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It’s long been clear that if the President is driven from office it will only be by the voters in November 2020. Trump has overseen and catalyzed a decisive pivot by the GOP toward authoritarian rule and illiberal politics. Trump will always have 30-something Republican senators who will maintain him in office no matter what crimes he commits or how he violates his oath of office. But we’ve now reached an impasse, a critical juncture at which the House of Representatives, controlled by a party that still supports the rule of law, has no choice but to dramatically intensify its oversight efforts up to and including voting on articles of impeachment against the President. The very premise of democratic government and the rule of law is under active attack by a lawless President.
Today we’re launching our annual membership drive at TPM. (TLDR? Click here and join.) If you have already subscribed and become a member, we truly appreciate it. Since 2015 you have helped us grow our membership numbers from just over 3,000 to now exactly 30,670 members. That has made us a model of what independent media organizations can do focusing on members as the news media staggers in the face of ad industry woes. It is critical that we add 2,000 new members by the end of the calendar year (bring us to 32,700 total members, to be precise). And we hope to do most or all of it during this drive. This is critical for our finances, for our team’s effort to build a robust and sustainable business model based on memberships. But it’s also about something beyond us.
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.