Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Hey, Ukraine, If You're Listening: Trump Gets the Impeachment He Deserves!

THE IMPEACHMENT CASE
(Part One)

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.




*

6/17/17The 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.



*

5/23/18Bloomberg 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 links between 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, including hiding $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.


Hey, a million dollars plus!

  

Patten also formed a company with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence agent (naturally).

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 him there 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 day after 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.
14. You can look it up.



“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:


  
*

IN DECIDING who you believe, regarding Ukraine, keep what happened with Russia in view. At least a dozen Trump aides and family members admitted in the face of legal duress that they did meet with Russians during the 2016 campaign. Those individuals include Michael Caputo, Michael Cohen, General Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, George Nader, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Felix Sater, Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr.


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 president declined 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 President Zelensky 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 claimed that 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 second act 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 argument with 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 unanimously in 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.

Chairman Schiff added 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.

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 Times file a story anyway and the “scum” at Fox News decide to 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 whistleblower followed the rules and acted in 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 apologizing for 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 The Atlantic. “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 allegations could 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 warned that 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 quote when 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 mentioned Joe 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 complaint they 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 misquoted Trump’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 retreats to 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 men grasped 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.
The Blogger

*

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 considered what 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 said the 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 the most 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. Newsweek reported 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.

In his fourth paragraph he clanged the first bell.

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 campaign from 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.

That is: the quid pro quo.



*

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.”

Or as Sen. Lindsey Graham might say,

Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

    


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.

CBS confirms the story next.

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 to ditch 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 placed U.S. national security at risk for 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.

Possible charges include campaign finance violations and failure to register as a lobbyist for a foreign government. Rudy’s “work alongside the president” had “raised counterintelligence concerns.” Or: 2016, déjà vu.



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.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist. I hate that cliché. In this case, it wouldn’t take a pig farmer, or a pig, and no offense to either, to grasp the “political benefits” that would accrue for Trump.

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.

(See, again: July 25 call memorandum, in necessary.)




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.)

Here’s the capsule version of what Sondland really said:

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 The Financial 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.



PART TWO FOLLOWS….

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