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.
____________________
“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.”
Ambassador Bill
Taylor
____________________
Clearly feeling the pressure, Trump explodes in a series of fiery tweets. Sounding like Vladimir Putin, but not in such good shape, the orange doughball 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 crazy man 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 the 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.
*
ABC ALMOST immediately reports that several sources have confirmed the report. Trump did ask Barr.
CBS confirms the story next. “There is no evidence of Barr denying the story,” CBS points out.
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 viewers.
*
“Thank you to Tim Morrison for your honesty.”
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 full opening statement is out. Morrison was one of the National Security Council officials who sat in on the July 25 call at the center of the impeachment inquiry.
He did say during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, “I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed.”
The president heard that sentence, which Republicans leaked
as soon as Morrison spoke it, and leaped on it like a lion dragging a baby
zebra down by its neck. “Thank you to Tim Morrison for your honesty,” he
tweeted on October 31.
Now we know Morrison 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. And, what about the testimony of Ambassador Taylor? Taylor was clear in saying that the fix – the quid pro quo – 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 National Security Council, Dr. Fiona Hill warned him that Ambassador Gordon Sondland “and President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, were trying to get President Zelensky to reopen Ukrainian investigations into Burisma.” Morrison says he had to Google “Burisma,” and learned that “it was a Ukrainian energy company and that Hunter Biden was on its board. I also did not understand,” he said, “why Ambassador [to the European Union] Sondland would be involved in Ukraine policy, often without the involvement of our duly-appointed Chief of Mission, Ambassador Bill Taylor.”
In other words (and “thank you for your honesty”), even Mr.
Morrison smelled something noxious was brewing.
Morrison, like Taylor, made this fundamental point. No military aid was coming until the Ukrainians committed to one special investigation, involving Burisma, a company Hunter Biden used to advise.
Still, 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 Morrison with a tranquilizer dart at that moment. 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 [who stepped down in mid-July].” In other words, he wouldn’t have known about the second quid pro quo till August, himself. He also said he wasn’t as worried about the call as others who listened in, because (at the time) he was confident 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.”
Morrison said that he had “no reason to believe the Ukrainians
had any knowledge” of the holdup of military aide until August 28.
He and Ambassador Taylor, he said, “had no reason to believe that that release of military aid might be conditioned on a public statement [emphasis added throughout, unless otherwise noted] 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. But 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.”
There’s the main point: Holding up military assistance to our
Ukrainian allies endangered U.S. national security.
*
“Full of lies and incorrect information.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S defenses suffer a pair of devastating hits later the same day when transcripts of Ambassador Bill Taylor’s and top State Department official George Kent’s testimonies, 324 pages and 355 pages in length, are released. Kent lambasts Rudy 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 Marie Yovanovitch’s anti-corruption efforts.
Kent was telling lawmakers that Rudy wanted to ditch a diplomat who was fighting corruption. He wasn’t working to fight corruption, as Trump and his lackeys 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.”
As USA Today explained, Kent told lawmakers that Giuliani and his shady friends were pushing four story lines. First, they were trying to sell the idea that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, not Russia. Second, was the line that Ukrainians and people at the U.S. embassy had an “animus” toward Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair. (That’s right, the guy currently ensconced in a federal prison.) A third line held that it was Vice President Biden’s pressure to fire Ukraine’s top prosecutor in 2015 that saved his son, Hunter, and Burisma, from investigation. Finally, George Soros was mixed up in the mess and working against Mr. Trump.
(Cue the anti-Semitism, where Mr. Soros is
concerned.)
Kent, however, 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 in Ukraine in 2015 – apparently the only sentence in more than 300 pages of testimony that any Republican lawmakers heard.
Kent was perfectly clear.
He testified that Trump wanted “nothing less than President Zelensky to go to microphone and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton.”
Quid
fucking pro quo.
*
THE PRESIDENT, as all his loyal fans know, has been swearing that there was no quid pro quo. He never asked the Ukrainians to investigate the Biden family if they wanted a meeting at the White House.
Nor did he ever make it clear, nor Rudy, either, that if Ukraine expected military aid, they would have to agree to investigate Hunter and Joe. Who could imagine President Trump would stoop so low!
When we read the transcript of the testimony of Ambassador Taylor, we know who would imagine.
Ambassador Taylor, for sure.
Assuming you’re retired and have hours of free time (as this blogger is and does), it’s interesting to dive into the records. One notices, first, that GOP lawmakers involved in the questioning, only want to complain. Chairman Schiff is mean to be holding the hearings behind closed doors. How will the public ever learn what witnesses have to say? At one point, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas declares, “This whole hearing is out of order.”
Rep. Val Demings, a Maryland Democrat retorts, “You really don’t want to hear from this witness, do you?”
Roy insists he does. He says he wants every member of Congress to hear the witness and that he wants the American people to hear too. Now he should be content, since all one needs do is go to the link provided here, and plow through all 324 pages of Taylor’s testimony. And since few people are going to do that plowing – including Sen. Lindsey Graham – here’s a summary.
First, Taylor lays out his background: West Point graduate,
infantry officer in Vietnam. Bronze Star for valor. He tells lawmakers he has
had a “non-partisan,” fifty-year career in government. As a diplomat he did
stints in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and a previous tour in Ukraine. He had, he
explains, an abiding interest in Ukrainian affairs. “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 Rep. Devin Nunes, this was Taylor making clear the Ukrainians were being asked to interfere in a U.S. political campaign.
That would be a future campaign.
As in 2020.
That is, a QUID PRO QUO.
Soon after arriving in Ukraine, Taylor began sniffing out 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.
(BLOGGER’S NOTE: 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.)
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 had 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 direct knowledge there, and 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 an 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 in aid 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 told him that the hold on military aid 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 Advisor Bolton flew to Kiev on August 27. Taylor spoke with him about his concerns, and 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 it clear he might resign. By this time, we can safely assume, Trump also knew diplomats and intelligence experts were on to his game.
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 assistance.
In his sworn testimony, Taylor also said he spoke with Tim Morrison, a member of the National Security Council. Morrison “went on to describe a conversation Ambassador Sondland had with Mr. Yermak at Warsaw. Ambassador Sondland told Mr. Yermak that the security assistance money would not come until President Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.
“President Trump wanted President Zelensky in a box.”
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.
During that phone call,
Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants
President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and
alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Ambassador Sondland also 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. He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky in a box by making public statement about ordering such investigations.
“The Russians love it. And I quit.”
On September 5, Taylor hosted two U.S. senators on a visit to Kiev (alternate spelling of the Ukrainian capital city name). During this trip Sen. Ron Johnson and Sen. Chris Murphy met with Zelensky. “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 2015 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. Except, if 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 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.”
The quid and the quo had been discovered.
As we have mentioned before, 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 doubts. “I
think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political
campaign,” he told Sondland and Volker the next day.
Soon after, as the story spread in the free press, the Trump
administration relented. The military aid was unfrozen. The quid and the quo had
been discovered. The plan to get the Ukrainians to interfere in the coming election
was aborted.
 |
Ukraine will finally get the military assistance. |
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