I wanted to flag this article in the Post that published overnight, which purports (and I don’t doubt it) to described the House GOP’s latest angle on protecting the President.
Quite simply, Rudy Giuliani, Gordon Sondland and Mick Mulvaney were freelancing this whole caper and the President was not involved. In other words, they’re the fall guys who get Trump off the hook. It’s a curious and entertaining article on a number of levels since by the conventions of newspaper writing dictate that the authors cannot really say the entire premise is absurd. They have to step around it and obliquely suggest it.
Join
Happy Friday, November 8. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was subpoenaed to testify in the impeachment inquiry Thursday night — he is, predictably, ignoring it. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.
Join
Here are some basic thoughts about what happened in this story, what matters and how to describe it.
The President used extortion to cheat in the 2020 presidential election. He used military aid dollars meant to aid an ally against his Russian patrons in order to force Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 elections, in order to remain in office by corrupt means.
There are various crimes that get committed along the way. But that is the core of it. The President is delegated vast powers to act in the national interest and he has vast discretion to determine what he or she believes the national interest is. But when he uses those powers for his own personal or financial gain they are illegitimate on their face, abuses of power and merit impeachment. The fact that he was doing so to sabotage a national election makes it vastly worse. And the fact that he was getting a foreign power to sabotage a US election makes it worse still. Any talk of “quid pro quos” and this and that minutiae is a distortion of what happened. Quid pro quos are simply exchanges of one thing for another. Presidents will ask for help on one bill in exchange for another. They’ll condition one kind of aid to a country on assistance on another foreign policy goal. In itself it means nothing. The crimes are bribery and extortion, the abuses of power are using presidential power for personal gain and the central offense against the state is the attempt to sabotage a national election, the event on which the legitimacy of the entire system rests.
For Inside members, I hope you can join us for an Inside Briefing tomorrow at 3 PM. We’ll be speaking with Heather Hurlburt, director of the New Models of Policy Change Program at New America Foundation. Heather held senior positions at the White House and State Department under Bill Clinton and frequently writes on foreign policy issues for New York Magazine.
Kentucky Republicans are already considering ways to install Matt Bevin as Governor or call a new election because he lost the first time.
We have just 179 member sign-ups to go before we get to our 2019 membership drive goal of 32,000 members. Take that moment today and help us get to that goal. Just click here. Thank you!
It appears that Republican Matt Bevin has gone down to defeat in the Kentucky governor’s race. Democrat Andy Beshear will be the state’s next governor. Republicans are having a solid night overall in the state. So it’s worth considering what this result means and what it doesn’t. Matt Bevin is many ways a toxic figure, even in a deep red state. He dismantled a very popular and successful implementation of the ACA. This is mainly about Bevin’s unpopularity, which was well earned.
Why it’s important is this: Bevin went all in on impeachment to get himself over the finish line. He brought in Trump for a caustic, aggressive rally last night to finish the sale. But it didn’t work. That’s a big deal.
My personal posting may be a bit lighter today or delayed until later in the day, as it was yesterday, because I’m going through the impeachment inquiry transcripts methodically. Here’s Sondland’s and here’s Volker’s testimony.
Just a reminder that today’s decision on presidential immunity involves an investigation into hush money payments from Trump to a porn star and to a Playboy model.
This may be a relatively minor point and it’s a bit in the weeds. But it’s important to note. On CNN a couple days ago I saw David Chalian say that polling numbers are getting more complicated for Democrats on impeachment because independents are moving from significant support to more like evenly divided. But that’s actually not quite true. What has happened is that the question pollsters are asking, and especially the ones they and the press are focusing on, are changing.