In our own ways, Nancy and I both covered the subject of the president’s crumbling excuses yesterday. It was an obvious take to explain why 30 House Republicans stormed a secure room in the Capitol to disrupt the testimony of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Everywhere you care to look, people are repeating the old saw about lawyers pounding the table when both the facts and the law are against them, and the congressional sit-in on Wednesday fit the bill. I suppose the stunt energized the president’s defenders, but daily tactics don’t add up to a long-term strategy.
Some time after 2 p.m., Mr. [House Minority Whip, Steve] Scalise and several of his fellow protesters re-emerged to complain to the assembled media about the “Soviet-style tactics” of the inquiry.
The entire spectacle was a circus — which was the point. This was a publicity stunt aimed at delegitimizing the impeachment investigation that Mr. Trump and his defenders have portrayed as a partisan inquisition. If a few rules and national security precautions got violated along the way, so be it.
The biggest flaw with Trump’s strategy so far is that he’s been using messaging that has no staying power. At first, he focused on the anonymous CIA whistleblower and anybody who might have talked to him. But, almost immediately, the White House confirmed the substance of the whistleblower’s complaint by releasing a “transcript” of his call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. That rendered the source of the tip irrelevant, and subsequent testimony before Congress from direct witnesses has completely eliminated any need to hear anything more from the original source.
Trump next explained that he didn’t want to release money or arms to Ukraine until he was assured that they were going to do more to address corruption. This was supposedly the key reason why aid was held up. But there is now plenty of testimony that corruption was not the focus of negotiations with the Ukrainians, and on Wednesday reporting from the Washington Post destroyed Trump’s claim by demonstrating how he wanted to severely cut all the anti-corruption money in the budget for Ukraine.
Then there’s the news the New York Times broke on Wednesday that debunked Trump’s insistence that the Ukrainians couldn’t have been extorted over military aid because they did not know the aid was being withheld. The problem here is that they actually did know.
Numerous news outlets, including The Hill, are reporting that Republican senators are getting a little nervous watching this spectacle. As a result, they’re falling back on the supposed lack of transparency argument that animated the House Republicans’ sit-in.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said on Wednesday that it was difficult to draw “hard, fast conclusions” from a top U.S. diplomat’s closed-door testimony but that the “picture” from initial reports was “not a good one.”
“The picture coming out of it based on the reporting that we’ve seen is, yeah, I would say not a good one,” Thune told reporters when a reporter characterized William Taylor’s testimony as “troubling.”
“But I would say also that, again, until we have a process that allows for everybody to see this in full transparency, it’s pretty hard to draw any hard, fast conclusions,” Thune added.
But this argument, too, doesn’t have much of a future.
House Democrats are preparing to move their largely private impeachment inquiry onto a more public stage as soon as mid-November and are already grappling with how best to present the complex Ukraine saga to the American people…
…Among the witnesses Democrats hope to question in open session are the acting ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., and his predecessor, former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch…
…Another top priority for many Democrats is John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, who made known around the White House his visceral opposition to the campaign to pressure Zelensky, a campaign directed in part by Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.
Testimony from Bolton could be particularly devastating for the White House…
To review, among the defenses the White House and Republicans have erected, all are already in ruins or soon to be reduced to rubble.
- The whistleblower wasn’t a direct witness to anything.
- The call was mischaracterized.
- Aid was held up due to concerns about corruption.
- You can’t extort someone who doesn’t know they’re being extorted.
- The process isn’t fair because it’s being conducted behind closed doors.
Obviously the two options laid out were impossible for a mentally disabled egomaniac who cannot admit a mistake, however inconsequential. Plus, the shakedown was not a “mistake”, it was entirely intentional and seen by the Stable Genius as “smart”, like his tax fraud. So his defense is the shakedown was done for the “good of the country”, which is the same schtick he’s now playing with the Kurdish Betrayal.
Unfortunately, Repub senators are not constrained by Trumper’s daily lies and bad faith spin and can independently find that the shakedown occurred, but does not merit removal. The difficulty for some of them is they voted to remove Clinton over civil perjury involving a consensual blowjob. But most of them don’t have that “precedent” to deal with, and hypocrisy is one of the ten commandments of “conservatism” in any event. The smart Repubs were immediately declaring Trumper’s shakedown was not worthy of removal, and that will be their mantra during the trial.
Moscow Mitch has already declared the call “innocent”. And what else can Repubs say? They have to say something, and as you detail, they can’t use any of the shitbrain nonsense that the criminal “conservative” imbecile(s) in the WH are dishing out for cultist and Foxist delectation. That the entire debacle will show the RICO-publican party couldn’t care less about national security (or Ukrainian security) means nothing to them or their cultists. And as for the fact that the whole affair has Putin’s fingerprints all over it (as Pelosi told Der Trumper to his face), well, we don’t call him Moscow Mitch for nothing!
Thing is, what he did amounted to bribery and that’s right there in the Constitution. Arguably, a conspiracy to defraud the US through the utilization of state power for your own personal gains and the gains of foreign nation’s who are lining your pockets…seems pretty treasonous too. I mean, in the carrying out of the Turkey part of the scheme (which it looks like was a bunch of kabuki between Turkey and Russia), Turkish air strikes were carried out and fired upon our army.
He checks all the boxes as a psychopath so why are we surprised? He would let Russia have Ukraine for his hotel in Moscow. Maybe he already has.
Good point–by (needlessly) injecting a “quid pro quo” concept into the mix, Der Trumper and his Repubs effectively turned his (campaign finance) shakedown into a bribery offense–and now even that has been proven!
One thing bothers me about this whole affair. Is there no one in Europe who will step and help Ukraine? There seems no way Ukraine can stop Putin without the arms.
Will there be more to the story? Vanity Fair had an interview with Scaramucci where he suggested that Trump got some kind of personal benefit from Turkey in exchange for selling out the Kurds. No evidence, so it is probably BS. But…it sure sounds like something Trump would do. He does have business connections to Turkey.
A problem with getting Rs to convict on the Ukraine stuff is that, ultimately, they approve of Trump’s goal (bringing down Biden). But they don’t approve of what Trump did to the Kurds. So if there is some kind of corrupt bargain there, they really might vote to convict.
Again, Nixon and Watergate are useful historical precedents. One of the things that most shocked many of Nixon’s strongest defenders was that he’d been guilty all along. He just lied to them, and they believed him.
There’s a story on Politico today about the frustration of Congressional Republicans regarding the lack of a good strategy coming from the White House for defending Trump.
The proverbial elephant in the room that never gets mentioned is that Trump is guilty. Which, in the face of an increasingly aggressive investigation by House Democrats (and numerous court cases), is what makes a successful defense strategy harder and harder to carry off.
I have to say I doubt that the overwhelming majority of elected Repubs care one whit whether Der Trumper is guilty. And since all he does is lie, even they can’t put too much stock in his “word”, unless all they do is engage in wishful thinking.
But more importantly, the evidence already publicly available makes crystal clear Trumper’s guilt–assuming one is not a confirmed cultist and thinks abuse of office is indeed an impeachable offense!
The best defense for Trump and the most worrying one to me is the one Mulvaney basically used:
Yeah he did it, so what? Get over it!
It’s the best defense he has because in the US we have today, it could work with enough pols and people to get the R’s through this.
It’s a horrible worry because if that argument is accepted as the new normal it demolishes the last vestiges of the balance of powers, and makes Trump a king in all but title.