Digby's Hullabaloo

More Ukrainian shoes dropping

They are the shoes of a trio of Bigfoots: Esper, Pompeo and Bolton.

The New York Times has taken a deeper look into what went on in the White House last summer as Trump insisted on withholding aid to Ukraine in exchange for an announcement of an investigation into Joe Biden and false rumors of 2016 election interference by the Ukraine government. It turns out that it was a much bigger deal than we knew.

Greg Sargent points out that it’s getting harder and harder for Mitch McConnell to justify not calling witnesses in light of what we have learned. He writes:

McConnell badly needs the media’s both-sidesing instincts to hold firm against the brute facts of the situation. If Republicans bear the brunt of media pressure to explain why they don’t want to hear from witnesses, that risks highlighting their true rationale: They adamantly fear new revelations precisely because they know Trump is guilty — and that this corrupt scheme is almost certainly much worse than we can currently surmise.

And he helpfully lays out the story’s key points:

As early as June, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney worked to execute the freeze for Trump, and a top aide to Mulvaney — Robert Blair — worried it would fuel the narrative that Trump was tacitly aiding Russia.
Internal opposition was more forceful than previously known. The Pentagon pushed for the money for months. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton privately urged Trump to understand that freezing the aid was not in our national interest.
Trump was unmoved, citing Ukraine’s “corruption.” We now know Trump actually wanted Ukraine to announce sham investigations absolving Russia of 2016 electoral sabotage and smearing potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden. The Times report reveals that top Trump officials did not think that ostensibly combating Ukrainian “corruption” (which wasn’t even Trump’s real aim) was in our interests.
Lawyers at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) worked to develop a far-fetched legal argument that Trump could exercise commander-in-chief authority to override Congress’ appropriation of the aid, to get around the law precluding Trump from freezing it.
Michael Duffey, a political appointee at OMB, tried to get the Pentagon to assume responsibility for getting the aid released, to deflect blame away from the White House for its own role in blocking it. This led a Pentagon official to pronounce herself “speechless.”
Duffey froze the aid with highly unusual bureaucratic tactics, refused to tell Pentagon officials why Trump wanted it withheld and instructed them to keep this “closely held.” (Some of this had already been reported, but in narrative context it becomes far more damning.)

They can’t continue to say that there was no pressure on Ukraine or that Trump was withholding the money for normal policy reasons. Everyone in the White House knew this was wrong and possibly illegal. In fact, they went out of their way to try to construct a legal rationale after the fact. (One might call it a “cover-up)

If Pelosi and the Democrats wanted to let the impeachment articles simmer over the holiday because the crimes are ongoing and new information is trickling out everyday, they made a good decision.

I encourage you to read the whole NYT article. It’s very hard to see how they can continue to insist that we don’t need to hear from witnesses. If they do they will be making the case for everyone to see that Trump is covering up his crimes and the Republican Senate is helping him do it.

The Democrats can take that argument into 2020 with confidence.

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