The case for impeaching President Trump now rests largely on the testimony of Ambassador Bill Taylor. His account of events leading up to Trump’s phone call is damning if true. He said Trump inappropriately demanded that Ukraine’s new government help his reelection bid to get a one-on-one meeting with Trump and foreign aid that had already been approved by Congress and signed into law by the president.
Taylor’s testimony clashes with claims by Trump and several diplomats. So should we believe Taylor or the men, such as Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who offer conflicting accounts? Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
Unfortunately, news media are prone to shoot first and ask questions later.
“If Bill Taylor says it happened, it happened,” New York Times correspondent Michael Crowley wrote on Twitter, quoting praise for the “model” diplomat.
We have no reason to doubt the honesty or accuracy of Taylor, a West Point graduate and lifelong civil servant. But we do have reason to be skeptical of every new hero celebrated by the “resistance” media.
We remember when Trump’s single most powerful critic, the man who supposedly would bring down the president, was paraded before every cable news camera and fawned over until he was convinced he should run for president himself. That was porn star lawyer Michael Avenatti, who has since been charged with fraud.
Avenatti, by our count, made 121 appearances on CNN and 108 on MSNBC, enough that CNN personalities took him “seriously as a presidential contender.” On The View, Avenatti was told he was “like the Holy Spirit” who was “saving the country.”
Even Avenatti’s craziest gambits, such as his wild claim that Brett Kavanaugh led a rape gang in high school, were entertained by Democrats and liberal journalists. Sen. Mazie Hirono called this charge “credible,” and other Democrats called on the FBI to follow up on Avenatti’s claims.
Avenatti wasn’t alone among the self-styled “resistance” who went to war with Trump and received wholly undeserved plaudits for doing so. Taylor isn’t even the first public servant elevated in this manner. John Brennan, James Clapper, and Andrew McCabe come to mind.
Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director, is held in high esteem on the left side of cable news, serving as an MSNBC and NBC analyst. But in 2014, Brennan blatantly lied to Congress and the public when asked if the CIA was spying on Congress to swat away oversight. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Brennan declared on national TV. “I mean, we wouldn’t do that.”
Except it turns out that he had indeed done that. Yet he is still trotted out as a patriotic member of the intelligence community who just can’t stomach Trump’s transgressions.
Clapper, Brennan’s counterpart on CNN and Obama’s director of national intelligence, plays the same role as elder-statesman-turned-resistance-hero. Clapper, of course, lied to Congress in 2013 about the National Security Agency collecting “any type of data at all” on American citizens. “No, sir,” he told Sen. Ron Wyden. He added: “Not wittingly.” This was before Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was collecting and storing massive amounts of data on the phone habits of everyone living in the United States. Clapper was fortunate to escape a perjury prosecution thanks to the five-year statute of limitations.
McCabe is a career FBI agent held up as a patriot who was simply compelled by his conscience to call out Trump’s misdeeds. But McCabe got fired by the FBI not for bravely confronting Trump, but for lying to investigators to cover up his leaks from investigations. Prosecutors have recommended charges against him. Oh, and naturally, CNN has hired him as a contributor.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff gets especially glowing treatment, complete with glamour shots on glossy magazines, as a pursuer of truth. But he is a rank partisan who is always ready to use his inside access to leak misleading information. Schiff fooled the media and the Democratic base into believing Congress had mountains of evidence that Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin in 2016. That turned out to be false. Now Schiff is back with a new story, and the media is eating it up. Fool me once … Hey, come back and fool me again, please!
Still, the resistance held Schiff up as a noble statesman seeking only the truth. “In all the ways that matter for this particular moment,” one New York Times blogger wrote amid the latest Ukraine scandal, “Mr. Schiff seems to be coming off as the opposite of a slick political operator bent on betraying the country.”
That was just before it came out that Schiff had lied to the public about his communications with the Ukraine whistleblower.
So far, Taylor has not been impeached as a witness. But in light of this recent history of public servants and much-praised frauds who made Trump’s life difficult, we hope he will understand if we approach his testimony against Trump with measured skepticism. Too much is at stake simply to take the New York Times’ word on his integrity.
Then again, Taylor may hold up as a credible witness. To all outward appearances, he is no Avenatti or Schiff. In his decades of serving the country, we know of no circumstances where he blatantly lied as Brennan and Clapper did. He hasn’t lied to investigators or been fired, as McCabe has.
All fair observers must take Taylor’s account for what it is: a single account by a single diplomat who believed Trump was behaving improperly. The White House habitually lashes out at the character of all of Trump’s critics, and that is both indecent and unhelpful. But neither would it be proper for us to instantly believe everyone who tells a tale of Trumpian misdeeds.
