We begin with Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times who calls on the media to avoid “balance” in reporting on Trump’s lies about the Bidens and Ukraine:
Journalists, perhaps seeking to appear balanced, have sometimes described Trump’s claims about Biden as “unsubstantiated” or “unsupported.” That is misleading, because it suggests more muddiness in the factual record than actually exists. Trump isn’t making unproven charges against Biden. He is blatantly lying about him. He and his defenders are spreading a conspiracy theory that is the precise opposite of the truth. [...]
[G]etting rid of Shokin made an investigation of Burisma more likely, not less. “He didn’t want to investigate Burisma,” the Ukrainian anti-corruption activist Daria Kaleniuk told The Washington Post. “Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.” [...]
However bad the optics around Hunter Biden, Joe Biden was not serving his son’s interests. If anything, they were working at cross-purposes.
Karen Tumulty:
James Madison warned us that somebody as reckless as Donald Trump might come along. [...] The framers of the Constitution took great care in spelling out what acts could be regarded as treason, which was the only crime they explicitly defined. Article III, Section 3 states that“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
Why did the framers believe treason, alone among offenses, merited such clarity in the nation’s founding document? Their recent history had given them reason to fear authoritarians who would loosely throw around accusations of treason. [...]
The president, as he is showing us, is the “alternate malignity” that Madison feared. Trump took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. He should start by learning what is in it.
Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post reminds us of the other whistleblower complaint:
In defiance of a half-century norm, Trump has kept his tax returns secret.
We don’t know exactly what he might be hiding. His bizarre behavior, though, suggests it’s really bad. [...] The whistleblower offered credible allegations of “evidence of possible misconduct,” specifically “inappropriate efforts to influence” the audit of the president, according to a letter Neal sent to the treasury secretary. [...]
As is so often true with allegations of Trumpian wrongdoing, we’ve learned once again that there’s a there there — and there, and there, and all sorts of other places you mightn’t have thought to look.
At The Nation, Joan Walsh calls on Democrats to avoid false choices in pursuing impeachment:
Democrats should be wary of false binary choices. First of all, it’s hard to completely disentangle the Russia scandal from the apparent threat to withhold Ukrainian aid needed to discourage more Russian incursions (which Trump actually did, mysteriously, until a bipartisan group of senators forced him to release it).
David Remnick at The New Yorker on the floodgates opening:
The onset of an impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives—an initiative that is gathering increasing public support during an election season—is sure to elicit more, and increasingly lurid, threats of retribution from the President. As a result, anxiety throughout the federal government has deepened.
On a final note, in a must-read analytical piece at USA Today, Mimi Rocah, Jennifer Rodgers and Berit Berger offer their expert opinions as former federal prosecutors on the DOJ’s troubling conduct:
DOJ made a strikingly quick decision not to open an investigation, stating that the head of the criminal division determined that “there was no campaign finance violation and no further action was warranted.”
This rapid conclusion raises red flags for two major reasons.
First, the standards for opening an investigation are quite low. The Attorney General Guidelines make clear that to open a preliminary investigation, FBI agents need only have “information or an allegation” that a federal crime might have been committed. Given these standards, it is incomprehensible that anyone would determine that no investigation was warranted here. [...]
All of this underscores the necessity of an investigation. Instead, DOJ seems to have relied solely on the White House’s summary of the July 25 telephone call in making its determination. While the call is undoubtedly damning evidence, it’s unclear whether it is a complete summary or only the tip of the iceberg. Why would DOJ walk away from an investigation with so much left on the table?