New episode of the podcast. Taintor, Riga, Kovensky and I try to make sense of the fast unfolding Trump-Ukraine story.
It’s hard to keep track of the gross abuse of power. But here’s the critical thing to keep an eye on through this. We know about election interference of targeting the Biden’s. What was even clearer in those texts is demand that Ukraine “get to the bottom of” collusion between the DNC and Ukraine in the 2016 election. That is code for the conspiracy theory that Russia was framed for the DNC hack and actually didn’t interfere in the 2016 election at all. The “real collusion” was between Ukraine and the Democrats. The big aim here – right in front of our faces, right in the texts and transcripts – is to clear Russia of the crime.
Chairs Schiff, Engel and Cummings did a major document dump tonight based on texts exchanged between various Trump Department officials, Rudy Giuliani and a top advisor to President Zelensky. The upshot is documentation of months of efforts by the Trump officials to get Ukraine to publicly announce investigations of the Bidens and 2016 election collusion between Ukraine and the DNC in exchange for a White House meeting with President Trump and military aide to ward off Russian-backed separatists in the east.
What is important to note here is that the Ukraine-DNC collusion conspiracy theory, in addition to being crazy in itself, is in fact an exoneration of Russia. The idea is that Russia didn’t really interfere in the election. They were framed by Ukraine and the DNC. We’ve heard lots of talk about these ‘investigations’. But what seems more clear here is that the big “deliverable”, as Trump megadonor Gordon Sondland puts it in one text, is a public statement from Zelensky announcing these investigations. That in itself validates the key Trump/Giuliani conspiracy theories for domestic consumption in the United States and quite likely is the predicate for Bill Barr for announcing his own probes into the same.
It’s late. So I went through the document dump and tweeted out the key passages. I’ve assembled them together here.
Some points are so obvious they escape attention or so obvious as not to seem worth noting. Yet they are worth noting. Can anyone think of a country, out of the globe’s almost 200 sovereign states, where President Trump has called for a crackdown on corruption other than Ukraine?
I genuinely do not think there is a single example. There’s Baltimore and Puerto Rico but of course those are not countries.
I want to thank everyone who’s joined us as members over the last ten days. We have gained net 637 new members in our drive so far. That puts us a big leg of the way toward the goal for this drive. The confidence in the work that we do that your sign ups communicate is also a great boost to our organizational morale. There’s still plenty of time to join us during this drive. Just click here. But for now just, thank you.
Will the impeachment inquiry be able to keep up with an ongoing series of high crimes and misdemeanors?
Good TPM Readers, I was in the midst of writing out a post explaining how there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that that packet of pro-Trump conspiracy theories the State Department Inspector General brought up to the Hill was actually Rudy Giuliani’s work product: the packet of information he’d assembled in his trips abroad. Rudy likely piped it into the State Department. It got circulated through the Department by State appointees (this part we know). The IG had had it since May. But when he heard the events of the last week, especially Pompeo going on the warpath, the IG decided he wanted to get it out of his hands and into the hands of Congress as soon as possible.
Well, I’m robbed of my genius reconstruction of the evidence! Because now Rudy has admitted that, yeah, it’s his stuff.