Autocratic forces are ascendant in America, but the story isn’t fully written. Truth-telling independent media is one remaining bulwark against the unrestrained exercise of power. At a time when billionaire owners of corporate media are making accommodations to power, our nonprofit newsroom cannot be bought, bent, or broken. Depend on it, and please stand with us.
Autocratic forces are ascendant in America, but the story isn’t fully written. Truth-telling independent media is one remaining bulwark against the unrestrained exercise of power. At a time when billionaire owners of corporate media are making accommodations to power, our nonprofit newsroom cannot be bought or broken. Please stand with us.
In a fiery statement bringing Thursday’s impeachment hearings to a close, House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff explained the gravity of the accusations against President Donald Trump and dismantled the Republican argument against impeachment. Where his Republican counterpart Devin Nunes resorted to bluster and a bit of Founding Father necrophilia, Schiff was clinical and incisive. In a matter of 20 minutes, he laid out both a straightforward case for impeaching the president and a comprehensive picture of GOP denial.
Schiff began by repudiating Republicans’ cries of a “Russia hoax,” reminding views that Russia did indeed interfere with the 2016 presidential election. “We all remember that debacle in Helsinki, when the president stood next to Vladimir Putin and questioned his own intelligence agencies,” he said, bristling. “But of course, they were silent when the president said that.”
.@RepAdamSchiff recalls when Trump stood next to Putin and attacked US intelligence agencies who determined Russia interfered in the 2016 election: "I wish I had heard just some of the righteous indignation we heard in the committee today … but of course they were silent!" pic.twitter.com/R64tOnLnrt
Schiff took pains to clarify the geopolitical stakes underlying Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s communications with Trump. Zelensky needed Trump as an ally in his nation’s war against Russia. He was entering a negotiation with its president, Vladimir Putin, over how to end the conflict, and the prospect of Trump’s support was a large part of the leverage he needed.
“Whether [Zelensky] has good leverage or lousy leverage depends on whether the Russians think he has a relationship with the president, and the president wouldn’t give him that, not without getting something in return,” Schiff said. “And that return was investigations of his rival that would help his reelection.”
.@RepAdamSchiff: “The interest, of course, was in an investigation of Donald Trump’s rival, the one that he apparently feared the most. And they were willing to do whatever was necessary to get Ukraine to do that dirty work, to do that political investigation.” pic.twitter.com/yVcdS1TS0z
Then, questioning his colleagues’ grasp of legal procedure, Schiff called accusations that all evidence was hearsay “absurd.”
“After all, you’re relating what you heard and you’re saying it, so it must be hearsay,” Schiff said, mimicking the Republican members of the committee. “Therefore, we don’t really have to think about it, do we? Well, if that were true, you could never present any evidence in court unless the jury was also in the Ward Room.”
.@RepAdamSchiff: “[The Republicans'] defense is, ‘It’s all hearsay…Because we’re not in the room, it’s all hearsay.’ …Well if that were true, you could never present any evidence in court unless the jury was also in the Ward Room. That’s absurd.” pic.twitter.com/LPdeepwF6V
And in any case, Trump is implicated by his own words, as written in the memo of the July 25 phone call. Per the Republican argument, Schiff said, “We should imagine that he said something about actually fighting corruption, instead of what he actually said, which was, ‘I want you to do us a favor, though.'”
Said Schiff: “When the founders provided a mechanism in the Constitution for impeachment, they were worried about what might happen if someone unethical took the highest office in the land and used it for their personal gain and not because of deep care about the big things that should matter.” Though Schiff resisted impeachment for a long time, Trump’s request for China to investigate the Bidens pushed him over the edge, he said. “The president believes he is above the law, beyond accountability,” he concluded. “And in my view, there is nothing more dangerous than an unethical president who believes they are above the law.”
Schiff: "The day after [Mueller testified], Donald Trump is back on the phone, asking another nation to involve itself in another US election. That says to me, this president believes he is above the law—beyond accountability. And in my view, there is nothing more dangerous.” pic.twitter.com/nCjCkqdGot
Dear God, can we please ban the phrase “quid pro quo”? If you’ve watched any of the impeachment hearings so far, you’ve been subjected to this expression; yesterday it was used, by one count, nearly 70 times. The phrase at the center of the Ukraine scandal is simple, meaning “something for something”—say, aid for a foreign country like Ukraine in exchange for that government investigating the opponents of US President Donald Trump. But it isn’t a legal charge of a crime—or English. But even so, it’s become something of a false test in this winding impeachment journey, much like collusion was during the Russia investigation. As our own David Corn has written, “The game plan for Trump and his gang, once again, is to distract from Trump’s clear-and-present wrongdoing by asserting he didn’t actually do something worse, such as break the law.”
Seeming to recognize how the phrase is both confusing and muddying, Democrats have attempted to switch away from the Latin phrase to “bribery,” which has led Republicans to crow that Democrats are backing down from their initial allegations. (Synonyms are hard!)
And yet! the phrase persists.
So I wondered: Who first began using the term to discuss Trump and Ukraine? How did this become the thing? And most importantly: Who can we blame for this?
Spoiler alert: I went down and down the rabbit hole and there is no clear answer. Or, more accurately, there seem to be a few possible answers.
Let’s first talk about its use in public conversation. According to our search of Nexis’ news archive, the first use of “quid pro quo” in relation to the larger Ukraine scandal popped up on September 19—about a week before the whistleblower’s complaint was made public, but after Congress knew about it, and when reports were swirling about its existence. In an interview on CNN, Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and current horrific lawyer to the president, brought up the widely dismissed claim that former Vice President Joe Biden abused his power to help his son in Ukraine. Host Chris Cuomo pressed Giuliani on whether he could prove “it was quid pro quo,” referencing Biden’s behavior, not Trump’s, in this instance. (The conversation then devolved into the two speaking over one another.) On another CNN spot the same day, national security reporter Samantha Vinograd was asked about the whistleblower complaint and said, “what we’re seeing is some kind of quid pro quo potentially play out,” in reference to Trump’s potential actions.
Also that same day, on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, security expert Ned Price was talking about the whistleblower report and explained it “raises the prospect” that “what we’re really talking about is a quid pro quo,” again in reference to the president.
Over the next few days it began to splash across national newspapers, often in the context of off-the-record conversations about the whistleblower report.
Just days before the complaint became public, the Washington Post said on September 20, “one source familiar with the contents of the [July 25] phone call said Trump did not raise the issue of American military and intelligence aid that the administration was at the time withholding from Ukraine—indicating that there may not have been an explicit quid pro quo expressed in the call.” Also on the 20th, the New York Timesnoted that according to unnamed Democrats, “the key question is whether Mr. Trump was demanding a quid pro quo, explicitly or implicitly.” The next day, on the 21st, the Wall Street Journal confirmed with an unnamed Ukrainian official that, “Mr. Trump in the call didn’t mention a provision of U.S. aid to Ukraine, said this person, who didn’t believe Mr. Trump offered the Ukrainian president any quid pro quo for his cooperation on any investigation.”
The 21st is also the day Giuliani seems to have publicly picked it up, now using it to refer his boss:
Whistleblower story, like Kavanaugh story, is blowing up. Now no mention of money or quid pro quo. So appropriate conduct. Now we must look at Biden Family pattern of corruption of selling his public offices for 5 decades. Pattern of corruption enabled by Swamp.
The president soon followed his lead. When Trump announced he was releasing the transcript of his call with Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky a few days later, he claimed “NO quid pro quo!” for himself, “unlike Joe Biden and his son.”
….You will see it was a very friendly and totally appropriate call. No pressure and, unlike Joe Biden and his son, NO quid pro quo! This is nothing more than a continuation of the Greatest and most Destructive Witch Hunt of all time!
From there, quid pro quo blossomed into a behemoth. A crucial point was its usage in mid-October when acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted to a quid pro quo. Its fate was sealed.
But let’s back up. Could this have entered the media vernacular because the unnamed sources were already using it? Maybe! We can’t really know. But we do know definitively that officials in the Trump administration—including many of those at the center of the impeachment inquiry—were using the phrase long before the media did to describe the Trump administration withholding security assistance and a White House visit in exchange for political investigations.
On September 7, two days before Congress learned about the whistleblower complaint, it seems to have come up in conversation between Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat to Ukraine, and Tim Morrison, a former top National Security Council official. As Taylor described in his congressional testimony:
[O]n September 7, I had a conversation with Mr. Morrison in which he described a phone conversation earlier that day between Ambassador Sondland and President Trump. Mr. Morrison said that he had a “sinking feeling” after learning about this conversation from Ambassador Sondland. According to Mr. Morrison, President Trump told Ambassador Sondland that he was not asking for a “quid pro quo.” But President Trump did insist that President Zelenskyy go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference, and that President Zelenskyy should want to do this himself.
Then again, it comes up the next day:
[O]n September 8, Ambassador Sondland and I spoke on the phone. He said he had talked to President Trump as I had suggested a week earlier, but that President Trump was adamant that President Zelenskyy, himself, had to “clear things up and do it in public.” President Trump said it was not a “quid pro quo.” Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelenskyy and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelenskyy did not “clear things up” in public, we would be at a “stalemate.”
Presumably, these are direct quotes, though second hand.
It was definitely used again the following day, on September 9, by Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, according to text messages between Taylor and Sondland.
“I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor texted.
Sondland replied, the “President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s [sic] of any kind.”
We know from Sondland’s testimony yesterday that before responding to this text, he talked to President Trump. Sondland claims he asked the president an open question: What do you want from Ukraine? Sondland says the president himself produced the phrase, replying: “I want nothing, I want nothing, I want no quid pro quo.”
(Remember: This was the same day that the IG reported to Congress the existence of the whistleblower complaint.)
But this all still doesn’t answer the question: How the hell did Trump come up with this phrase?
In fact, both Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) ended up with a similar question yesterday:
Under questioning from @CongressmanRaja, Sondland admits he can't rule out that Trump said he wanted nothing from Ukraine during their September 9 phone call simply because the whistleblower complaint was about to blow the lid off the whole scheme pic.twitter.com/kULQHj1OmS
The lawmakers suggest Trump starting using it as an attempt to cover his tracks. Still, my suspicion is that Trump first heard the phrase in a phone call before all this, one as far back as late August from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Johnson said that month Sondland had “described to him a quid pro quo involving a commitment by Kyiv to probe matters related to U.S. elections and the status of nearly $400 million in U.S. aid to Ukraine that the president had ordered to be held up in July.” So, according to the Journal, Johnson said he called Trump directly:
Sen. Ron Johnson said that Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, had described to him a quid pro quo involving a commitment by Kyiv to probe matters related to U.S. elections and the status of nearly $400 million in U.S. aid to Ukraine that the president had ordered to be held up in July.
Alarmed by that information, Mr. Johnson, who supports aid to Ukraine and is the chairman of a Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over the region, said he raised the issue with Mr. Trump the next day, Aug. 31, in a phone call, days before the senator was to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. In the call, Mr. Trump flatly rejected the notion that he directed aides to make military aid to Ukraine contingent on a new probe by Kyiv, Mr. Johnson said.
“He said, ‘Expletive deleted—No way. I would never do that. Who told you that?” the Wisconsin senator recalled in an interview Friday. Mr. Johnson said he told the president he had learned of the arrangement from Mr. Sondland.
Given this use of quid pro quo isn’t in direct quotes, it’s just my suspicion that this is where the phrase entered Trump’s lexicon and started to ruin our lives, presumably traveling from Sondland to Johnson to Trump. At the very least, it seems to have been in use by Sondland in early September, and very likely could have been used in his conversations with Trump.
So, in our very non-scientific query, let’s blame Sondland?
If there is some point in time you remember that I am missing, please, for the love of God, help us all get to the bottom of it. (I look forward to your crazed emails.)
One of the biggest bombshells on the first day of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings came from Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, who testified that a member of his staff overheard a phone call between President Donald Trump and US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland. During the call, Taylor said, the president had asked Sondland about “the investigations,” referring to investigations into Trump’s political enemies that he was pressuring Ukraine to conduct.
David Holmes, the staffer who overheard the call, just described that phone call during Thursday’s hearing. According to Holmes, he heard Trump ask, “So, he’s gonna do the investigation?” Holmes said that Sondland replied that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was indeed “gonna do it.”
David Holmes testifies that in a phone call he overheard, Sondland told Trump that Ukrainian President Zelenskiy "loves your a–." "I then heard President Trump ask, so is he going to do the investigation? Amb. Sondland replied that he's gonna do it." https://t.co/gSTHH3SBBDpic.twitter.com/XwZC9nL34P
Holmes described easily overhearing the phone call, which wasn’t on speakerphone, because Trump’s “voice was very loud and recognizable,” so much so that Sondland had to hold the phone away from his ear. Like this:
David Holmes demonstrates how he said Ambassador Sondland "winced" and held the phone away when President Trump was talking loudly on their call, so Holmes was able to overhear their conversation on Ukraine https://t.co/cUEuNWc5zjpic.twitter.com/nfOrHdDhjG
Holmes testified that after the call ended, he asked Sondland “if it was true that the president did not give a expletive about Ukraine,” to which Sondland agreed and said that “the president only cares about ‘big stuff.'” Sondland then explained that “big stuff” meant the investigation Trump wanted into the Bidens and Burisma—not the war Ukraine is fighting with Russia.
David Holmes says Sondland agreed that Trump "did not give an expletive about Ukraine"
"Amb. Sondland stated that the president only cares about big stuff," and later explained, "he meant big stuff that benefits the president like the Biden investigation" https://t.co/Q5w6PVVxewpic.twitter.com/MHXg3r50Q7
Holmes also testified that on the call, Trump and Sondland discussed the situation of A$AP Rocky, the American rapper who at the time was jailed in Sweden:
WATCH: David Holmes, political counselor for the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, describes Amb. Sondland's efforts to get rapper A$AP Rocky out of a Swedish jail. pic.twitter.com/ZoUfD26beT
Holmes said that when he returned to the US embassy, he “immediately briefed” his supervisor, as well as others, about the call between Sondland and Trump. He said that he “repeatedly referred to the call” in subsequent meetings where Trump’s interest in Ukraine “was potentially relevant.”
Trump, who has repeatedly attacked impeachment witnesses on Twitter, suggested that it would have been impossible for Holmes to overhear his statements:
I have been watching people making phone calls my entire life. My hearing is, and has been, great. Never have I been watching a person making a call, which was not on speakerphone, and been able to hear or understand a conversation. I’ve even tried, but to no avail. Try it live!
Connie Schultz, a journalist married to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), quickly noted that she, too, had once overheard “every word” of Trump’s comments on a phone call:
I sat in the backseat of a moving car on a busy Ohio highway and heard your every word during your call with the guy I knew sitting in the front seat. You were not on speakerphone, @realDonaldTrump. As my mother would say, your voice carries. https://t.co/awZn8fHn3j
Listen to Washington D.C. Bureau Chief David Corn describe the outrageous partisan theatrics in the impeachment room, and the mounting evidence against Donald Trump, in the latest episode of the Mother Jones Podcast:
Rudy Giuliani at Fox Business Network Studios on September 23, 2019.Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, named Rudy Giuliani as the key player in President Donald Trump’s scheme to force Ukraine to announce investigations into Joe Biden and supposed involvement in the 2016 election. Giuliani is also reportedly under investigation by the office of US Attorney in the Southern District of New York, which he once ran.
But Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, has not quit his pursuit of the investigations that landed him in this predicament. In an interview with Glenn Beck on BlazeTV later in the day on Wednesday, Giuliani continued to tout allegations by former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was forced out of his job in 2016 under pressure by then-Vice President Biden and officials from European states who believed Shokin was corrupt.
Giuliani complained that the State Department has refused to grant visas to Shokin and “four or five other parliamentarians” in Ukraine “who are ready, willing and able to testify” about “bribery” by Biden and “collusion” between Ukrainians and Democrats in 2016.
The former New York mayor told Beck he would give the host the names of these officials. “I was in contact with two of them today” Giuliani added.
I can’t stop staring at this photo of Trump’s notes.
Mark Wilson/Getty
“Tell Zellinsky to do the right thing,” his notes read. (There are many accepted spellings of the last name of President of Ukraine, but “Zellinsky” is not one of them.) “This is the final word from the Pres of the U.S.” His notepad appears to be lying on top of a print-out of one of his own tweets.
I can’t shake the feeling that this is what the notes of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia must have looked like when he wrote, “Democratic vote for me is right thing to do, Philadelphia, so do.”
Trump referred to these notes while he spoke from the White House lawn following US ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland’s Wednesday morning testimony that there was, in fact, a quid pro quo. Trump cited Sondland’s previous testimony in which he quoted Trump as saying, “I want no quid pro quo.”
Here are some more totally unhinged notes, titled “Ambas Gordon Sundland says.”
Mark Wilson/Getty
Watch Trump’s crazed press briefing here:
Listen to Washington, DC Bureau Chief David Corn describe the outrageous partisan theatrics playing out inside the impeachment room, and the mounting evidence against Donald Trump, in the latest episode of the Mother Jones Podcast:
Gordon Sondland is one of many ambassadors appointed by President Donald Trump without relevant foreign policy experience. Under Trump, the percentage of inexperienced diplomats has risen relative to President Barack Obama.Alex Edelman/Getty
“I am not a note taker, nor am I a memo writer. Never have been.”
Those words, documented in Gordon Sondland’s opening statement as part of Wednesday’s impeachment hearing, show just one of the differences in style between Sondland, a GOP megadonor tapped to be US ambassador to the European Union, and his colleagues in the Foreign Service who assumed senior roles in the State Department after lengthy careers in government.
Ambassadors George Kent and Bill Taylor, both career Foreign Service officers who were stationed at the US embassy in Kyiv, told lawmakers that they maintained copious notes during conversations with foreign leaders and other administration officials. When Taylor testified last week, he was asked if he kept records of the conversations referenced in his testimony. “All of them,” he replied.
Jennifer Williams, a Foreign Service officer who served on Vice President Mike Pence’s staff, also memorialized important events or details. During her testimony on Tuesday, she told lawmakers that she knew President Donald Trump’s July call with the Ukrainian president included a direct reference to Burisma, an energy company not mentioned in a memo of the call released by the White House, because it appeared in her contemporaneous notes. “My notes did reflect that the word Burisma had come up in the call, that the president had mentioned Burisma,” she said.
Sondland, a foreign policy neophyte who received the job after contributing $1 million toward Trump’s inauguration, apparently had no such habits. “Talking with foreign leaders might be memorable to some people. But this is my job. I do it all the time,” he said Wednesday. Given the apparent gaps in his memory, Sondland said he needed access to State Department records to jog his recollection of certain events, but the White House refused to provide them. “In the absence of these materials, my memory has not been perfect,” he said.
Sondland’s private deposition reflected that discordance between his own memory of events and the view captured by witnesses like Taylor, Williams, and Kent. At the private hearing last month, Sondland initially denied knowing of Trump’s desire to hold up military aid to Ukraine until its leaders issued a statement connecting the Bidens to corruption, but days later, he amended his testimony, saying his memory was “refreshed” after reading how Taylor and other witnesses portrayed events. In his opening statement Wednesday, Sondland described Trump’s policy as a clear quid pro quo, but adjusted his testimony again, this time saying the request for Ukraine’s anti-corruption statement was in exchange for an in-person meeting between Trump and the Ukrainian president. (Sondland said he assumed there was a link between military aid and the anti-corruption statement as well, calling it a “potential” quid pro quo.)
The relevance of Sondland’s lack of experience and untraditional professional habits has come under increasing scrutiny as he has occupied a significant role in the Ukraine scandal. In addition to not taking notes, he also broke from diplomatic protocol by calling Trump and other foreign leaders on his cellphone, making it especially easy for Russia and other American adversaries to spy on him. “I have unclassified conversations all the time from landlines that are unsecured and cellphones,” Sondland said Wednesday.
Since Trump entered office, inexperienced diplomats like Sondland—chosen not because of their professional qualifications, but their history of political donations—have assumed more vital diplomatic posts than any president since Franklin Roosevelt. As I reported last week:
Most ambassadors are career foreign service officers, highly trained professionals who have worked their way up through the diplomatic ranks. But a significant minority are so-called “political ambassadors” who come from outside the diplomatic corps—generally a mishmash of campaign donors, ex-lawmakers, and retired military officers. Under President Obama, these political ambassadors made up 30 percent of total appointees, according to a paper by Ryan Scoville, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School. Under Trump, that figure has ballooned to more than 40 percent, the highest number in nearly eight decades.
Many of these political ambassadors are not appointed to especially volatile regions of the world—those hotspots are generally overseen by career Foreign Service officers—but in Trumpworld, where freelancing by cronies like Rudy Giuliani is common, someone like Sondland was able to outflank career US officials responsible for Ukraine policy to assume an outsize role in negotiations with Ukrainian leaders despite the country not being an EU member. The results of that strategy, evidently favored by Trump, are playing out live in front of millions of people as the House continues its impeachment inquiry.
Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, may have given Democrats fodder for an additional article of impeachment against President Donald Trump.Drew Angerer/Getty
Before even opening his mouth Wednesday, Gordon Sondland gave Democrats even more evidence that the White House and State Department are obstructing Congress’ impeachment inquiry.
Sondland has repeatedly changed or added to his version of events, recalling new information that is damaging to Trump. Sondland is now suggesting that interference from the Trump administration is at least partly to blame for omissions in his earlier testimony.
“I have not had access to all of my phone records, State Department emails, and other State Department documents,” Sondland said, per his prepared opening statement. “And I was told I could not work with my EU Staff to pull together the relevant files.”
The White House had previously stated that it would not cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, but Sondland’s statement sheds new light on the efforts administration officials took internally to hinder witnesses who agreed to testify. “My lawyers and I have made multiple requests to the State Department and the White House for these materials. Yet, these materials were not provided to me,” Sondland said. “These documents are not classified and, in fairness, should have been made available. In the absence of these materials, my memory has not been perfect.”
Sondland’s complaints about White House interference dovetail with a warning issued Wednesday by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the committee conducting the impeachment hearings. Schiff noted in his opening statement that one of the articles of impeachment prepared against President Richard Nixon detailed that administration’s refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas. As part of the White House’s refusal to cooperate with Schiff’s committee, the State Department has not made any documents available.
SCHIFF warns Trump & Pompeo to top obstructing the investigation: “I remind the president that Article 3 of the impeachment articles drafted against President Nixon was his refusal to obey the subpoenas of Congress.” pic.twitter.com/5U2SDhwFqz
Listen to Washington, DC Bureau Chief David Corn describe the outrageous partisan theatrics in the impeachment room, and the mounting evidence against Donald Trump, in the latest episode of the Mother Jones Podcast:
Former US special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker entered Tuesday’s afternoon impeachment hearing as one of the few witnesses with testimony that could potentially be favorable to President Donald Trump. Unlike other government officials who described a strategy of pressuring the Ukrainian leader to investigate Trump’s political rival, Volker told House investigators in a private deposition last month that “at no time” was he “aware of or took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden.”
In his opening statement on Tuesday, Volker changed his tune. “I have learned many things that I did not know at the time of the events in question,” he said. Specifically, Volker said he was not aware of the implicit link between Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, and the vice president’s son Hunter. “I now understand that others saw the idea of investigating possible corruption involving the Ukrainian company, Burisma, as equivalent to investigating former Vice President Biden,” Volker said. “I saw them as very different—the former being appropriate and unremarkable, the latter being unacceptable. In retrospect, I should have seen that connection differently, and had I done so, I would have raised my own objections.”
In response to questioning from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Volker drove a finer distinction between what he saw as a request for one legitimate investigation, into Burisma, and one illegitimate one, into Biden. “Those things I saw as completely distinct,” Volker said. “What I was trying to do in working with the Ukrainians was to thread a needle.” Volker seemed to think he could convince Trump that Ukraine was fighting corruption without dragging Biden into it, not realizing that the two were linked. His updated testimony reflects that conclusion. “I now understand that most of the other people didn’t see or didn’t consider this distinction—that for them it was synonymous.”
Volker testifies in hindsight, he "should have recognized" that some, including Trump, saw probing Burisma "equivalent to investigating former vice president Biden." Adds, "I now understand that most of the other people didn't see this distinction. For them it was synonymous." pic.twitter.com/wXQItTseDX
To be clear: Volker knew of Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board and understood that the former Ukrainian top prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko, had pushed a narrative in the United States that Burisma paid Hunter Biden to influence his father. These allegations “were themselves self-serving, intended to make [Lutsenko] appear valuable to the United States, so that the United States might weigh in against his being removed from office by the new government,” Volker said last month, adding that the allegation of wrongdoing by Joe Biden “simply has no credibility to me.”
Knowing this fact, Volker seemed to ignore Hunter Biden’s relevance to Burisma and assume Trump’s interest in it was a good-faith attempt to root out corruption in Ukraine. That explanation struck somecommentators on Twitter as a cover for Volker’s failure to oppose Trump’s Ukraine policy, which most other impeachment witnesses have characterized as an abuse of power designed to enlist Ukraine’s help in damaging a political opponent.
And then presumably either it would serve Trump's purposes without getting Volker's hands dirty (because Trump could spin a Burisma investigation into whatever he wanted) or Trump would just … back down, I guess?
Volker’s appearance before the intelligence panel, requested by Republicans, is yet another sign of the way career government officials—and their reputations—have become collateral in a scandal advanced by Trump and his allies.
The odd thing is Volker had a good reputation before this, now accused of being one of Rudy’s bag men. Perhaps a sign of what happens to those to get dragged in, dragged down by forces beyond their control.
“My worst fear of how our Ukraine policy could play out was playing out.” That’s how Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman described what was going through his head while he was listening to President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that’s at the heart of the House’s impeachment inquiry.
The moment came while Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) was questioning Vindman, who is the Ukraine expert on the National Security Council. “Frankly, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Vindman said. “Now this was likely to have significant implications for US national security.” Maloney asked him why he immediately reported the phone call and Vindman replied, “because that was my duty.”
"Frankly, I couldn't believe what I was hearing," Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman told lawmakers when asked what went through his head when listening to President Trump's phone call with Ukraine's president. https://t.co/hCQkQ65AGDpic.twitter.com/QiUSMAH7q4
Throughout Vindman’s testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, the Republican line has been to question Vindman’s loyalty to Trump, which has caused worries about his safety. Meanwhile, the White House’s twitter account has been pushing the familiar GOP narrative that Vindman is another “Never Trumper” who is not to be trusted:
But despite efforts to question Vindman’s judgement and loyalty—Trump even questioned why he was wearing his military uniform, echoing a talking point from right-wing outlets that Vindman was wearing it as a stunt—Maloney praised his dedication to his duty and reminded him of what he said to his dad in his opening statement: “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who began calling for President Trump to be impeached earlier this year, believes we have now reached “the point of no return” where it is inarguably clear that he has committed criminal acts. Ocasio-Cortez discussed the issue with Yahoo News on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as the third day of public hearings were being conducted in the Democrats’ ongoing impeachment inquiry.
“We’re kind of knee deep here in impeachment inquiry … and so at this point I think we’re beyond the question as to whether Trump has committed a crime or whether he’s violated the Constitution,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “He’s clearly engaged in extortion and bribery.”
…
“It’s not just Trump, but who else is … going to be implicated in this,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding, “I think, when it comes to what we’ve discovered, we’re at the point of no return and it’s just a question of how many crimes have been potentially committed and who else has committed them.”
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