As President Trump’s most ardent defenders have reiterated in the weeks following the whistleblower frenzy, politicians initiate quid pro quos with foreign governments all the time. Trump may have threatened to withhold $400 million in congressionally approved aid to Ukraine, his surrogates argue, but as vice president, Joe Biden threatened to withhold a whopping $1 billion.
What matters in both cases were the stakes. Biden’s quid pro quo was a service to the global community, which begged the United States to oust corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin. It was an act to patriotically benefit the American people. Trump’s motive is the core of the current question rattling the country.
Trump’s most obvious defense from the release of the transcript between him and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was that his discussion of the $400 million aid package wasn’t linked to his later requests about investigating Biden and his son Hunter Biden, formerly a member of the besieged board of Burisma Holdings. As witnesses to the events surrounding the July 25 call testified in front of the impeachment proceeding investigators, his new defense became that his push to have Zelensky to commit to investigating the Bidens derived from Trump’s desire to combat corruption in Ukraine.
It was never terribly plausible that Trump, who in the middle of the transcript fallout announced that he’d hold the G-7 summit at one of his own properties, took corruption in an allied nation very seriously. But with Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony and revisions now in public purview, Trump’s best bet is to throw him under the bus.
In Sondland’s testimonies, he carefully words his claims that American aid wouldn’t be delivered unless Ukraine issued a public anti-corruption “statement,” not that the investigation itself be initiated.
Some excerpts:
You get the picture.
Trump’s easiest defense here, if he is in fact innocent of putting his own personal interests over the public good in Ukraine, is that Sondland ran with his “presumption” and acted on his own terms, not following Trump’s orders. After all, the most damning aspect of this story thus far comes from the Sondland-Yermak meeting that lit the National Security Council on fire. It’s theoretically possible that Trump intentionally hired a known lackey in Sondland, let him keep a long leash, and then Sondland went rogue.
But everyone knows that’s not what Occam’s Razor dictates, and given that Sondland explicated that the aid was contingent on Ukraine issuing a public statement about investigating the Bidens rather than actually just doing it in private, it seems increasingly evident that the quid pro quo was enacted for Trump’s personal political gain.
Trump spurred the entire Mueller farce by firing FBI Director James Comey after he wouldn’t publicly announce that Trump wasn’t personally under investigation. It was an unforced error that didn’t remotely constitute an impeachable offense, but it did derail a large part of Trump’s first term.
Trump may have just let his desire for another public declaration do the same. But this time, it could render him the third president in our nation’s history to be successfully impeached.
