It’s all one scandal
by digby
I’ve been saying this for a while (even earlier today) but Jeffrey Toobin lays it all out in the New Yorker in a way that I hope people will take seriously:
[T]he Russia and Ukraine scandals are, in fact, one story. Indeed, the President’s false denials in both of them capture the common themes: soliciting help from foreign interests for partisan gain, followed by obstruction of efforts to uncover what happened. Both, too, share roots in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mueller’s two indictments of Russian interests—the first involving the use of social media and the second the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails—are perhaps the most detailed chronicle ever published of foreign interference in a U.S. political campaign. Trump’s team was appreciative. When a public-relations adviser to a Russian oligarch’s family e-mailed Donald Trump, Jr., offering dirt on Hillary Clinton that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” the candidate’s son gave a straightforward reply: “If it’s what you say I love it.”
Just two years earlier, Putin had invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. The government in Kiev went back and forth between leaders who wanted to accommodate Putin’s regime and others who wanted to enlist the help of the West to push back against it. The political consultant of choice for the pro-Russian faction was Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chair in the summer of 2016. As Mueller documented, Manafort passed proprietary campaign polling data to pro-Russian Ukrainians. The campaign-era Trump portrayed in the report suffered from one major limitation: he wasn’t President. He clearly welcomed Putin’s assistance, and promised a better relationship with Russia, but he was still just a businessman from New York. The whistle-blower’s complaint is the epilogue to Mueller’s report: the coming of age of an aspiring colluder.It’s important to note, as well, that, in the Ukrainian chapter, Trump has done Putin’s bidding, to the extent that he can, going so far as to embrace a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 campaign. The rest of the U.S. government has never been as enamored of Putin as Trump is. That includes Republicans in Congress, who joined the Democrats in voting for military aid to Ukraine. Trump wants no part of conflict with Putin, but the aid package tied his hands. There was a revealing moment in his joint news conference with Zelensky at the United Nations last month. Almost as an aside, Trump said, “I really believe that President Putin would like to do something. I really hope that you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem.” Ukraine doesn’t have a “problem” with Putin—it has an invasion by Putin.In the July 25th phone call, Trump did what he couldn’t do as a candidate: he tried to leverage the power of the Presidency to extract partisan political advantage. Texts of U.S. officials, released last week, further suggest an attempted quid pro quo. On September 1st, William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Kiev, asked, “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Gordon Sondland, a former Republican fund-raiser who is Trump’s Ambassador to the European Union, replied, “Call me.”
Mueller did chronicle Trump’s efforts, as President, to interfere with his investigation. Trump made repeated attempts to rein in or fire Mueller, and was saved from that misconduct only by the refusal of people around him (including Don McGahn, his White House counsel; Rob Porter, his staff secretary; and even Corey Lewandowski, his otherwise zealous onetime campaign manager) to carry out his directives. The lesson of the past few weeks is that those restraining figures have left the building, literally and figuratively. Trump is currently surrounded by people like Barr and Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, who are willing to debase their offices to indulge Trump’s abuse of power. The unhinged arias of Rudolph Giuliani, his personal lawyer, are a constant from the Russian chapter to the Ukrainian. In customary fashion, Trump has sought to normalize his corruption, by bragging that he could recruit even more countries, including China, to conduct political investigations for him. That’s still an abuse of power, even though he’s now doing it in public, rather than bothering to try to hide it.
Toobin points out that this behavior is accelerating. And it’s now in the hands of the congress to do something about it.
The Republicans are so far proving that all the predictions of their blind, servile partisanship are true. So impeachment will be about educating the public and laying out the high crimes of the president so that there is a clear marker for the future of how this president abused his office for personal gain. Hopefully, we have one more chance for a fair election or all of this is probably moot.
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