I won the race for governor by less than 30,000 votes. This move pushed by Republicans to remove 200,000 Wisconsinites from the voter rolls is just another attempt at overriding the will of the people and stifling the democratic process. https://t.co/SQDjdsQ6HW
— Tony Evers (@Tony4WI) December 13, 2019
Category Archives: Democracy
Congressional leaders differ on Constitutional responsibility and the conduct of the President
“I think this President is a coward when it comes to helping kids who are afraid of gun violence. I think he is cruel when he doesn’t deal with helping our Dreamers, of which we are very proud. I think he is in denial about the climate crisis. However, that’s about the election. This is about the election. Take it up in the election.
This is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the President’s violation of his oath of office. And as a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is a heart full of love and always pray for the President. And I still pray for the President. I pray for the President all the time. So don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.” – Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House
“We’ll listen to the opening arguments by the House prosecutors. We’ll listen to the President’s lawyers’ response. And then we’ll have to make a decision about the way forward. And everything I do during this I’m coordinating with White House counsel. There will be no difference between the President’s position and our position as to how to handle this – to the extent that we can. We don’t have the kind of ball control on this that a typical issue, for example, comes over from the House, if I don’t like it, we don’t take it up.
We have no choice but to take it up, but we’ll be working through this process, hopefully in a fairly short period of time, in total coordination with the White House counsel’s office and the people who are representing the president in the well of the Senate.” – Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader
Quote of the day on the state of the nation
“The forces aligned for partisanship and against truth are stronger than ever.” – Adam Cohen, in a review of Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover by Ruth Marcus.
Image (of four men dedicated to partisanship and against truth) by Barry Blitt (“The Shining”) for the New Yorker.
George Will, trolling Elizabeth Warren, asks the wrong question about billionaires
“Warren, whose profile in courage is to foment hostility toward a small minority (“billionaires”), should try an experiment — not at her rallies of the resentful, but with an audience of representative Americans. Ask how many in the audience own an Apple product? The overwhelming majority will raise their hands. Then ask: How many resent the fact that Steve Jobs, Apple’s innovator, died a billionaire? Few hands will be raised.” — George Will, “Elizabeth Warren is progressivissm’s Donald Trump”
He adds this for good measure:
Warren’s dependence on a wealth tax announces progressivism’s failure of nerve, its unwillingness to require anyone other than a tiny crumb of society’s upper crust to pay significantly for the cornucopia of benefits that she clearly thinks everyone wants — but only if someone else pays for them.
On the same morning Will’s wisdom about taxation, billionaires, and Americans with iPhones and other Apple merchandise appeared, a SurveyMonkey poll in the New York Times revealed the measure of popular support for Senator Warren’s proposed two percent tax on individual wealth above $50 million.
Sixty-three percent of Americans support this wealth tax; 77% of Democrats; 55% of Independents; and 57% of Republicans.
That’s right, even a clear majority of Republicans are in favor of imposing a 2 percent tax on this “tiny crumb of society’s upper crust.”
The survey found a single group that opposes this plan: College-educated Republican men, only 41.5% of whom endorse the proposed wealth tax.
Will’s reference to the popularity of stuff made by Apple is confirmed by the link he offers, which reports, “Sixty-four percent of Americans now own an apple product,” — virtually the same percentage that support a 2-cents on the dollar tax on assets over $50 million.
While George Will is focused on hostility and resentment and hand-wringing over the oppressed minority of the rich, Americans — including those of us (like Elizabeth Warren) with ample appreciation for the benefits of a competitive market economy — believe in the fairness of progressive taxation, just as the U.S. had back in the 1950s and 1960s, when everyone received a more equitable share of the nation’s wealth.
Five Takeaways following the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings
I. Putin’s authorship of the “Russia hoax.” II. Distinguishing a national security foreign policy channel and a channel dedicated to a domestic political errand. III. Closing statements from Ranking Member Nunes and Chairman Schiff. IV. What pushed Schiff to impeachment. V. Will Hurd can’t justify impeachment, as Justin Amash tries to nudge him in that direction.
I. In her opening statement before the committee, Fiona Hill, former Deputy Assistant to the President Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs, noted with dismay that Republicans on the committee, in denying Russian interference in the 2016 election, were fulfilling Vladimir Putin’s stratagem to weaken our country:
“Based on questions and statements I have heard, 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. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified.
The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today. Our nation is being torn apart. Truth is questioned. Our highly professional and expert career foreign service is being undermined.
U.S. support for Ukraine—which continues to face armed Russian aggression—has been politicized.
The Russian government’s goal is to weaken our country—to diminish America’s global role and to neutralize a perceived U.S. threat to Russian interests. President Putin and the Russian security services aim to counter U.S. foreign policy objectives in Europe, including in Ukraine, where Moscow wishes to reassert political and economic dominance.
I say this not as an alarmist, but as a realist. I do not think long-term conflict with Russia is either desirable or inevitable. I continue to believe that we need to seek ways of stabilizing our relationship with Moscow even as we counter their efforts to harm us. Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. 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.
As Republicans and Democrats have agreed for decades, Ukraine is a valued partner of the United States, and it plays an important role in our national security. And as I told this Committee last month, I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine—not Russia—attacked us in 2016.
These fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes. President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a Super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives. When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each another, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.
I respect the work that this Congress does in carrying out its constitutional responsibilities, including in this inquiry, and I am here to help you to the best of my ability. If the President, or anyone else, impedes or subverts the national security of the United States in order to further domestic political or personal interests, that is more than worthy of your attention. But we must not let domestic politics stop us from defending ourselves against the foreign powers who truly wish us harm.”
II. In response to a question from minority counsel Steve Castor, Dr. Hill responded with a succinct delineation of the two policy channels the Trump administration was pursuing. After acknowledging her anger at Ambassador Sondland, she continued:
“And what I was angry about was that he wasn’t coordinating with us. I now actually realize, having listened to his deposition, that he was absolutely right. That he wasn’t coordinating with us because we weren’t doing the same thing that he was doing.
So I was upset with him that he wasn’t fully telling us about all of the meetings that he was having. And he said to me: “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?”
And the point is, we have a robust interagency process that deals with Ukraine. It includes Mr. Holmes. It includes Ambassador Taylor as the chargé in Ukraine. It includes a whole load of other people. But it struck me when—yesterday—when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these emails and he said, “These the people 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 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. And I did say to him, Ambassador Sondland—Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up. And here we are.
And after I left to my next meeting, our director for the European Union talked to him much further for a full half-hour or more later, trying to ask him about how we could coordinate better or how others could coordinate better after I had left the office. And his feeling was that the National Security Council was always trying to block him.
What we were trying to do was block us from straying into domestic or personal politics. And that was precisely what I was trying to do.
But Ambassador Sondland is not wrong that he had been given a different remit than we had been.
And it was at that moment that I started to realize how those things have diverged. And I realized, in fact, that I wasn’t really being fair to Ambassador Sondland because he was carrying out what he thought he had been instructed to carry out. And we were doing something that we thought was just as or perhaps even more important, but it wasn’t in the same channel.”
III. Mr. Nunes, in his closing statement, offered a timeline that made no reference to any testimony from the public hearings over the past two weeks. Replete with references to the Steele dossier, a coup, “the Russia hoax,” “the so-called whistleblower,” “secret depositions and mid-hearing press conferences,” and “a show trial,” the gentleman from California condemned Democrats, the media, executive branch officials, James Comey, and the FBI, and complained that tyranny of the majority had led to “a process that was grossly unfair.”
Throughout the hearings, as Adam Schiff noted, Republicans attempted to smear and demean witnesses, while failing to raise substantive questions about their testimony. Witness after witness offered accounts without any refutation. In the words of the chairman, “So much of this is really undisputed.”
Mr. Schiff then reviewed and knocked down the various ‘defenses’ Republicans have offered for Trump, and finally lands on the I’m-not-a-crook defense (which comes to the fore because Donald Trump spoke the words, “No quid pro quo”):
“You said it and, I guess, that’s the end of it.
Well, the only thing we can say is that it’s not so much that this situation is different in terms of Nixon’s conduct and Trump’s conduct. What we have seen here is far more serious than a third-rate burglary of the Democratic headquarters. What we’re talking about here is the withholding of recognition in that White House meeting. The withholding of military aid to an ally at war. That is beyond anything that Nixon did.
The difference between then and now is not the difference between Nixon and Trump. It’s the difference between that Congress and this one.
And so, we are asking, where is Howard Baker? Where is Howard Baker? Where are the people who willing to go beyond their party? To look to their duty? I was struck by Colonel Vindman’s testimony because he said that he acted out of duty. What is our duty here? That’s what we need to be asking.”
IV. Mr. Schiff concluded his statement with words about why he could “resist no more” the calls for an impeachment inquiry:
“It came down to the fact that the day after Bob Mueller testified. The day after Bob Mueller testified that Donald Trump invited Russian interference: Hey, Russia, if you’re listening, come get Hillary’s emails. And later that day, they tried to hack her server.
The day after he testified that not only did Trump invite that interference, but that he welcomed the help in the campaign. They made full use of it. They lied about it. They obstructed the investigation into it. And all this is in his testimony and his report.
The day after that Donald Trump is back on the phone asking another nation to involve itself in another U.S. election.
That says to me, this President believes he is above the law. Beyond accountability. And in my view there is nothing more dangerous than an unethical president who believes they are above the law. And I would just say to people watching here at home and around the world, in the words of my great colleague, ‘We are better than that.’ “
By the time he reaches the last four sentences of his remarks (finally concluding by quoting the late Elijah Cummings), and gavels the hearing to a close, Mr. Schiff is visibly angry.
V. Will Hurd, who is leaving the House without seeking reelection and is the lone Republican on the panel who was regarded as a possible vote to send Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, rejected that course of action on Friday:
“An impeachable offense should be compelling, overwhelmingly clear, and unambiguous. And it’s not something to be rushed or taken lightly. I’ve not heard evidence proving the President committed bribery or extortion.”
His colleague Justin Amash, who has left the Republican Party, offered a reply that is highly unlikely to resonate with any current Republican Members of Congress:
“With respect, my friend
@HurdOnTheHill applies the wrong standard. House impeachment is an indictment, not a conviction. The question in the House is whether there is probable cause to charge President Trump with an impeachable offense. The answer to that question is clearly yes. “
Worlds collide, truth fractures — the Lesson on Day One of the public impeachment hearings
The nation is divided. The opposing sides cannot even agree on plain as day, garden variety, eyes wide open facts. Yesterday, from my vantage point, the evidence presented by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and Ambassador William Taylor was devastating for President Donald Trump.
Rank and file Republicans, who buy into the world according to Fox News Channel, didn’t see the same thing. Meanwhile even Republican Congressmen who don’t push unhinged conspiracy theories, fail to push back against them. And this (as Ronald Brownstein points out) suggests that the rule of law across party lines is endangered.
“The larger question the hearings may raise, then, is whether the partisan divide has widened to the point where Republican voters and elected officials alike will not consider valid any process controlled by Democrats, no matter how powerful the evidence it produces. If that’s the case, it points toward a future in which partisan loyalties eclipse, to a growing extent, any shared national commitment to applying the rule of law across party lines. Even given the decades-long rise in political polarization, such a rejection of common standards would constitute an ominous threshold for the nation to cross. . . .
The willingness of rank-and-file Republican voters to dismiss the concerns of such nonpartisan voices underscores the extent to which the party has grown resistant to outside information that challenges its ideological preferences…. [argument attributed to Alan Abramowitz, political scientist at Emory University] . . .
A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that the roughly 45 percent of Republicans who identified Fox as their primary news source expressed nearly unbroken opposition to impeachment. Just 2 percent of Fox-dependent Republicans said they back Trump’s removal, compared with 10 percent of those who don’t rely on the network, the poll found. The indifferent response to the evidence against Trump on Ukraine “is maybe the best example so far of how the Fox News bubble just totally consumes a different reality—which, of course, is not actually reality….” [quotation from Andrew Baumann, Democratic pollster] . . .
In that environment, it’s easy for Trump to convince much of his base that any charge against him—even allegations from nonpartisan diplomats and national-security professionals—is inherently a liberal plot to silence him and his supporters. Very few Republican elected officials have challenged that conspiratorial argument.” — Ronald Brownstein, “Just How Far Will Republicans Go for Trump?“
Conservatives with convictions that don’t budge because the political winds change direction, who have been loyal Republicans but can’t deny Donald Trump’s unfitness as a leader, are horrified by their party’s opportunistic embrace of the man. Peter Wehner served in the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. He couldn’t bear the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton; he laments the “increasingly radicalized” Democratic Party. But he sees with clear eyes the GOP circa 2019:
“What makes the Trump era so unusual isn’t partisanship and political tribalism, which have been around for much of human existence. It is the degree to which the transgressive nature of Trump—his willingness to go places no other president has gone, to say and do things that no president before him has done—has exposed the Republican Party. There is hardly a pretense any more regarding what the party, and the right-wing media complex, are doing. They are driven by a single, all-consuming commitment: Defend Donald Trump at all costs. That is the end they seek, and they will pursue virtually any means necessary to achieve it. This from the party that once said it stood for objective truth, for honor and integrity, and against moral relativism.
We are facing a profound political crisis. What the Republican Party is saying and signaling isn’t simply that rationality and truth are subordinate to partisanship; it is that they have to be obliterated for the sake of partisanship and the survival of the Trump presidency. As best I can tell, based on some fairly intense interactions with Trump supporters, there is no limiting principle—almost nothing he can do—that will forfeit their support. Members of Congress clearly believe Trump is all that stands between them and the loss of power, while many Trump voters believe the president is all that stands between them and national ruin. In either case, it has led them into the shadowlands.” . . .
“The Republican Party under Donald Trump is a party built largely on lies, and it is now maintained by politicians and supporters who are willing to “live within the lie,” to quote the great Czech dissident (and later president) Vaclav Havel. Many congressional Republicans privately admit this but, with very rare exceptions—Utah Senator Mitt Romney is the most conspicuous example—refuse to publicly acknowledge it.
“For what purpose?” they respond point-blank when asked why they don’t speak out with moral urgency against the president’s moral transgressions, his cruelty, his daily assault on reality, and his ongoing destruction of our civic and political culture. Trump is more powerful and more popular than they are, they will say, and they will be targeted by him and his supporters and perhaps even voted out of office.” — Peter Wehner, “The Exposure of the Republican Party“
(Image above headline: CNN on YouTube.)
Did Misguided Certainty of Clinton’s victory ensure her defeat? It won’t happen in 2020.
Insight of the day — on the third anniversary of Donald Trump’s election:
“Now, there’s no way to prove that people who didn’t bother to vote, or cast a protest vote for a minor-party candidate or even for Trump while assuming he could not actually be inaugurated, cost Clinton the election (there’s actually some evidence that minor-party voting hurt Trump more than his opponent). But if you add together the substantial evidence that nonvoters skewed Democratic and consider the tactical mistakes Team Clinton seemed to make due to misperceptions of the state of the race (e.g., focusing resources on Arizona rather than Wisconsin), it’s clear the element of surprise was an important — perhaps critical — asset for the 45th president.
If so, he’s lost it for good heading toward 2020, and that could be a hidden asset for his Democratic opponent, whoever it is.” — Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine
There are a ton of factors that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. I haven’t any proof that the conventional wisdom that Clinton would win actually bolstered the number of third party votes or, more significantly, increased the number of prospective voters who just didn’t bother to cast a ballot (or even, as Kilgore suggests, pulled the lever for Trump knowing he wouldn’t win).
But it would be difficult to convince me that this isn’t so.
This won’t happen in 2020.
(Image: detail from cover of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.)
“Know that you are an essential part of our great country.” – Justin Trudeau to his opposition
A split between urban and rural Canada — similar to that in the United States — was brought into sharp relief as the Liberals swept all 25 seats in the greater Toronto area.
Also on display was a stark regional division, with Liberals completely shut out in Saskatchewan and Alberta. The east-west rift has defined contemporary Canadian politics the way the Solid South — first a Democratic stronghold and then a Republican one — has defined U.S. politics since Reconstruction.
A chastened but triumphant Trudeau acknowledged those divisions and offered a verbal outstretched hand to Saskatchewan and Alberta, which along with Manitoba recoiled at his support for a carbon tax and other energy and environmental policies.
“Know that you are an essential part of this country,” Trudeau said. — A report from this morning’s Los Angeles Times on how yesterday’s Canadian election revealed a closely divided nation. [Editor’s note: Other news organizations, including CNBC, reported the version of the quotation in the headline, not the wording in the LA Times report.]
CNBC offers another excerpt from Trudeau’s remarks: “And to those – to those who did not vote for us – know that we will work every single day for you. We will govern for everyone.” [Quoted excerpt begins at the 1:00 minute mark.]
I can’t vouch for the analogy – that Canada’s East-West rift defines politics in our northern neighbor much as the distinctive preoccupations of the South have shaped American politics since Reconstruction – but both these quotations reveal a huge difference in the national leadership of the two nations.
Trudeau reached out – at least rhetorically – to the folks on the other side of the divide. Donald Trump consistently has catered to the Southern-dominated GOP base, while denigrating cities and regions (as well as religious and ethnic minority communities) where he lacks political support.
Disconcerting, dispiriting, and scary quotations and headlines of the day
▪ “The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get.” — Peter Nicholas, “The Unraveling of Donald Trump: As the impeachment inquiry intensifies, some associates of the president predict that his already erratic behavior is going to get worse.”
▪ We’re in an astonishing situation. Mr. Trump seems to have single-handedly and unilaterally precipitated a national security crisis in the middle east.
You know, at the end of the day, he green-lighted the Turkish invasion. The five-day pause is probably a good thing. Maybe it will reduce the number of people murdered by Arab militias that are following the Turkish army. Give the Kurds time to run for their lives. Where they’re supposed to go is beyond me.
But, you know, the instant take on this is: You allow Assad to reenter the Kurdish areas. You allow Iranian dominance in the region. And you let the Russian military occupy abandoned, hastily abandoned U.S. military outposts. It’s an astonishing outcome. What did Mr. Trump think he was getting out of all this? — General Barry McCaffrey, retired — “Gen. Barry McCaffrey blasts Trump’s ‘inexplicable’ policy in Syria.”
▪ Trump has publicly sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence in dismissing the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and suggested this year it would be “appropriate” for Russia to rejoin the Group of Seven richest countries — reversing the 2014 expulsion after Russia invaded Ukraine.
No Trump foreign policy move, however, has redounded so directly to Russia’s benefit as the Syrian pullout, with the Kurdish forces striking a deal with Russia. — Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim, “‘All roads lead to Putin’: Pelosi questions Trump’s loyalty in White House clash.”
▪ At one point during one of his most unpresidential of days, President Trump insisted that he knew how to be presidential.
“It’s much easier being presidential, it’s easy,” he told a stadium full of more than 20,000 boisterous supporters in MAGA hats and T-shirts cheering his every word on Thursday night. “All you have to do is act like a stiff.”
He buttoned his suit coat, pursed his lips, squared his shoulders and dropped his arms rigidly at his sides. “Ladies and gentlemen of Texas,” he then droned in a sleep-inducing staccato monotone the way he imagined most of the other 44 presidents had done. “It is a great honor to be with you this evening.”
The crowd loved it, roaring with laughter. Transforming back into the unpresidential president America has come to know, Mr. Trump added, “And everybody would be out of here so fast! You wouldn’t come in in the first place!” Being presidential, he was saying, is so boring. Who wants that? — Peter Baker, “On Day 1001, Trump Made It Clear: Being ‘Presidential’ is Boring.”
▪ “This is unquestionably the most outstanding nomination that I’ve ever recommended to Presidents to serve on the bench in Kentucky,” Mitch McConnell tweeted in July, when Walker’s name first came up. However, the Senate Majority Leader made his endorsement to the detriment of the nonpartisan American Bar Association, which gave Walker a rare “not qualified rating.” The ABA suggests that “a nominee to the federal bench ordinarily should have at least 12 years’ experience in the practice of law” — not zero cases in court under their belt. In addition, Paul T. Moxley, chair of the ABA committee on the federal judiciary, issued the closest thing to an I Don’t Know Her that a lawyer can physically emit: “Based on review of his biographical information and conversations with Mr. Walker, it was challenging to determine how much of his ten years since graduation from law school has been spent in the practice of law. — Matt Steib, “As Trump Fumes, GOP Advances Real Party Goal of Making the Federal Judiciary Great Again.”
▪ “I don’t believe I’m leading a wing of the party. Because there’s no wing that’s very large that is aligned with me.” — Senator Mitt Romney, “Mitt Romney Marches Alone: ‘I don’t believe I’m leading a wing of the party.’“
▪ And, yes, among the unsettling items in today’s news, is one about the Democrats:
Democrats aren’t comfortable with the brutal language of unvarnished national interest. They aren’t comfortable acknowledging tragic tradeoffs between the welfare of ordinary Americans and the welfare of vulnerable people overseas. Donald Trump is. He genuinely doesn’t care what happens to the Kurds or the Afghans—or any other group of people who can’t offer him votes or money or project his image onto the side of a luxury hotel. Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden do care, which is why they found it so easy to offer ferocious moral denunciations of Trump’s Syria policy at this week’s debate. They just don’t care enough to ask Americans to sacrifice to reduce the chances that Syria’s horrors repeat themselves in Afghanistan. — Peter Beinart, “Democrats are Hypocrites for Condemning Trump Over Syria: Presidential hopefuls blasted Trump for abandoning the Kurds — but want the U.S. to pull out of Afghanistan under similar conditions.“
Quid Pro Quo? “Absolutely. No question about that….That’s why we held up the money.” — Mick Mulvaney
Exchange of the day as White House Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney renders inoperative weeks of denials of a quid pro quo — Congressionally-approved military aid would go to Ukraine only if Ukraine agreed to dig up dirt on Trump’s political opponents — first revealed in a ‘transcript’ released by the White House.
Mulvaney: “Did he also mention to me in the past the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that.
But that’s it. That’s why we held up the money.”
. . .
Reporter: But to be clear, what you just described is a quid pro quo. Funding will not flow unless the investigation into the Democratic server happens as well.
Mulvaney: “We do that all the time with foreign policy.”
Video from C-Span. Exchange begins at 21:07.
Two days ago the Washington Post reported on Mulvaney’s central role in this scheme. Each day, in spite of the White House’s blanket refusal to provide witnesses or documents to Congress, the testimony of witness after witness for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has been filling in additional details on the hijacking of American foreign policy to undermine free and fair elections in the United States and politically benefit Donald Trump.
But — so says Mulvaney — Trump’s concern in directing this quid pro quo wasn’t to implicate the Bidens! It was to prove (contra the Mueller report) that it was Ukraine, not Putin’s Russia, that interfered with the 2016 election and that a Ukrainian company had absconded with the Democratic National Committee server containing Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. (Check out Vox’s explainers regarding Ukraine conspiracy theories.)
So there, Nancy Pelosi, all roads don’t lead to Putin (or so the Trump White House wished to ‘prove’). And ignore the White House memo on Trump’s call to Zalensky, wherein Trump says: ” 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.“