Donald Trump is back at it. He’s trying to justify his threats to the whistleblower who reported on his use of the presidency to pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political rivals, and re-upping his false claims that the whistleblower’s extraordinarily accurate complaint was wrong.
Trump tweeted “So if the so-called ‘Whistleblower’ has all second hand information, and almost everything he has said about my ‘perfect’ call with the Ukrainian President is wrong (much to the embarrassment of Pelosi & Schiff), why aren’t we entitled to interview & learn everything about....” I’m going to stop right there before moving on to the second tweet. Because:
- The whistleblower’s account of the Ukraine call was mind-blowingly accurate, from the specific pressure on Ukraine to dig for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and to try to shift blame for 2016 election interference from Russia to Ukraine, to the way Trump referred to Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr “multiple times in tandem.”
- That being the case, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff are the opposite of embarrassed.
- “Why aren’t we entitled to interview & learn everything about [the whistleblower]?” Gee, maybe because you were already throwing around accusations of treason against this person. Or, more broadly, because that’s how whistleblower protections, which are in the law, work. Trump is railing against the laws of the United States here.
Trump continued, “....the Whistleblower, and also the person who gave all of the false information to him. This is simply about a phone conversation that could not have been nicer, warmer, or better. No pressure at all (as confirmed by Ukrainian Pres.). It is just another Democrat Hoax!”
So he wants not just the whistleblower but “the person” who told the whistleblower what happened—which is funny, since the complaint says that “more than half a dozen U.S. officials” were sources for the information.
Beyond that, this is Trump’s ongoing attempt to hoax people who haven’t read the complaint and the White House summary of the call. That phone conversation was Trump leaning hard on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was scrambling to flatter and please him in order to get the military aid that Congress had passed and Trump was withholding. Any surface warmth in the summary of the call is from Zelensky’s eagerness to appease Trump and Trump’s satisfaction that Zelensky is responding to pressure.
Trump is trying to get out of trouble for bullying and abusing his office by lying, bullying, and abusing his office. And he’s counting on the entire Republican Party once again following his lead.