First reactions are important, and my first reaction to the transcript of President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s President Zelensky was, “It looks bad.” Others who, like me, aren’t Trumpists or in the Resistance had the same reaction. It looked bad.
The president disagrees, but he pressed for an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden, saying: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do.” Trump had already referred to U.S. support for Ukraine and mentioned a lack of reciprocity, so it’s easy to see the phone call as a shakedown for dirt on Trump’s front-running presidential rival.
But second thoughts are important, too. For example, when is a delay not a delay? All financial aid to Ukraine was paid out by the end of the Sept. 30 fiscal year, as laid out by Congress. Yes, the flow was stanched for a while, but within already prescribed limits. Trump’s perceived threat was never carried out. It’s like so much of what he does — full of sound and fury, signifying not nothing exactly, but not all that his critics loudly proclaim.
There’s another important issue, which is Trump’s intent. Like most things he says and does, his phone call produced mutually exclusive certainty in both supporters and opponents. When James Comey, of all people, said he’d withhold judgment, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace actually asked why; she thought guilt was already established. But Trump is so often somewhere both defensible and shocking (even when one can no longer be surprised).
Impeachment is camouflaged badly as litigation, but it’s pure politics. So there’s no definitive answer as to whether what Trump did was impeachable. A grand jury will indict a ham sandwich, and the House of Representatives can impeach for whatever it chooses.
But it’s clear Trump didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. There were 17 people on the call. These included the secretary of state and, perhaps more importantly, several lower officials whose loyalty couldn’t be presumed.
Ken Starr, independent counsel for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, captured the balance of probabilities on this during a recent podcast with Byron York. Starr said Trump “did nothing that sounds in the nature of a corrupt bargain … I’m not dismissing whether the president exercised wise judgment. If I’d been on the call or preparing the president for the call, I’d have said, ‘Don’t raise this yourself. I understand your concerns, but this is not something that’s appropriate for you to get into.'”
So, inappropriate, highly unusual, and questionable but, on current evidence, a stretch to say it should overturn the 2016 election and throw the president out of office.
We’ll return often to this, and I recommend our editorial on the subject, along with all the other great reads in this week’s magazine.
