feeling “left out” of the chain of command as decisions about
the future of Ukraine were made? Was he unhappy to be “sidelined” by a new
supervisor? And what about that job the Ukrainians offered? Wasn’t it true, he asked,
squinting at Vindman, as if sizing up a man he suspected was about to lie, that
he had been offered the job of Minister of Defense in Ukraine?
You knew at that moment that Castor and the men who hired him
to smear people like Vindman had no shame. He was hinting that Vindman wasn’t a
patriot, Purple Heart and twenty years of service be damned! No. The colonel was
angling for a top post with a foreign power. He wasn’t really a good American, now,
was he? Watching at home, I wanted to vomit at that point.
(A quick check of the records indicates that,
as I suspected, Castor never donned the uniform or dodged flying lead.)
The colonel kept his cool. He said the idea that he had
actually been offered the top defense position in Ukraine was “comical.” He
said it was “preposterous” to think he’d be interested, even he had.
To be honest, I’d have been happy to see Vindman rise from
the witness table and punch Castor in the nose.
The GOP counsel tends to look like he's passing a kidney stone.
*
AS PER COMMITTEE RULES, Daniel Goldman, the Democrats’
counsel, had first crack at questioning witnesses, and then Castor took his
turn. At one point, Goldman asked Lt. Col. Vindman if he was aware of any
evidence (as Trump and Giuliani believed) that Ukraine, not Russia,
interfered in the 2016 election?
“I am not,” he replied.
Are you aware, Goldman asked, that this conspiracy theory was promoted by Vladimir Putin?
“I am well aware of that fact,” the colonel said. “It is the
consensus of the entire intelligence community that the Russians interfered in
the U.S. election in 2016.”
What about the idea that Vice President Biden interfered in
some investigation in Ukraine? Was either witness aware of any credible
evidence of that?
“No,” said Vindman.
“No, I am not,” Ms. Williams replied.
At one point, Goldman asked Vindman what languages he spoke.
“I speak Russian and Ukrainian,” he said. He hesitated a moment, and with excellent
comic timing, added, “and a little bit of English.” Goldman laughed. So did the
audience. Vindman seemed pleased with his joke.
Rep. Jordan looked constipated.
Why, Goldman wondered, was it so important that Ukraine get
the White House meeting Mr. Zelensky wanted—and especially the military aid?
Vindman said the meeting was partly “symbolic.” A meeting would show the U.S.
had Ukraine’s back. If the military assistance was not forthcoming, it “would
likely encourage Russia” to pursue more aggressive attacks. This, he said,
would further undermine “Ukrainian sovereignty, European security, and U.S.
security.”
Russia gets a huge win!
Vindman testified that the call memorandum for July 25 left
out two important details. He said he tried to have the transcript adjusted.
Zelensky, he said, had specifically mentioned to President Trump that an
investigation of “Burisma” would be conducted. Ms. Williams and the colonel had
taken notes during the call. Both agreed the name of that specific company came
up.
Was it “nefarious,” Vindman was asked, that the word
“Burisma” was left out of the call memorandum? No, he said. He said that the
call memorandum was “substantially correct.” Ms. Williams agreed.
A smile briefly passed over Ranking Member Nunes’s face.
Republicans have been at pains during hearings to convince
viewers that what Trump cared about most in his dealings with Ukraine was
rooting out corruption before the Ukrainians got aid.
Had Trump mentioned “corruption” in this call, Goldman asked?
No, said Vindman.
No, Williams agreed.
What about a call that took place on April 21, Goldman wondered,
when President Trump congratulated Zelensky on his election victory? Both
witnesses agreed. “Corruption” never came up.
The official White House readout, however, says the two
presidents talked about how to “root out corruption” in Ukraine.
Part of a White House coverup, Goldman wondered?
Vindman said the readout might differ simply because it was a
“messaging tool.” Mentioning corruption would send a signal to the Ukrainian
people that the U.S. wanted to bolster the rule of law in their country.
*
CASTOR then had his turn to question the witnesses. He’s a
skilled questioner and got Williams and Vindman to say just enough, so that the
stupidest pig in the pen might imagine Trump was innocent.
The
request “had nothing to do with national security policy.”
But the basics of the witness testimonies were clear. Vindman
was also involved in a July 10 meeting, with representatives of Ukraine. During
that meeting, Ambassador Sondland told the three Ukrainians present that if Mr.
Zelensky wanted a meeting with Mr. Trump, then the Ukrainian president was
going to have to say publicly that the investigation Trump wanted was going to
take place. Vindman said he told
Sondland this request was “inappropriate” and “had nothing to do with national
security policy.” Like Ambassador Bill Taylor and George Kent, who had testified
previously, Williams agreed. Holding up aid was damaging to U.S. security.
Each member of the committee now had five minutes to put questions
to the witnesses. The Republicans kept trying to show that the Ukrainians
couldn’t have felt pressure about the delay on military aid because they didn’t
know it was delayed. Williams testified about a meeting on September 1, in
Warsaw, between Zelensky and her boss, Vice President Mike Pence. The first
question the Ukrainian leader put to Mr. Pence had to do with the delay. In
other words, he was feeling the pressure no later than September 1. In fact,
the free press had broken the story of the aid delay a few days before.
And may all the pigs on the farm come to understand:
President Trump considers the free press “the Enemy of the People.”
He’d crush it if he dared.
If you haven’t been watching the hearings, I swear to god,
several GOP members of the committee used their five minutes of fame to shout
about how the original whistleblower had never been seen! Why weren’t they
being allowed to question that person! Right now! On television! What
diabolical, Democratic plot was afoot!
Rep. Jordan accused Chairman Schiff of lying when he said he
didn’t know who the whistleblower was.
A rational observer might have thought that having two live
witnesses to question would have been enough for Jordan and his friends. Or
that having three who testified last week was a good start. Or that it might be
wise to prepare for the two witnesses scheduled that afternoon. You might think
that 3,500 pages of witness testimony, now publicly available, would be a good
place to focus.
A rational observer would be wrong.
Ranking Member Nunes fumed. The Democrats didn’t care about
the truth, he insisted. He demanded to know who the whistleblower was. He wanted
that person to appear before the committee at once!
Besides, the Ukrainians got the military aid, didn’t they?
Rep. John Ratcliffe reminded us all.
End of story.
Case closed.
The pigs could go back to focusing on their corn.
Chairman Schiff took a moment to note that the military aid
was not released till September 11, meaning there had been a delay of nearly
three months. He noted that the White House was made aware that a whistleblower
complaint had been lodged by late August. On September 9, the House
Intelligence Committee announced that it would be holding hearings, after it came
to Schiff’s attention that the whistleblower complaint had not been
forwarded to Congress, as required by law.
The president’s knee-jerk defenders insisted that it was the Democrats
who didn’t care about the law and they were all a bunch of commies. Schiff
noted that it was on the very next day that the House Intelligence Committee
requested the whistleblower’s complaint be delivered to Congress.
Presto, their cover blown, the people involved in withholding
the military aid to Ukraine let it flow within 24 hours.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians had to be feeling the pressure.
In their fight against Russia, thousands had been killed.
“You know what we used to do in the old days when we were
smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently
than we do now.”
President Donald J. Trump
Ranking Member Nunes didn’t care about the thousands of Ukrainian
dead. It didn’t bother him to hear witnesses say the delay threatened U.S.
security, too. He tried a cheap shot of his own. He wanted to know who Vindman had
talked to after he first lodged protest about the demands by Sondland (July 10)
and Trump (July 25) that the Ukrainians agree to investigate Biden and son.
Vindman said he talked to two individuals. One was George Kent, at the State
Department. The other was a member of a U.S. intelligence agency. Nunes
demanded to know which agency and wanted that person’s name. Vindman’s lawyer
said he wouldn’t provide either. Schiff warned that no question which might
lead to identification of the whistleblower would be allowed. Nunes told
Vindman he could answer or “take the Fifth.”
Vindman’s lawyer rejected the insinuation that his client
might be hiding wrongdoing. His client was testifying under rules set down by
Chairman Schiff. The whistleblower’s identity would not be revealed—nor details
provided that might lead to his or her unmasking.
That pissed Nunes off. Goddam! Where was that whistleblower?
He characterized the whole day of testimony as “this impeachment inquisition”
and decided to ignore some rather glaring facts.
For example, according to the whistleblower’s lawyer, his
client had been the target of numerous death threats, if his or her identity
were to be found out. The F.B.I. was already investigating, including one email in which the sender
said the whistleblower “should be shot.”
Had anyone else threatened the whistleblower? Why, yes:
President Trump had! He compared the whistleblower to a spy. “You know what we
used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right?” he asked reporters. “The
spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”
Yes, the penalty was death.
Vindman, himself, had also been a target of death threats.
The U.S. Army, an organization not known for timidity, decided to relocate
Vindman and his family for safety and provide a security detail too.
You might think Nunes would care.
“Do not
worry,” he added, “I will be fine for telling the truth.”
But there was one great moment, early in the day, and then
that moment was repeated at the end of the colonel’s day under oath. He talked
about his dad, who had grown up under Soviet rule. His dad remembered what
happened in a country where the government could ignore the rule of law—where
the press was shackled—where critics of leadership met grim fates.
The colonel thanked his father for bringing the family to a
country where they could live “free from fear.”
“Dad, [the fact] I’m sitting here today in the U.S. Capitol,
talking to our elected professionals,” he said, “is proof that you made
the right decision 40 years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the
United States of America in search of a better life for our family.”
“Do not worry,” he added, “I will be fine for telling the
truth.”
In the old Soviet Union (and in Russia to this day), Lt.
Colonel Vindman added, his testimony “would not be tolerated.” In many nations,
questioning the leader, “would cost me my life.”
It made you proud to know—that, at least for now—America was
a place where Vindman and the other witnesses could still have a say.
11/20-21/19: By Tuesday afternoon, even
this hard-working blogger had fallen far behind in an effort to keep track of
key developments in the hearings. So, let’s just say, it was a bad week for Mr.
Trump.
Even if you had time and inclination to listen, the testimony
was often repetitious, as lawyers and lawmakers on both sides kept asking
witnesses to elaborate on minor points already made. Rep. Jordan could be counted
on to repeat his Four Points (see: 11/19/19) whenever he had the chance.
No matter who might be testifying, Rep. Stefanik, was going to consult her yellow
legal pad, filled with handwritten notes, and attack Chairman Schiff for
refusing to bring the whistleblower forward. If the whistleblower wasn’t going
to testify, she fumed, the other witnesses should go home. Then the American
people should all agree Donald J. Trump was a totally innocent man; and he
should be reelected in 2020, even if the Ukrainians didn’t help.
In fact, in Rep. Stefanik’s mind, the real problem our nation
faced was “the hysteria and frenzied media coverage,” and not all the testimony
that made the president look like he thought he could get away with ignoring
the U.S. Constitution with ease. Ukraine got the money in the end! And no
investigation of Burisma and the Bidens occurred! She was like a female version
of Rep. Jordan, parroting the same Four Points, although admittedly far less
strident when she talked.
At one point, she consulted her legal pad again. Wasn’t it
important, she asked Williams and Vindman, for President Trump to ensure that
U.S. aid was being wisely spent, and that the standards of U.S. anti-corruption
laws were met—before the $400 million for Ukraine was disbursed?
It seemed like a valid point.
A Democratic lawmaker noted, almost as soon as Stefanik’s
five minutes for questioning were up, that the Department of Defense and State
Department had both certified that Ukraine was meeting applicable U.S.
anti-corruption standards and had decided the aid should be sent in June.
June!
Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat, brought the
critical question back into view. “Is it proper for a U.S. president to ask a
foreign government to investigate a U.S. citizen?” he asked.
Nunes scowled, and his glance fell, as if he had just been
ordered to eat a plate of stewed prunes placed on the dais before him. Not one
Republican dared offer an answer on that point.
*
THE PARADE of witnesses continued. Tuesday afternoon Ambassador
Volker appeared, as did Tim Morrison. Wednesday morning, Ambassador Sondland had
a turn. Wednesday afternoon, David Hale, a State Department official, and Laura
Cooper, an official with the Department of Defense took seats at the witness
table.
If you wondered whether or not testimony was going well for
the president, you had only to follow his Twitter feed and see what he was
saying about the witnesses themselves.
“Impeachment Witch Hunt is now OVER!” Trump tweeted with glee
after picking out one random sentence from what Sondland had said.
But most people watching—and most pigs—had enough brains to
realize that Sondland had torched his boss. By Wednesday evening the president’s
tone had changed, and he was tweet-quoting Tucker Carlson: “‘All four of Gordon
Sondland’s lawyers are Democrat Donors.’”
What, then, were some of the highlights you missed—and that the
President of the United States refused to acknowledge? Volker clarified and
even changed parts of his testimony given behind closed doors. Now, in a public
setting, he said that he did remember. During a July 10 meeting, Ambassador
Sondland did say Ukraine would have to do the investigation the president
wanted or there’d be no White House meeting. As Volker put it, the Ambassador
made “a generic comment about
investigations,” which “all of us thought was inappropriate.”
Volker claimed he had no idea that Burisma, the only
Ukrainian company Trump seemed to care about, was connected to Hunter Biden. He
did say, however, that Rudy’s whole line of attack, that Vice President Biden
was involved in some kind of cover-up in Ukraine was a “conspiracy theory.”
“What, you mean like asking us to investigate Clinton and
Biden?”
Ukrainian presidential aide Andrey
Yermak
And probably every patriotic American, and every patriotic
pig, should note in particular, this piece of testimony from Volker. At one
point, he says he cautioned Andrey Yermak, a top aide to President Zelensky,
not to investigate Zelensky’s defeated opponent in the recent election.
I cautioned Mr. Yermak to say
that pursuing prosecution of President Poroshenko risks deepening the divisions
in the country, exactly the opposite of what President Zelensky says he wants
to do.
“What, you mean like asking us
to investigate Clinton and Biden?” Yermak retorted.
Volker told lawmakers that comment “puzzled” him at the time.
But a chimp, a dolphin, an elephant or a pig might realize that the Ukrainians
were feeling the pressure to investigate, as Trump was demanding.
Morrison admitted that he helped bury a more-detailed record
of the July 25 call because he feared a political firestorm might erupt.
That was a mistake, leading to suspicion about what Trump had said, and the
firestorm erupted anyway. Morrison did say his testimony was not to be taken as
an attack on the “character or integrity” of other witnesses from the National
Security Council.
As for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee,
they continued to attack the integrity of every witness, whenever they could.
What about the White House meeting? Was it contingent on the
Ukrainians doing the investigation Trump wanted? Volker said he didn’t see it
as “a necessary condition” if the Ukrainians wanted the meeting. “I wouldn’t
have called it a condition,” Volker said under questioning. “It’s a nuance I
guess, but I viewed it as very helpful…to get the date for the meeting.”
In fact, Mr. Morrison said that, as per comments by
Ambassador Sondland to him at the end of the July 10 meeting, he believed that a
statement by Zelensky announcing corruption probes into Biden and the 2016
election was a necessary condition for military aid to be released.
No one
believed the military aid should be delayed.
In Morrison’s telling, Sondland was an added hurdle in
getting the Ukrainians the meeting and aid they needed. Here we might note for
Trump supporters that Morrison, like every other witness so far, agreed. No one
at the Department of Defense, no one at State, and no one on the National
Security Council, including Morrison, believed the military aid should be
delayed.
Mr. Morrison seemed careful to put the blame for the holdup
on Sondland; but the real blame (we soon learned) would lie with the president.
And even Morrison believed the aid was being held up until
the Ukrainians agreed to do the investigation.
Or: the quid pro quo.
*
I MISSED MOST of the Tuesday afternoon hearings. But it was
during the testimony of Volker, I believe, that Chairman Schiff brought up this
salient point. It was President Trump in the July 25 call that said he wanted a
favor—and that favor was an investigation into Joe Biden and his son.
It wasn’t Ambassador Sondland who brought it up.
It wasn’t a poltergeist.
Schiff reminded everyone that Mick Mulvaney had admitted that the meeting and military aid were
held up until Zelensky did what Trump asked.
*
AS ALWAYS, you could do the legwork yourself if you had time
and cared enough. You could go to Rev.com and read the transcript of the press briefing Mulvaney gave on October
17.
For our purposes here, we’ll pick up at the twenty-minute
mark.
By that point, the delay on military aid was out in the open.
A reporter wondered what the official explanation might be. Mulvaney said it
was no different than Puerto Rico, where Trump thought aid money had been
wasted. “And by the way,” he asserted, “it turns out we were right.” Trump,
Mulvaney said, didn’t want money going to “a corrupt place.” Plus, Trump didn’t
think other European countries were helping Ukraine enough. “And what we found
out was that, and I can’t remember if it’s zero or near zero dollars from any
European countries for lethal aid,” Mulvaney explained. “You’ve heard the
president say this, that we give them tanks and the other countries give them pillows.
That’s absolutely right that as vocal as the Europeans are about supporting
Ukraine, they are really, really stingy when it comes to lethal aid,” he
continued. “And they weren’t helping Ukraine and still to this day are not.”
That might all be true—although it wasn’t—but it still begged
the question. Why was Trump demanding an investigation into the Biden family,
an investigation that could help him win again in 2020?
Mulvaney told reporters there was the matter of “corruption
related to the DNC server” and “that’s why we held up the money.”
“So,” a journalist inquired, “the demand for an investigation
into the Democrats was part of the reason that he ordered to withhold funding
to Ukraine?”
“The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of
the thing that [the president] was worried about in corruption with that
nation. And that is absolutely appropriate,” said Mr. Mulvaney.
“But to be clear,” another reporter interjected, “what you
just described is a quid pro quo. It is funding will not flow unless the
investigation into…into the Democratic server happened as well.”
Mulvaney didn’t push back. And on Wednesday, during public
hearings, Schiff reminded his GOP colleagues and anyone watching what Mulvaney had
said in response.
And we quote:
We do that all the time with
foreign policy. We were holding up money at the same time for what was it? The
Northern triangle countries. We were holding up aid at the Northern triangle
countries so that they would change their policies on immigration….If you read
the news reports and you believe them, what did McKinney say yesterday? Well,
McKinney said yesterday that he was really upset with the political
influence in foreign policy. That was one of the reasons he was so upset
about this. And I have news for everybody. Get over it. There’s going to be
political influence in foreign policy.
“What about the Bidens?” a member of the press asked. Mulvaney
continued with a response to the previous question.
That is going to happen.
Elections have consequences and foreign policy is going to change from the
Obama Administration to the Trump Administration. And what you’re seeing now I
believe is a group of mostly career bureaucrats who are saying, “You know what?
I don’t like president Trump’s politics, so I’m going to participate in this
witch hunt that they’re undertaking on the hill.” Elections do have
consequences and they should. And your foreign policy is going to change. Obama
did it in one way. We’re doing it a different way and there is no problem with
that.
“What about the Bidens though, Mr. Mulvaney? Does that come
into consideration when that…”
Mulvaney interrupted. He said it was okay to investigate the
DNC server.
The reporter tried again: “Are you saying that it’s okay for
the U.S. government to hold up aid and require a foreign government to
investigate political opponents of the president?”
“No, you’re talking about looking forward to the next
election. We’re talking…” Mulvaney started to say.
“Even the DNC. The DNC is still involved in this next
election. Is that not correct?” another reporter asked.
Good
reporters in free countries don’t have to let go.
Mulvaney and the reporters sparred over what kinds of
investigations would be proper and what kinds would not. Mulvaney insisted it
was “bizarre” that anyone would think that “the chief law enforcement person”
in this country, namely President Donald J. Trump, could not legitimately “ask
somebody to cooperate with an ongoing public investigation.” But that didn’t
make sense—and the press knew it. Trump is the chief law enforcement person as
far as U.S. investigations are concerned. He’s not in charge of
investigations in Ukraine.
The reporters kept pressing. One asked, so, “It’s fine to ask
about the DNC, but not about Biden?”
“That’s a hypothetical,” Mulvaney replied.
The press wouldn’t let go—because good reporters in free
countries don’t have to let go. They can keep digging for the truth, and
whether you like Trump or not, that’s exactly what they should do.
“No. No,” Mulvaney continued. “On the call the president did
ask about investigating the Bidens. Are you saying that the money was held up,
that that had nothing to do with the Bidens? No. The money held up had absolutely nothing
to do with Biden,” Mr. Mulvaney insisted.
“And you’re drawing the distinction. You’re saying that it
would be wrong to hold up money for the Bidens?” the reporter tried again.
A frustrated Mulvaney gave it another shot. “There were three
factors,” involved in the decision to withhold aid, he explained. He held up three
fingers for emphasis and ticked them off:
Again, I was involved with the
process by which the money was held up temporarily. Okay. Three issues for
that. The corruption in the country, whether or not other countries were
participating in the support of the Ukraine, and whether or not they were
cooperating in an ongoing investigation with our Department of Justice. That’s
completely legitimate.
“Reporter 6” (as identified in the transcript), asks Mulvaney
to clarify an earlier point:
You just said you were involved in the process in which the money being held up
temporarily, you named three issues for that for corruption in the country,
whether or not the country… they were assisting with an ongoing investigation
of corruption. How is that not an establishment of an exchange of a quid pro
quo? You just see what…
Mulvaney interrupts and there’s a bit of crosstalk. Then he
replies:
Those are the terms that you
use. Go look at what Gordon Sondland said today in his testimony, was that… I
think in his opening statement [which by this point has leaked to the press] he
said something along the lines of: they were trying to get the deliverable. And
the deliverable was a statement by the Ukraine about how they were going to
deal with corruption. Okay? Go read his testimony if you haven’t already. And
what he says is, and he’s right, that’s absolutely ordinary course of business….This
is the ordinary course of foreign policy.
Reporter 7 asks, “Mr. Mulvaney, is it appropriate for any
president or this president to pressure a foreign country to investigate a political
opponent?”
Mulvaney complains that that’s one of those “‘when did you
stop beating your wife?’ questions. It assumes that the president’s done that.”
Finally, Mulvaney calls it quits, saying, “Look, I know we
could do this all night. No, I’m not going to take anymore. But it’s nice to
see everybody. Thanks again. All right.
Reporter 12 (I suspect, a representative of CNN) calls after
the departing White House official, “[crosstalk]…didn’t take a question. Why
are you afraid to take questions from CNN, sir?”
And I was left thinking at the time that someone should have
shouted, “So when did Trump start beating—metaphorically—his wife?”
*
IN FACT, on Wednesday morning, Ambassador Sondland answered
that very question. When did the beating stop? It stopped only once the
president realized there were witnesses watching the abuse.
It’s safe to say that no single American probably watched
every hour of televised hearings and read every one of the 4,000 pages of
transcribed testimony from the closed-door hearings. So, what did we learn from
witnesses, who came last, on Wednesday and Thursday?
Watching intently at home, during Wednesday’s testimony, both
my wife and I were struck how “smug” Ambassador Sondland seemed. Republicans
would later dig a few sentences out of hours of his testimony—and insist, bizarrely,
that Sondland had cleared Donald J. Trump’s name. But if you listened intently,
from start to finish, you knew Sondland was happy to be throwing the president
and other members of Team Trump under the bus. And he was enjoying seeing them
squashed. In all likelihood, the ambassador was feeling a sense of relief. Up
to that point, much of the blame for the delay in the meeting and the military aid
had been laid at his feet.
In his opening statement, he said almost all that needed to be
said, although it took hours of back and forth for Democrats and Republicans to
parse the key points. In the end, the Republicans managed to select pieces of his
testimony, suitable to their needs, and weave them into what looked, if you
squinted hard enough, like a quilt of innocence to cover up the impeachable
offenses of President Trump.
If you opened your eyes fully, however, you realized all the
Republicans had was a pile of cloth scraps.
(President Trump at first called Sondland’s testimony
“fantastic.” Because Trump is, at best, a delusional fool.)
1.He wasn’t in charge of getting Ukraine to
announce an investigation. But it was an “open secret” that that was
what the Ukrainians were expected to do if Zelensky wanted a White House
meeting with Trump.
2.“Everyone was in the loop.” That
included Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence.
3.“I know that
members of this Committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in
the form of a simple question: Was there a ‘quid pro quo?’” Sondland said. “As
I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White
House meeting, the answer is yes.”
4.The ambassador told lawmakers that he and other
diplomats were reluctant to work with Rudy Giuliani. They did so at the
“express direction of the President of the United States.”
5.Who else would
have known about this quid pro quo? “Mr. Giuliani conveyed to Secretary Perry,
Ambassador Volker, and others that President Trump wanted a public statement
from President Zelensky committing to investigations of Burisma and the 2016
election,” Sondland explained. Giuliani made this clear to the Ukrainians. “We
all understood that these prerequisites for the White House call and White
House meeting reflected President Trump’s desires and requirements,” he said.
6.The real diplomats and the top leadership on the
president’s National Security Council agreed: U.S. national security would be
enhanced if we provided Ukraine with aid.
7.Was the long delay in assistance tied to Ukrainian
unwillingness to get involved in U.S. politics? Sondland was “absolutely
convinced” it was. And that made for a second quid pro quo.
So, what scraps of cloth did GOP members of the House
Intelligence Committee dig out of the flaming bag of shit Sondland had dumped
on the White House doorstep? They homed in on the idea that Sondland had
never heard President Trump demand a quid pro quo. It might walk like a
quid pro quo, and quack like a quid pro quo, and have feathers and webbed feet.
This was a moose.
On September 9, for example, Sondland talked to Trump on the
phone. At that time, as Sondland testified, Trump said there was “no quid pro
quo.” Chairman Schiff pointed out that by then the White House was aware an
investigation was coming. So, the duck was covering its tail.
Ranking Member Nunes insisted the duck was no duck and in
fact, the whistleblower was the elephant in the room and unless we heard from
the original whistleblower, the duck could not be a duck.
Rep. Elise Stefanik agreed. The duck was a cow.
It would have been simple to ask: What had President Trump
done right, since President Zelensky took office?
The blogger
By the time Sondland finished testifying, a fair-minded
observer might have thought that President Trump was doomed. In fact, even a
Fox News story on Sondland’s testimony began with these lines:
The Donald Trump mega-donor who
was awarded with an ambassadorship stepped into the impeachment spotlight
Wednesday and said the president basically did what Democrats are accusing
him of doing.
Gordon Sondland, who had already
changed his testimony once, delivered a torrent of words, but none more
important than these: “Was there a quid pro quo?...The answer is yes.”
Unfortunately, there was no accounting for how low Republican
lawmakers were willing to crouch.
In all the testimony provided so far, and after all the
testimony that followed that day an into Thursday, it would have been simple to
ask. What had President Trump done right, since President Zelensky took office?
Had his actions bolstered a U.S. ally?
Had his decision to delay aid delivered a signal to the
Russians that they should not push their aggression?
Had the delay in military aid bolstered Ukrainian or U.S.
national security?
And were Trump’s motives in demanding the investigation pure
and in the interests of the United States and not just his own?
The answer to those questions would be: Nothing. No. No. No.
And, hell no.
*
WEDNESDAY afternoon two more witnesses testified—and Ranking
Member Nunes kept howling that these witnesses were no good, and the only
witness he wanted to see was the whistleblower, whoever he or she was.
Again, the duck was there for Nunes to see; and he looked at
the duck and, by god, he said it was a panda! There were scraps of testimony Republican
lawmakers could find to add to their quilt. But the duck was quacking loudly,
as if to say, “QUACK, QUACK, QUACK, QUACK!!!!!”
Translated: “I’m a duck you damn fools.”
Laura Cooper, an official at the Department of Defense
offered explication on several key points. The DOD, she said, had certified in
May 2019 that Ukraine was complying with anti-corruption requirements
and military aid should be delivered. So that removed at least one important square
from the GOP Denial Quilt. (That would be the idea that Trump delayed aid
because he was worried about corruption.) Next, Cooper snatched away a second square.
She noted that the Ukrainians had contacted her office on July 25, once at 2:31
p.m., again at 4:25 p.m. At that early date, they were already wondering about
the delay on military aid—by some coincidence on the very day, when around 9
a.m., Trump had asked Mr. Zelensky to do him a favor.
She said her office was contacted again, during the week of
August 6-10, by Ukrainians wondering what the delay was about.
(Nunes and his gang of duck-deniers had been insisting there
could be no “quid pro quo” if the Ukrainians didn’t know the aid was being held
up.)
Cooper testified further, that no one in her office knew why
the aid was held, but that the order came from the White House, by way of Mick
Mulvaney. As already mentioned, Mulvaney had told reporters in no uncertain
terms on October 17, that it was okay to hold up the aid in return for a favor.
Or, you might say, Mulvaney had said, “Look, we all know it’s
a…
David Hale, the third-ranking official at the State
Department came to the defense of Ambassador Yovanovitch in his testimony. He described the smear campaign against her, led by Rudy Giuliani
and his weird assortment of pals—now, mostly indicted—as “wrong.” He said she “should
have been able to stay in [her] post and continue to do the outstanding work
that she was doing.”
Like Ms. Cooper, Hale said experts at State were surprised by
the hold on military and other aid to Ukraine.
Chairman Schiff walked Mr. Hale through this exchange:
“Would you agree, though, that it would be very unusual to
place a hold on military aid to leverage a foreign country to get them to
investigate a political opponent?”
“Yes,” said Hale.
“And I take it you would agree that that would be completely
inappropriate,” Schiff said.
“That would be inconsistent with the conduct of our foreign
policy in general,” Hale replied.
“And it’d be wrong, wouldn’t it?”
Hale was careful in all of his answers; and, so, he didn’t
shout right out: Jesus, yes, it’s a duck.”
But he did reply like a man who could tell a duck from a
donkey, “It’s certainly not what I would do.”
Cooper also pointed out that there would have been only two
legal ways for the Trump administration to withhold the aid—and both would
have required that Congress be notified.
Well, then, what scraps for their quilt could Republicans on
the committee pluck from this pile? Had either Hale or Cooper ever had direct
contact with the president and heard the duck, as it were, speak? Had they
heard from Trump’s mouth that aid was held up to pressure the Ukrainians into
doing what he asked—announce that an investigation into Joe Biden and son was
about to begin?
Nope, the two witnesses said. Rep. Jim Jordan started
shouting that the metaphorical quilt was complete.
Again, if you could squint hard enough, the pile of scraps
might look like a quilt. All you had to do was ignore the fact that several
other witnesses had said they had been told the aid was held up for that exact
reason. Sondland had said that morning that he had no doubt that was the
reason. Mick Mulvaney had admitted to reporters that aid was held up for that
reason.
“Get over it,” he said.
So Nunes and his cronies had 100 ducks in a row. Nunes said
he didn’t want to look at any ducks until he saw the whistleblower first. Rep.
Stefanik looked at the ducks and swore she was seeing aardvarks for sure. Rep.
Jordan shouted that he couldn’t see anything, not a duck or an aardvark or the
U.S. Constitution, either, because, honestly, he preferred to remain blind.
(I think Rep. Hurd’s position boiled down to this: Okay, it
walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. It has webbed feet and feathers and
a bill like a duck. Well, I don’t care. I guess I like ducks.)
*
THE END of any hope that Republicans would admit there were
ducks, came when Rep. Will Hurd spoke. Having listened to more than a dozen
witnesses, either in closed-door hearings or during public testimony, Hurd was the
one Republican on the House Intelligence Committee you thought might put
principle over party.
In his closing opportunity on Thursday, he began to speak in
such a way, that you thought he would. Summing up President Trump’s efforts to help,
or hurt, or put the President of Ukraine in a “public box,” as one witness put
it, Hurd, a former C.I.A. officer was blunt. “I disagree with this sort of
bungling foreign policy,” he said. He called Trump’s comments during the July
25 phone call—a call Trump has called “perfect”—“inappropriate,” “misguided
foreign policy,” and “not how the executive should handle such things.” You
hoped next he would note, “Any attempt to bring foreign interference into the
2020 election would be…”
Only, Hurd, backed down. “An impeachable offense should be
compelling, overwhelming, clear and unambiguous,” he said. “And it’s not
something to be rushed or taken lightly. I’ve not heard evidence proving the
president committed bribery or extortion.”
(That might have much to do with President Trump refusing to
let several subpoenaed witnesses testify.)
Hurd said next that he’d like to see Rudy Giuliani, Hunter
Biden and the whistleblower subpoenaed. Barring that, he wasn’t going to
vote to impeach.
Still, Hurd wanted to cling to the idea that he truly cared
about defending U.S. national security interests. “I also reject the notion
that holding this view [not to impeach] means supporting all the foreign policy
choices we have been hearing over the past few weeks,” Hurd said. “I hope we
won’t let this very partisan process keep us from agreeing on how a free and
prosperous Ukraine is important to the security of the Ukrainian people, the
United States and the rest of the world.”
But that was exactly what Republican were willing to forget. Screw
the Ukrainians, it that’s what Trump wanted.
And if U.S. national security was endangered?
So what?
“Keep fighting tough, Republicans, you are dealing with human
scum…”
President Donald J. Trump
Yet, almost at the same moment Hurd was speaking, a president
with no regard for the founding principles on which this nation stands, was
attacking another witness, the third time he had done so in two weeks. This time
his target was David Holmes.
But the best example of Trump at his worst, came when
he tweeted this:
Corrupt
politician Adam Schiff’s lies are growing by the day. Keep fighting tough,
Republicans, you are dealing with human scum who have taken Due Process and all
of the Republican Party’s rights away from us during the most unfair hearings
in American History......
Trump, then, with his fanatical attacks on political foes,
labeling them as “treasonous,” “lowlifes,” and now simply as , “human scum,”
would play the role of Hitler, if he could.
The Nazi dictator also described political foes as “scum.”
*
THURSDAY DAWNED, with two additional witnesses, David Holmes
and Dr. Fiona Hill headed up to Capitol Hill.
This would be the last chance for any of the Republicans on
the House Intelligence Committee to see the duck—but with the lone hope that
Rep. Hurd was not blind—no one expected most of the GOP members to recognize
that, yes, this was a duck:
Once testimony began, Mr. Holmes made it clear that he had
seen at least one duck and Dr. Hill testified about seeing ducks all over the
Trump administration pond. Holmes, like most witnesses, was concise in all his
answers. Dr. Hill went into detail, describing ducks in all their parts and
habits, much to the chagrin of Nunes and his crew. Republicans no doubt prayed the
floor of the hearing room would open up, as in an earthquake, and swallow the
good doctor whole.
At one point, Republican counsel, Stephen Castor probed for explanation
of Dr. Hill’s differences with Ambassador Sondland. He clearly hoped to plant another
seed of doubt. If Hill and Sondland couldn’t agree on the proper path to follow,
who was to say Trump hadn’t been right all along!
Castor quickly regretted inquiring. Dr. Hill admitted having
“testy” contacts with Ambassador Sondland. She said at one point she had asked,
“Who put you in charge of Ukraine?” She said she might have been rude.
“That’s when he told me, ‘the president,’ which shut me up.”
In another meeting, she wanted to know why Sondland wasn’t keeping the NSC
better informed. He replied, “But I’m briefing the president, I’m briefing Chief
of Staff Mulvaney, I’m briefing Secretary Pompeo, and I’ve talked to Ambassador
Bolton. Who else do I have to deal with?”
He was
running a “political errand” for President Trump.
Now she explained, she had realized something just the day before, in watching Sondland’s
testimony.
And the point is, we have a robust
interagency process that deals with Ukraine. ... It struck me yesterday when
you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these
emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was
absolutely right. Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand.
And we were being involved in national security [and] foreign policy. And those
two things had just diverged.
So he was correct, and I had not put my
finger on that at the moment. But I was irritated with him and angry with him
that he wasn’t fully coordinating. I did say to him, ‘Ambassador Sondland,
Gordon, I fear this is all going to blow up.’ And here we are.
Now she understood why his actions regarding Ukraine had been
so frustrating, and why he seemed to be working at cross purposes with what the
National Security Council was trying to achieve.
He was running a “political errand” for President Trump.
She and National Security Adviser Bolton, and others were
working to implement official U.S. foreign policy. “His [Sondland’s] feeling
was that the National Security Council was trying to block him,” Dr. Hill said.
What the NSC was really trying to do was “block us [that is the U.S. national
security apparatus] from straying into domestic or personal politics.
But Ambassador Sondland is not
wrong that he had been given a different remit than we had been. And then it
was at that moment that I realized that those things had diverged, and I
realized that I was not being fair to Ambassador Sondland because he was
carrying out something that he thought that he was instructed to carry out, and
we were doing something that is perhaps more important—but it was not in the
same channel.
“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and
propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
Dr. Hill
During her hours at the witness table Dr. Hill never gave
ground under Republican probing. She admitted she’d been afraid at times in her
life. She had an interview at Harvard, and she was so nervous beforehand she walked
into a broom closet. She had no desire to testify in public; but it was her
duty.
Like Lt. Col. Vindman, she was an immigrant, and deeply proud
of her adopted country. Her father was a coal miner in England, but she rose
from a humble background, earned a PhD. in Russian history, co-authored a book
on Putin, and went to work at NSC, first under General H.R. McMaster, later
under Bolton.
In fact, at one point, Dr. Hill warned GOP lawmakers,
Some of you on this committee
appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a
campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason,
Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated
by the Russian security services themselves. The unfortunate truth is that
Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic
institutions in 2016.
Hill was both impressive and blunt in her
warnings. Do not become “useful idiots,” she told lawmakers, a term the
Russians use for useful tools who serve their interests, unwittingly, in
foreign lands.
“Russia’s security services and their proxies
have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election,” she said.
“We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation,
I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods
that so clearly advance Russian interests.”
Ranking Member Nunes promptly validated Dr.
Hill’s concern, arguing that it was “entirely possible for two separate nations
[he meant Russia and Ukraine] to engage in election meddling at the same time,
and Republicans believe we should take meddling seriously by all foreign
countries.”
It was almost as if the duck had just landed on the
dais in front of him and taken a powerful dump. And Nunes still chose to ignore
it.
She said it seemed to be her “duty” to testify;
after Turner and Ratcliffe attacked her and then left…she rebuked them.
“Our nation is being torn apart,” Dr. Hill continued. “Truth is questioned. Our highly professional
and expert career foreign service is being undermined.”
At that point, she might as well have started quacking loudly
every time a Republican bothered to question her. The duck was a fucking duck. Nunes
and his crew of Trump toadies didn’t care.
“We must not let domestic politics stop us from defending
ourselves against the foreign powers who truly wish us harm,” she concluded.
QUACK.
Holmes had his turn next. He was not “engaged in U.S.
politics in any way,” he pointed out. “I am an apolitical foreign policy
professional, and my job is to focus on the politics of the country in which I
serve so that we can better understand the local landscape and better
advance U.S. national interests there.” Holmes promised, in his testimony,
that he would do his best to “stay clear of Washington politics.”
Still, what the heck was Rudy doing, you sensed he wanted to
say. At one point, as U.S. officials prepared to attend the Zelensky inauguration,
Holmes said everyone “wondered aloud about why Mr. Giuliani was so active in
the media with respect to Ukraine.” His recollection was that Ambassador
Sondland stated, “‘Damn it, Rudy. Every time Rudy gets involved he goes and
f---s everything up.’”
Was the duck really a duck? “My clear impression was that the
security assistance hold was likely intended by the president either as an
expression of dissatisfaction that the Ukrainians had not yet agreed to the
Burisma/Biden investigation,” Holmes said, “or as an effort to increase the pressure
on them to do so.” He said learned from top diplomat Bill Taylor on September 8
that the ‘Three Amigos’ were insisting Zelensky give an interview to CNN to
announce investigations. Holmes said he was “shocked the requirement was so
specific and concrete.” “This was a demand that President Zelensky personally
commit, on a cable news channel, to a specific investigation of President Trump’s
political rival,” he continued.
There was the quid pro quo. Holmes could see it, plain as the
orange toner Trump slathers on his sagging jowls.
Despite recent denials by Zelensky and other Ukrainian
leaders—who still desire most to stay out of the middle of U.S. politics—they
could see the duck, themselves. They had already committed to an interview on
CNN, to talk about the duck, when the hold on military aid was lifted by a
White House under duress. “Although we knew the hold was lifted,” Holmes
explained, “we were still concerned that President Zelensky had committed, in
exchange for the lifting, to give the requested CNN interview. We had several
indications that the interview would occur.”
Trump was going to get exactly what he wanted.
On September 13, Holmes testified, he and Taylor ran into a
top aide to Zelensky, Andrey Yermak, coming out of a meeting with Zelensky.
Ambassador Taylor again stressed
the importance of staying out of U.S. politics and said he hoped no
interview was planned. Mr. Yermak did not answer, but shrugged in
resignation as if to indicate they had no choice. In short, everyone thought
there was going to be an interview, and that the Ukrainians believed they had
to do it. The interview ultimately did not occur.
The duck was quacking again—and Nunes had to stick his
fingers in his ears to ignore the racket.
Jordan started yelling again. If the Ukrainians got the
aid—just because Trump caved in under duress—then, no harm, no fowl. Plus, had
Holmes ever heard the president say there was a quid pro quo.
“No,” Holmes admitted.
Jordan looked for someone to high-five, even though his line
of defense was ridiculous. A man plotting murder does not announce to strangers,
“Hey, I’m going to have my wife murdered, in case you were wondering.”
And if he learns that the police have incriminating text
messages, in which he offers a hit man $25,000, but now aborts payment, this
does not prove he was innocent of criminal intent.
*
SO, HOW ARE TRUMP and his
supporters handling the impeachment pressure? The president’s not doing very
well. But Televangelist Rick Wiles is even more upset than the Orange Chosen One. Having “studied” all the evidence
and weighed the Constitutional issues with care, Wiles announces that the whole
impeachment inquiry is a…“Jew Coup,” thereby mixing ignorance with
anti-Semitism, a common problem with right-wing nuts of several types. (See,
also: 12/5/19.)
11/23-24/19: President Trump is all tuckered out from being president.
Other than tweeting obsessively about the impeachment inquiry, he spends a
quite weekend at the White House. To sum up all those tweets: Everything Trump
did, regarding Ukraine was perfect and fine and everyone else is crooked and
should go to jail or hell, or possibly both, in that order.
11/30/19: Former Republican congressman Charlie Dent tells CNN that former colleagues in the House of Representatives are
“absolutely disgusted and exhausted by the President’s behavior.”
“Moving from one corrupt act to another,” Dent said. “I mean
those types of head-exploding moments are just I think infuriating these
members and I think they’d like to step out but they just can’t because of
their base at the moment. I think a lot of members have to take a hard look at
this,” Dent continued. “They can be more concerned about their election, or
their legacies. And I would argue to many of them: your legacy is more
important than the next election.”
Based on what he has seen, Dent said he would probably vote
to impeach if he was still in the House. “I do think this rises to the level of
impeachment.”
December 1, 2019: Sen. John Kennedy appears on Meet
the Press, and tries to sell the Ukraine-did-it-too defense to viewers.
Known for folksy good humor, Kennedy makes the case that the Ukrainians helped Hillary Clinton in the
2016 election. That would mean President Trump had a perfect reason to demand
that Ukraine investigate—or they’d get no military aid.
Host
Chuck Todd points out that U.S. intelligence agencies briefed senators just
days before and told them the “Ukraine-interfered story” was bogus. Kennedy
says he wasn’t briefed. Then he gets tangled in the weeds. He’s talking about
some story in The Financial Times and another in The New York Times,
and how a Ukrainian court ruled that Ukrainian officials had meddled in our
election.
Sure,
he admits, “Russia was very aggressive and they’re
much more sophisticated. But the fact that Russia was so aggressive does not
exclude the fact that President Poroshenko actively worked for Secretary
Clinton.”
“Come on!” Todd responds
incredulously.
“You realize, the only other person selling this argument outside
the United States is this man, Vladimir Putin,” the host continues. A picture
of the Russian autocrat appears on the screen. “You’ve done exactly what the
Russian operation is trying to get American politicians to do,” he tells Sen.
Kennedy. “Are you at all concerned that you have been duped?”
See: Dr. Fiona Hill warning about “useful idiots,” above.
Todd points out that what Poroshenko did was criticize
Candidate Trump for his stance on Crimea. That was after Candidate Trump
said if he were elected, he’d remove the economic sanctions slapped on Russia
by the Obama administration when they invaded Ukrainian soil.
Kennedy gets upset about the poor treatment afforded President
Trump by House Democrats and says the impeachment inquiry is “as rigged as a
carnival ring toss and we both know it.”
He does not try to explain why military aid was held up—nor
address the question of how that might have benefited U.S. security.
Postscript: What Edward Luce,
editor of TheFinancial Times can’t figure out, is which article
the senator was talking about. Monday morning, he appears on Joe Scarborough’s show on MSNBC, and says,
I’ve been wracking my brain, as have
colleagues, as to which Financial Times reporting Sen. Kennedy is
referring to in support of this really fanciful contention that Ukraine meddled
in the elections and I can’t find it. I don’t know whether he did the same with
the Washington Examiner and The Economist and so forth. But it
seems like he just plucked those newspaper names out of thin air.
It is a corrupt country, but the idea
that Ukraine intervened in the U.S. election specifically is not something Sen.
Kennedy can point to The Financial Times as supporting.
I’m not too aware of any credible reporting on that subject. I think Fiona Hill
was absolutely right when she said this is a conspiracy theory, an
alternative reality that was cooked up in the Kremlin, and that, from farm to
fork, is now coming out of Sen. Kennedy’s mouth.
12/2/19: President Zelensky talks to reporters from several European news outlets, as
well as Time magazine. Once again, he does his best to thread the
impeachment needle. “Look, I never talked to the president from the position of
a quid pro quo. That’s not my thing,” he says.
(If
he admitted he had, it would be a tremendous sign of weakness to his own
people.)
At
the White House, wild partying results, as the president throws official papers
in the air and dances round the Oval Office with lovely Kellyanne Conway in his
embrace. Trump finally settles and tweets the good news. He has been totally
exonerated, just like he was by the Mueller Report! The President of Ukraine,
he taps on his iPhone, “just again announced that President Trump has done nothing
wrong with respect to Ukraine and our interactions or calls.”
Shortly
after, he waddles out to the White House lawn to inform reporters it’s “case
over” for impeachment!
Zelensky,
he insists, has just told the world that Donald J. Trump “did absolutely
nothing wrong.”
Of
course, that’s not what the Ukrainian leader said. What he did say was this: “I
don’t want us to look like beggars. But you have to understand. We’re at war.
If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us.
I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo. It just goes
without saying.”
It
“goes without saying.” You can’t block military aid until you get the
investigation of Hunter and Joe Biden you want.
Yet,
that’s why the aid was blocked.
So,
Trump holds the needle and Zelensky has to handle the thread. “I would never
want Ukraine to be a piece on the map, on the chess board of big global
players, so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as part of
some bargain,” Zelensky continued. He remains thankful for the aid Kyiv has
received from the United States. “I would really want—and we feel this, it’s
true—for them to help us, to understand us, to see that we are a player in our
own right, that they cannot make deals about us with anyone behind our backs.”
*
ON
THE HOME FRONT, White House lawyers announce that neither they nor any other
Trump aides will be participating in the next step in the impeachment inquiry.
When experts on impeachment address the House Judiciary Committee next week,
Trump’s defenders will pass on taking a role.
Several
legal experts note, however, that if Trump is officially impeached, whether or
not he is removed from office, the U.S. Constitution makes him “unpardonable.”
If he were to be impeached on grounds of bribery, perjury or obstruction of
justice, for instance, the Constitution is clear. Article II, Section 2, gives a president the power to pardon
anyone who has been convicted of offenses against the United States, with
one exception: “In Cases of Impeachment.” So, Trump definitely could not
pardon himself if he were to be impeached.
We just have to hope that the federal courts
never uphold his position that he can pardon himself in all other matters.
