If the entire Ukraine affair had been designed to simply embarrass Republicans, then do it again, and again, it would look … pretty much as it does right now. Over the course of the last week alone, Republicans have found themselves having to erase the previous line in the sand, draw another one, then moan as the evidence that Donald Trump also crossed the new line develops before they can even straighten up.
As it turns out, the only tenable position available to Republicans is the one adopted by Lindsey Graham — I’m an absolute lickspittle, and I’m not even going to pretend to care.
In the last few days, more and more witnesses have come forward to say that Donald Trump didn’t just personally demand that a foreign country conduct investigations into a political opponent, he screamed his demands in The Call Heard Round the World. He didn’t just bully and smear a U.S. ambassador, he provided a live real-time demo of how that went down. He didn’t just conduct a months’ long scheme to extort a nation for personal favors, he had at least two such schemes underway, one of which was underway for years.
If it seems like Trump is determined to leave Republicans absolutely nowhere to stand, that’s because he is. That’s exactly why Trump issued a tweet on November 10 reiterating his stance that the call he made to Ukrainian President Zelensky was “perfect.” Excuse me, “PERFECT.” In that tweet Trump very deliberately cut off the exact path to semi-reasonableness that many Republicans were eyeing by saying “Republicans, don’t be led into the fools trap of saying it was not perfect, but is not impeachable. No, it is much stronger than that. NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!”
This is nothing less than a Trumpal bull of infallibility. You can be a Republican, or you can believe Trump did something wrong. Choose one.
That’s extraordinarily dangerous. That’s an invitation for any Republican still concerned about facts, the Constitution, or the security of the nation to step onto Fifth Avenue. That’s a declaration that is meant to break the system. And so far, it’s working like a charm.
Let’s go read pundits.
Abagail Tracy on America’s newest hero, and potent reminder that There Are Good People.
Vanity Fair
In contrast to the appearances of State Department officials William Taylor, whose deep baritone launched a thousand tweets about his radio career, and George Kent, with his flashy bow tie and matching pocket square, Marie Yovanovitch cut a subdued figure before the House Intelligence Committee on Friday. Testifying before lawmakers about her politicized ouster from her post as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Yovanovitch was soft-spoken—if firm—throughout. Sedate though she was, however, diplomats mostly saw her as the week’s hero. “Masha’s testimony was a powerful moment in the impeachment drama,” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me Friday afternoon. “She was compelling and utterly persuasive in asking how the president permitted corrupt individuals to convince him to fire her. ‘How could our system fail like this?’ she was right to ask.”
More in sadness than in anger, she laid the failure to insulate her against the Trump administration’s politicization of diplomacy in Ukraine at the feet of her bosses at the State Department, starting with Mike Pompeo. “I remain disappointed that the department’s leadership and others have declined to acknowledge that the attacks against me and others are dangerously wrong. This is about far more than me or a couple of individuals. As Foreign Service professionals are being denigrated and undermined, the institution is also being degraded. This will soon cause real harm, if it hasn’t already,” she said in her opening statement. “The attacks are leading to a crisis in the State Department…This is not a time to undercut our diplomats. It is the responsibility of the department’s leaders to stand up for the institution and the individuals who make that institution the most effective diplomatic force in the world.”
Marie Yovanovitch before the House is not just a moment of the hearing, but the moment so far. Other witnesses have, and will, speak more directly to Trump’s extortion and bribery scheme in Ukraine. No other witness will so clearly define the different between Trump and decency.
Jonathan Chait on America’s newest hero, and potent reminder that There Are Good People.
New York Magazine
Day two of the House impeachment hearings, featuring Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, may have appeared on the surface to focus on a sideshow. Yovanovitch was not directly involved in Trump’s efforts to extort Ukraine for political advantage, the main charge he faces. What her testimony instead accomplished was to put the lie to Trump’s ludicrous defense that he was pursuing an anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine — that his demands that Kiev investigate his rivals were simply about cleaning the country up.
The lawyer for House Republicans asked Yovanovitch to affirm that “the president has long-standing concerns about corruption in the Ukraine.” Her response was savage: “That’s what he says.” Her testimony was devoted to proving the hypocrisy of Trump’s claim. She testified how she had worked in Ukraine to promote reform, how her efforts to do so alienated corrupt oligarchs there, and how those oligarchs then worked in tandem with Rudy Giuliani to foment a backlash against her. She explained that the fired Ukrainian prosecutor that Trump praised to Ukraine’s president in a July phone call was in fact totally corrupt.
Chait also has some nice comments on the Roger Stone conviction and the sharp contrast between professionals working for America, like Yovanovitch and Bill Taylor, and everyone who surrounds Trump. “Totally corrupt” seems like it should replace “Fraud Guarantee” on the business card of Trump’s pals.
Nancy LeTourneau on America’s newest hero, and potent reminder that There Are Good People.
Washington Monthly
Republicans have made a big deal out of the fact that a president has the right to fire an ambassador. During her testimony on Friday, Marie Yovanovitch agreed. She said,”I have always understood that I served at the pleasure of the President.” The issue under review is not the fact that Trump fired Yovanovitch. Rather, it is the reason he did so. As Yovanovitch’s testimony made clear, she became an obstacle to the president’s attempt to exploit corruption in Ukraine.
Here is how Yovanovitch described the situation in Ukraine.
It was— and remains—a top U.S. priority to help Ukraine fight corruption. Significant progress has been made since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Unfortunately, as the past couple of months have underlined, not all Ukrainians embraced our anti-corruption work. Thus, perhaps, it was not surprising, that when our anti-corruption efforts got in the way of a desire for profit or power, Ukrainians who preferred to play by the old, corrupt rules sought to remove me. What continues to amaze me is that they found Americans willing to partner with them and, working together, they apparently succeeded in orchestrating the removal of a U.S. Ambassador.
As George Kent said during Wednesday’s hearing, “You can’t promote principled anti-corruption action without pissing off corrupt people.” It’s clear that Ambassador Yovanovitch pissed off some corrupt people and they launched a smear campaign in order to get her fired.
And, as LeTourneau points out, those pissed off corrupt people were working directly the Trump’s personal attorney, on Trump’s personal business, to enforce Trump’s open corruption.
Dana Milbank on America’s newest hero, and potent reminder that There Are Good People.
Washington Post
As a U.S. diplomat, Marie Yovanovitch braved gunfire in Moscow, the violence of Somalia’s civil war, an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan and 10 trips to the front line of Ukraine’s war with Russia.
But her greatest service to country may well have been what Yovanovitch did on Friday before the House Intelligence Committee. All Americans — however they feel about impeachment — should care deeply about her warning.
She used her moment in the spotlight at the impeachment inquiry to make a passionate plea for American diplomacy, which is being destroyed under the Trump administration, with dire consequences for U.S. influence and security.
The thing that needs to be hit more often in this Ukraine scandal, is how it is very much not just about Ukraine. It’s about the standing of the United States around the world. However, as Trump also spent this week demanding that South Korea up their payments 500% for the privilege of hosting U.S. troops, while bragging about the dollars he collected for shipping U.S. soldiers to Bone-Saudi Arabia, complaints that Trump’s actions in Ukraine hurt America’s elevation vs. the moral high ground may be moot.
Will Bunch and the idiocy of journalists demanding stupid impeachment tricks.
Philadelphia Inquirer
The impeachment inquiry of President Trump is an open-and-shut case that might struggle to fill out a 60-minute episode of Law and Order. The White House has already released the phone-call transcript that reveals Trump holding a clear quid quo pro over the new Ukrainian president, blocking more than $500 million in security aid while pressuring him to investigate Trump’s political rival Joe Biden. More than a half-dozen witnesses have backed this up in closed-door hearings. The case for abuse of presidential power is clear. Republicans seem to have surrendered on facts to argue the process. And yet Democrats can still find something to fret about …
How will the 18th century notion of impeachment play in a modern America that grew up singing, “Here we are now, entertain us”?
This week’s key witnesses — Taylor and fellow diplomat George Kent on Wednesday, ousted U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch on Friday — have already told House committee members everything they know behind closed doors. We’ve been told the purpose of the public hearings is to dramatize that case for the American people, to win public support. But anti-Trump obsessives who’ve poured over every word of the now-released closed-door transcripts may wonder where the news is, while fans of the president will insist all the news is “fake” anyway. And for the hearings to build public support, the public has to actually watch.
For the public to watch, it would be helpful if someone — say, at the very least PBS — was replaying the hearings in the hours when most people are not at work. Yes, this may be the era of streaming and digital recorders, but is it really too much to ask that the nation’s public broadcaster set aside a few hours for the most consequential political event of the whole damn century?
Art Cullen is also on the ‘this is clear, so let’s just get on with it’ train.
Storm Lake Times
Despite chilling testimony offered in the House impeachment hearings, it is hard to divine what has changed in the political calculus. Almost all the facts about President Trump attempting to extort Ukraine over military aid in return for investigating American domestic political opponents have been exhaustively documented. Those facts were reiterated on national television for hours on Wednesday with two star witnesses: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and Acting Ukraine Ambassador William Taylor. Each oozes sobriety and credibility, Taylor with his Walter Cronkite voice and demeanor, Kent in his button-down comments steeped in patriotic sentiment.
The story is clear: President Trump held up military aid and political support to our ally Ukraine, battling Russia on its own eastern turf, to force the new Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on the board of Ukraine’s largest natural gas provider, Burisma. American and Ukrainian authorities previously looked into the matter and found that any suggestion of corruption by the Bidens was baseless.
This has all been known for some time. Extortion and obstruction of Congress are impeachable offenses. There is no question that the House will vote to impeach President Trump and send it to the Senate for trial on removal from office.
Yep, can’t disagree with any of that. Trump is guilty, every day brings fresh confirmation of that guilt, and any claim that he’s not guilty is laughable. The problem is that Republicans have no problem defending a laughable position.
President Trump continues to enjoy broad support among Republicans in Iowa and elsewhere. Loyalists in the House made themselves look petty and small at the outset with attempts to out a whistle-blower and discredit the process in which they have been fully included. Ranking Member Rep. Devin Nunes discredited himself by trying to cast aspersions on these two men, Taylor and Kent, of unimpeachable credentials.
Well … to be fair, Devin Nunes discredited himself a long time ago. But what’s painfully obvious to Cullen is that any expectation that Republicans are going to remember there are things like law, the Constitution, and common decency before it’s time to vote in the Senate appears to be a completely lost cause.
Charles Pierce on the metric @#$% ton of evidence against Trump.
Esquire
Stop the news, I want to get off.
Earlier Friday evening, CNN’s congressional reporter Manu Raju scooped a copy of the statement that David Holmes delivered to the House Intelligence Committee in a closed session on Friday. Holmes is the aide to whom Ambassador Bill Taylor referred on Wednesday as the guy who overheard the cellphone conversation between the president* and his go-between, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, in a Ukrainian restaurant. Holmes’s statement is detailed and damning. It’s also faintly hilarious that the whole case may be broken because two old men talked too loudly on their cellphones. From CNN:
"Sondland told Trump that Zelensky 'loves your ass,' " Holmes said, according to a copy of his opening statement. "I then heard President Trump ask, 'So, he's gonna do the investigation?' Ambassador Sondland replied that 'he's gonna do it,' adding that President Zelensky will do 'anything you ask him to.’”..."Even though I did not take notes of those statements, I have a clear recollection that these statements were made," he added.
I’ve been on vacation this week (seriously, it was something I had to put on the calendar months ago, I did not purposely skip out on the first week of public hearings) so I’ve made few comments about the absolute deluge of new and damning testimony that seems to emerge each day. Just let me say that covering someone claiming that a foreign leader “loves [Trump’s] ass” is not a moment that I regret missing.
Oh, and Gordon Sondland doesn’t even need to be run over by a Trump bus. He ran over himself.
Joan Walsh wants us to stop talking Watergate, ‘stupid’ or otherwise.
The Nation
I’m old enough to remember watching the Senate Watergate Committee hearings, as a teenage Nixon-hater, raised that way by my liberal, devout Catholic, Nixon-loathing father. I can still be obsessive about Watergate trivia. But too much of our media is using the outcome of that inspiring process—Nixon’s resignation—to impeach, so to speak, the Democrats’ handling of Donald Trump’s many high crimes and misdemeanors, after day one of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry.
The New York Times’ Peter Baker harks back to that triumph of democracy almost a half century ago to find the first hearing a little disappointing: “While major television networks broke into regular programming to carry it live, there was little sense of a riveted country putting everything aside to watch à la Watergate.” It’s worth remembering that the Times’ first-day, front-page coverage of the Senate hearings in May 1973 carried the headline “A Low-Key Beginning Before A Rapt Audience.”
Is all the looking backward because it’s too scary to look forward? My objection isn’t to parallels between the abuses involved in Watergate and the Ukraine scandal, because they exist, but to the expectations of what Democrats ought to do, and how, and jumping to the conclusion that they’re botching it. They may be, but fetishizing the Watergate investigations ignores how much media, politics, and the GOP have changed in the intervening 45 years.
The idea that something is going to be said in the hearings that is so compelling that Trump supporters split from Trump is about as likely as Trump leaving office via Martian death ray. All those supporters are going to get out of the hearings is Trump tweeting defiance and Fox running snippets of Nunes and Jim Jordan without waiting for replies. Scary as it seems (and is) this is going to go to the Senate where it will depend on Republicans to weigh at the overwhelming evidence rather than simply checking Trump’s level of support within the GOP. The more compelling argument in the Senate isn’t Taylor and Yovanovitch. It’s Kentucky and Louisiana.
MIchael Tomasky on the importance of busting the GOP’s BS barrier.
Daily Beast
If you stuck with it long enough to see Joaquin Castro’s five minutes at around 2:45 p.m., you saw what was for my money the key exchange that showed a) some good, to-the-point questioning from a Democrat, but b) what the Democrats are up against here.
Castro was trying to ask Ambassador Bill Taylor why Ukrainian President Zelensky never held that press conference on CNN that Donald Trump wanted him to hold announcing that he was investigating the Bidens. Well, Taylor said, the press conference never happened because on Sept. 11 the president released the aid, and the point became moot—Zelensky was no longer under pressure to please Trump in that way.
Right, Castro said; the aid was released. But why? Isn’t it possible that the president released the aid because he’d gotten wind that there was a whistleblower out there who was about to go public on all this?
Pause. This is a, or maybe even the, key question. The Republicans’ big argument now, and to me probably their most persuasive line, is that the aid was released anyway, after less than two months, so no harm, no foul. And yes, that’s true, it was released.
It’s not a question. Because we know the answer. Both the White House and the DOJ had obtained the whistleblower complaint by that point, sent to them by acting DNI Joseph Maguire. Remember Maquire? It seems like a lifetime ago that Maguire was brought into Congress to defend his failure to release the whistleblower complaint to the Intelligence committees in House and Senate — as the law requires. Instead, Maguire got his hands on that complaint on August 26 and apparently marched it straight to the White House.
In fact, not only did the release on the Ukraine funds happen after Maguire made the White House aware of the whistleblower complaint, on September 9th, the Intelligence Community Inspector General, fed up with the delays and misdirection, notified the House and Senate that a complaint on an urgent matter. It was two days after that when the hold on funds was released.
Leonard Pitts on burying the lede, and the story, and the world.
Miami Herald
Consider three recent news stories:
In Washington, the White House announces it will cancel government subscriptions to The Washington Post and New York Times. The administration calls it a cost-saving measure, but the truth is obvious. Trump famously hates both newspapers.
In Citrus County, Florida, county commissioners reject the local library’s request for a digital subscription to The Times. Says Commissioner Scott Carnahan, “Fake news, OK, I agree with President Trump. I don’t want the New York Times in this county.”
In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the library reports that an unknown patron has been hiding books critical of Trump and conservatism, deliberately mis-shelving them in other sections of the library. As that person explained in a note, “I am going to continue hiding these books in the most obscure places I can find to keep this propaganda out of the hands of young minds.”
The sheer snowflakery of all this cannot, of course, be overstated. And yes, it reeks of anti-intellectualism, that proud, bullyboy ignorance that has too often fed books — and bodies — into bonfires.
But this also speaks to barriers of intellectual — and emotional — separation that now zigzag across America like a scar, splitting towns, colleges, churches, workplaces, friendships and families. Nor is the barrier only being built from one side. As liberal college students demand “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” so they won’t have to confront contradiction of their beliefs, it becomes painfully clear this wall is a bipartisan project. And that should concern us all.
Honestly, I’d expect better from Pitts than that clumsy tacked on both-siderism. When someone points out a demand for a “safe space” from criticism of Democratic officials, or announces “trigger warnings” before discussion of health care policy, let me know.