Every day that passes shows new areas of corruption within the Trump administration that any impeachment inquiry is going to have to address—and that the nation will be reckoning with for years to come. We’re learning more about the involvement of top officials, highlighting yet again the the problem isn’t just Trump, it’s the entire Republican party. And we’re getting a sense of how ugly the pushback against impeachment is going to get.
To recap, the originating scandal is that Trump used a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to press for Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden (dirt that likely doesn't exist). A “transcript”—though partial and edited by the Trump White House; really more of a summary—shows Trump doing exactly that. A whistleblower complaint expands on that, saying that White House officials knew how inappropriate Trump’s behavior on the call was and hid the transcript in a server dedicated to highly classified material. And it wasn’t the first time they had used that server to hide things that would be problematic for Trump.
● Attorney General William Barr, who Trump repeatedly named in the Ukraine call, is very much an active player in this, from asking foreign intelligence officials to discredit U.S. intelligence on Russia’s 2016 election interference to protecting Trump on other fronts, like sending Department of Justice lawyers to keep Trump's tax returns hidden. It's time to impeach Barr.
● Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is also implicated, accusing House Democrats of bullying because they issued subpoenas to him and said they’d be seeking to depose other current or former State Department officials. House Democrats responded by rebuking him for seeking to intimidate witnesses.
● In case you’re thinking that Senate Republicans will redeem their party’s basic honesty somehow, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is signaling that an impeachment trial would be over almost before it began, while Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana put forward legislation with the sole intent of redirecting attention from Trump’s abuses and onto former Vice President Joe Biden.
● Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to decide how narrowly to tailor their impeachment inquiry. Those questions come as it becomes more and more clear that the Ukraine story is thoroughly connected to Trump’s ongoing efforts to claim that Russia was not responsible for election interference in 2016, and as House attorneys suggest that redacted parts of the Mueller report hide Trump lies about WikiLeaks.
● Trump doesn’t have a defense plan beyond going on offense, yelling and threatening and bullying, but he sure is going to do that—while raising millions of dollars off the outrage.
● The Trump administration has been overclassifying information to hide it, and that’s just as damaging as not classifying enough.
● With all of this, both Democrats and the media should be clear that this is a BFD of the biggest variety. Newspapers should be calling for Trump's resignation—and, as for Democrats, they should embrace both the moral imperative and the political win of impeachment.