11/6/19: At a
rally in Kentucky, standing beside “Fat Nixon,” 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.
____________________
“Have
you no sense of decency? At long last, have you no sense of decency?”
Joseph Welch, replying to Sen. Joseph McCarthy
____________________
For once, this threat proves too much even for some of Sen.
Paul’s GOP colleagues. A lawless president has trampled a supine Republican
Party for years. Perhaps we are 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. Sen. Joe McCarthy was attacking
the reputation of a young lawyer on Welch’s staff, without producing any
evidence.
“Until this moment, Senator,” Welch said with icy calm, “I
think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy dared
continue, Welch interrupted angrily. “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?”
In
fact, like President Trump, McCarthy did not. From that moment forward,
McCarthy went into decline.
 |
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, left, with aid Roy Cohn.
(Ironically, Cohn would later be a confidante of Donald J. Trump.) |
Now
a few Republicans dared, if not to stand tall, at least not to crawl and
crouch. “We should follow the law,” Sen. Lamar Alexander said. “And I believe
the law protects whistleblowers.”
“The
whistleblower statute is there for a reason,” Sen. John Thune agreed. “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,
concurred. “All I can say is I expect whistleblowers to
be protected according to what the law gives them,” Grassley explained.
But Sen. Rand Paul stood
by his threat to name names; and Sen. Lindsey Graham backed his craven play.
Cowardice runs thick in most
Republican veins.
*
SEN. JOHN CORNYN 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,” he says. “People can read the transcript themselves.”
Yes,
they can! People are free to read the original nine-page whistleblower complaint.
It won’t even take long.
Or
they can dive into the transcripts documenting the testimony of career
diplomats and military men, which are being released daily. Even a cursory
reading shows that the whistleblower complaint has been validated on nearly
every point. As Sen. 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 truth. On Twitter,
Rep. Jim Jordan does just that. He selects one transcript, and 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.
 |
Interesting how Rep. Jordan wants to ignore hundreds of pages of transcripts,
save for two words: "no linkage." |
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. If you enjoyed that you
could wade through 360 pages of testimony provided by Ambassador Volker,
not simply pluck out two random words.
Or you could delve into the 379 pages served up for lawmakers by Ambassador
Gordon Sondland. That would include the four pages of amended testimony
Sondland added after his memory was jogged by testimony from Ambassador Bill
Taylor and National Security Council official Tim Morrison, and, perhaps, motivated
by fear he might have perjured himself.
*
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
this testimony, because,
lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala…
He doesn’t care what any of 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 President Trump at least a fig leaf of cover.
Now to remove that fig leaf and…
Gag.
“Security
aid to Ukraine was in our vital national interest.”
As early as May 23, 2019, Sondland originally said, he
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. Quid.
Rudy and his boss get an anti-corruption statement that they
hope will damage Joe Biden.
Quo.
Now, in his amended testimony, Sondland has 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 amended 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. As I said in my [original] prepared
testimony, security aid to Ukraine was in our vital national interest
and should not have been delayed for any reason.”
Sondland’s amended testimony offers depth to our
understanding of what was happening behind the scenes. At the conclusion of the
meeting in Warsaw, he told lawmakers, “President Zelensky had raised the issue
of suspension of U.S. aid to Ukraine directly with Vice President Pence.” In
fact, it had been the first matter Zelensky brought up, to start the meeting.
Afterwards, Sondland spoke briefly with Andrey Yermak, a top adviser to Zelensky. 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 [emphasis added].”
Soon after, he learned that “the public statement would need
to come directly from President Zelensky himself.”
Military aid. Quid.
Zelensky gives Trump a statement he badly wanted.
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,
Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
NOT-SO-FUN-FACT: Ambassador Sondland is
the second person to testify, after Bill Taylor, that the Department of State
has refused to let him review his own documents to prepare for testimony
in front of Congress.
