In Thursday’s press briefing, the White House just admitted to a charge it’s been vehemently denying for weeks. Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney conceded Thursday that the administration did in fact withhold congressionally-approved funding from Ukraine to push the country to investigate “the corruption related to the DNC server” in the 2016 election.
When challenged, point blank, by a reporter who said that what Mulvaney was describing was a textbook definition of a quid pro quo, he declared, “We do that all the time with foreign policy.”
In the fallout of the Ukraine call scandal, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said, “There was no quid pro quo. You’d have to have that if there was going to be anything wrong.”
Rep. Mark Meadows has repeatedly tweeted that despite Democratic “spin,” there was “zero evidence of quid pro quo.”
President Trump himself boasted that there was no quid pro quo as his principle defense.
….You will see it was a very friendly and totally appropriate call. No pressure and, unlike Joe Biden and his son, NO quid pro quo! This is nothing more than a continuation of the Greatest and most Destructive Witch Hunt of all time!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2019
After weeks of Trump and the GOP swearing that there was no quid pro quo and that the administration hasn’t exploited foreign policy for political expedience, Mulvaney just confessed on live television that there was a quid pro quo threatening to illegally defy Congress to weaponize our foreign policy against the best interests of the people and for Trump’s personal political benefit.
Surely GOP squishes will try to explain Mulvaney’s statements all away, drawing false equivalences between President Barack Obama’s earnestly abysmal foreign policy with Trump’s expressly corrupt brand. But by declaring that Trump is holding the G-7 at one of his own properties in the same breath as the oath that Trump was super-duper seriously concerned about Hunter Biden’s corruption, Mulvaney just undercut the only defense Trump could have used. Joe Biden initiated a quid pro quo with the Ukrainians, but it was motivated by the global consensus that the corrupt prosecutor at the time needed to go. We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s quid pro quo came from a genuine concern for corruption when he just announced that he’s using taxpayer funds during the G-7 summit to enrich himself?
