We begin the impeachment inquiry with the man who, aside from Donald Trump, appears central to the misconduct that’s being uncovered under oath — Attorney General William Barr. Here’s Dana Milbank’s analysis at The Washington Post:
As Trump’s impeachment looms, Barr has degraded the office Elliot Richardson once dignified. Barr has turned the Justice Department into a shield for presidential misconduct and a sword wielded against political opponents. [...] Now, as part of the “distancing” campaign, Barr’s Justice Department would have us believe the attorney general never discussed with Trump the prospective Ukraine probe into the Bidens, didn’t talk to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani about Ukraine and didn’t know anything about the White House withholding aid to Ukraine.
Why would anybody doubt the sincerity of such claims?
Adam Gopnik asks why Trump is obsessed with outing the whistleblower:
The whistle-blower is the one who is acting in the prescribed lawful way; the President and his henchmen are the ones—no surprise here—calling on the media to violate the point and purpose of the law. At an election-eve rally on Monday night in Lexington, Kentucky, where Trump and Senator Rand Paul were stumping for Matt Bevin, the Republican governor, Paul said, referring to the whistle-blower, “I say tonight to the media, ‘Do your job and print his name!’ ” (The next night, Bevin’s Democratic opponent, Andy Beshear, declared victory.) On Wednesday, Donald Trump, Jr., following a story posted by Breitbart, heedlessly tweeted the whistle-blower’s possible identity.
And The Washington Post pens an editorial saying outing him or her would set a dangerous precedent:
When accountability fails or politicians confuse their own interests with the public’s, there must be a way for officials to raise the alarm without fear of retaliation. Hence the long-standing, bipartisan agreement that whistleblowers should be given formal and informal protections. Now that a president is being called out for egregious behavior and calling his party to rally to him, that consensus is in danger. The next time a patriotic civil servant witnesses misconduct, the craven campaign against today’s whistleblower may affect whether that misconduct is reported. If it is not, the public will be poorer for it.
Meanwhile, Tim Dickinson looks at the latest developments in the Roger Stone trial:
On day one of the trial, prosecutors dropped a bombshell, presenting call records showing that Trump and Stone spoke on the phone regularly as the WikiLeaks email-dump saga evolved, including on the day the DNC announced it had been hacked. Federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky stopped short of arguing Trump directed Stone’s activity, but the government alleged Stone’s criminal cover-up was perpetrated on behalf of the now-President. “Evidence will show Roger Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committee because the truth looked bad,” Zelinsky told jurors. “The truth looked bad for the Trump campaign and the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.”
Matt Stieb analyzes Jeff Sessions and his unwavering fealty to Trump:
Though Sessions’s senate bid had been expected for weeks, its format was not: An awkward video for an executive audience of one, all but begging for his squiggly endorsement. [...] For Sessions, catering to the president’s bottomless need to be complimented and forgetting about all the insults Trump lobbied at him — mocking his accent, calling him a “dumb Southerner,” and calling his appointment to AG his “biggest mistake” — will be worth it if Trump tells Alabama Republicans that he’s the man to unseat Doug Jones, the most vulnerable incumbent in the 2020 senate races.
On a final note, here is a powerful op-ed by veteran Alan Pitts calling on Congress to stand up and defend democracy and announcing the formation of a new nonpartisan group to do the same:
Our president attempted to use his office to coerce a foreign government for help in his political campaign, and put our national security at risk by withholding nearly $400 million in military aid that Congress, a coequal branch of government, had already approved on a broad, bipartisan basis. Now, the same members of Congress who approved that funding say it’s OK for President Donald Trump to make that aid contingent on help for his campaign. How is that loyalty to your country? [...]
Our members of Congress swore the same oath we did, and have the same duty to protect what our veterans have put their lives on the line to protect for 243 years: our Constitution and our democracy, not politics. We’ve done our part, now it’s time that our elected representatives find the courage to do theirs.