I mentioned below that the key thing about this latest and most egregious Trump scandal is that his senior team was clearly in on it, aware of it, participated in it. One key person here is Vice President Mike Pence. Earlier this month Pence flew to Poland to fill in for President Trump in meetings with European leaders on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. On September 1st, he met in Warsaw with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The next day he held a press conference with President Duda of Poland at which he was specifically asked whether he had pressed Zelensky to manufacture damaging information about Joe Biden and whether military aid was being held up until he did.
Pence started by saying he hadn’t and then proceeded to give an answer that made it pretty clear that he had, even if he had not mentioned the former Vice President by name. It caught the ear’s of everyone who was already following this story. It’s even more clear with what we learned last week.
The only reasonable response to the President’s effort to force Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 presidential election is to demand the President resign and be prosecuted for criminal abuse of power after he leaves the White House. The President has deserved to be impeached for years. But last week’s revelations have an immediate bearing on the President’s foreign policy team and his top advisors at the White House.
Trump really wants to make the business dealings of the candidates’ children an issue in the 2020 election? Okay then.
It’s definitely time to return to this as part of the on-going pattern of criminal conduct. Back in May, the US Ambassador to Ukraine was fired. Rudy Giuliani had his fingerprints all over it.
New breaking news episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast. Kate Riga and I talk to TPM’s Josh Kovensky about what we’ve learned on the Ukraine/Whistleblower front over the last 48 hours and how it connects up with Josh’s reporting going back months. If you’re interested in understanding this story I strongly recommend it. Listen here.
The lede in this new Journal article pretty much tells the story.
President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden ’s son, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, on a probe, according to people familiar with the matter.
As part of the Covering Climate Now coalition’s week devoted to climate coverage, we published a few great Cafe pieces that really get at the politics of climate action.
All four that we published are worth a look, but we had two particularly insightful posts from political science researchers.
Over the last 24 hours, in emails and tweets, I’ve heard people say some version of ‘Hey, it’s a twofer. Maybe this new scandal will take out Trump and Joe Biden!’
Let me say that there are lots of reasons for Democrats not to support Joe Biden – ideology, mass incarceration, age, it not being his time, politics, just qualities as a campaigner. But even though these comments are semi-flippant this is a temptation Democrats should resist. This really is no different from claims that Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster or Barack Obama was born in Kenya, though obviously there’s a racist component to the latter canard. In terms of being in touch with reality or not, it’s no different. Democrats are prone to being manipulated in this way. They really need to resist the urge, just as Clinton’s opponents should have resisted rightwing and Russian efforts to sow divisions among them in 2016.
President Trump has just gotten his first crack at responding to last night’s news. Asked whether he discussed Joe Biden in his conversation with the President of Ukraine, he replies: “It doesn’t matter what I discussed” and says “someone out to look into Joe Biden.”
Josh Kovensky predicted this afternoon how this story in fact unfolded this evening. Given the gravity of the news, I’ve taken Josh’s piece out from behind the Prime paywall. You can read it below or at this link.