I’m begging you, and everyone else on our side, stop saying “soliciting foreign aid in our election is a crime, he confessed, case closed.” That’s a loser, and pales in comparison to the screaming impeachable crime here, extortion.
First of course, I don’t mean to insult the good folks here, I’m not calling you stupid, I’m invoking Bill Clinton’s famous messaging slogan “It’s the economy, stupid.” Frevvinsake, the worst offenders are Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert, my pundit idols, and I’d never call them stupid. I’m not fit to carry their intellectual jockstraps.
But good god, we’ve been handed the political gift of the millennium, a stinks-to-high-heaven crime with damning evidence piling up by the hour. Let’s not blow this.
“Soliciting foreign election aid” is a loser.
You know how I know this for a fact?
1) Trump admits it. Defends it proudly. Did it again, on camera. Had told Stephanopoulos he’d do it again.
You know what Donald is denying with every sniffling breath? Extortion. Quid pro quo. It’s this year’s “No puppet! No puppet! You’re the puppet!”
There is one arena where Trump actually is a stable genius, and that is marketing. Take your cue from the con master. He knows what sells.
2) The public has already shown us it does not care about soliciting foreign election help, when that help is information. Trump did it openly in the 2016 election—Russia, if you’re listening; If it’s what you say, I love it; Wikileaks, I love Wikileaks—and no one cared. Giuliani has been running around for months, openly gearing up to do it with Ukraine, and no one cared.
Further to this point, the crime of soliciting foreign interference is a campaign finance violation. The hush money payment to Stormy Daniels was also a campaign finance violation. The porn star payoff had lurid sex going for it, it was late night comedian fodder for months, Cohen went to jail for it, Trump got caught lying about it. It did not move the impeachment polls.
3) The biggest reason this is not the issue we want to be flogging: It is hella hard to distinguish “Russia if you’re listening,” from hiring a British ex-spy to talk to his Russian contacts about Trump’s shady dealings in Russia. Deflection and bothsides is their stock-in-trade. Don’t give them an actually fair deflection point.
4) Some may argue, but the soliciting is a crime, and undeniably committed. Why not push both? Because, when you have a killer issue, and a ho-hum one, and you live and die in a thirty-second sound byte world, you don’t give the opposition something ho hum to talk about. Don’t let the conversation be about anything else but the one key thing you want the listener to remember when he turns off the TV.
Related to the third point, “the Dems did it too,” I’d go so far as to say there is nothing wrong with soliciting or accepting information from a foreign source to aid in an election. While it’s a bit off topic, I’ll lay out my thoughts for this proposition at the end. Perhaps it will explain why, and thus persuade you that, the public doesn’t get excited when Trump says, “I think I’d listen. I’d take that meeting.” I would too.
It’s the extortion, stupid
What the public does care about is the extortion. You saw those polls swing, overnight.
Indeed, this is the bridge-too-far that moved our party’s leaders from “he’s not worth impeaching (dear god, don’t put our swing district representatives on the spot/we don’t have the votes) to—it’s on, we’re doing this, we’re not even waiting for a whip count. This is the scandal that got 225 members to go on record supporting the impeachment inquiry, in a matter of days.
And this extortion scandal has so many layers, so much to talk about. Let me lay them all out, in their full glory:
1) It’s extortion, in Nancy’s words, a “shakedown.” This is mob stuff, juicy as all get-out. Adam Schiff brilliantly riffed on this in his opening statement in the Maguire hearing, translating Trump’s July 25 phone call into the original New Jersey mobster. It’s easy to understand, and it’s nasty nasty nasty. Again, take your cue from what gets under Trump’s skin: he lost his shit over Adam’s Sopranos impression: It was a fraud! He should resign in disgrace! Treason!
2) It’s abuse of power Trump is using the power of his office, to commit a heinous crime, for personal political benefit. It is literally what the Founders meant by “high crimes and misdemeanors,” it’s right there in the Federalist papers.
3) Trump put our national security interests at risk to carry out his extortion plot This is a crime against you and me, our national security.
4) The victim is hella sympathetic A vulnerable ally, fighting one of the most powerful villains on the planet: a vicious dictator who already took a chunk of their country, and invaded them to take another. An ongoing hot war, in which 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already died. And, its brand new President is an adorable young comedian and TV personality. That cute young guy, Zelensky, torn between his duty to defend his country (for which he needs the aid) and his mission to make Ukraine an honest state. We saw the agony on his face, in that press conference, the hostage sitting two feet away from thug Trump, obediently agreeing “no push.”
5) Just when Ukraine was genuinely trying to turn its back on corruption and have an honest government, Trump forces them to be corrupt
6) This is a crime against two other victims, Joe and Hunter Biden Prosecution of innocent men is Kafka-level dystopia. Note, Adam Schiff is always careful to say, not “dig up dirt on a political opponent,” but manufacture dirt.
7) Even if it were a bribe, not an extortion plot against a desperate ally, that’s our money That’s our tax dollars that Trump is appropriating for his benefit.
8) That’s money that Congress appropriated for a specific purpose Congress voted to send that aid money to Ukraine, judging it to be in the country’s national security interests. The Constitution does not give the president the right to steal duly allocated funds for his own ends. And unlike his “emergency powers” theft for the Wall, Corruption by Former Vice-Presidents and Current Political Opponents, allegedly committed years ago, is not a national emergency.
There’s nothing wrong with soliciting or accepting information from a foreign source
It is a crime to solicit or accept any “thing of value” from a foreign source, to aid in a political campaign. And information is indeed a “thing of value.” This is a righteous law, but in my opinion, it should not apply to information (with two caveats).
Free speech principles trump the otherwise sound policy underlying the prohibition on foreign election aid. In this girl’s opinion, free speech rights are not just the right of an individual to speak his or her mind, they must also protect the right of the rest of us to hear what he or she has to say. I have to agree with Trump on this one, if someone calls you up and says they have information that the public should consider in deciding how to vote, you listen. If you believe someone has or can find out such relevant information, you solicit (see, Steele dossier).
There are two caveats to this. First, money is a thing of value. If the foreign assistance includes research or effort for which a campaign would ordinarily pay, you’re not allowed to let the foreign actor do it for free. Steele was paid for his work for the Rubio and Clinton campaigns.
The second important caveat is fraud. Information is what a democracy depends on. Disinfo is what kills it. It is a whole different thing to ask or coerce any person to make up evidence for conspiracy theories you know to be bullshit. That’s fraud.