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1/14 So @RepAndyBarr on @nprpolitics says Trump's phone call with Ukraine's President was "routine diplomacy". I've researched and written about US foreign policy for 25 years and read countless of these conversations. There was nothing routine about it. Why? A mini-primer.
2/14 First, calls like this are for ‘relationship maintenance’ or conducting business. When a US President talks to a newly elected leader of a foreign country, the conversation is highly structured, reviewing existing relations and generally pledging to maintain continuity.
3/14 It would be extraordinarily unusual for Trump to have a phone call like this with a new President in which no substantive policy issues are discussed. Normally, there would be a series of bulleted talking points Trump needed to raise, and he would run just through them.
4/14 Here is a good example of the kind of briefing paper a President gets before meeting with a foreign leader. Its from Nixon meeting with Indonesian President Suharto: nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB1…
5/14 Note the structure: Here is what they want and will say, here is what we say. There is *zero* chance that Trump’s talking points/briefing materials for this meeting consisted of two asks: one to investigate a bonkers Crowdstrike conspiracy and one to investigate Joe Biden.
6/14 Remember Ukraine has a new President who wants guarantees on US military commitments and some symbolic gesture of US support in face of ongoing Russian aggression. Trump was briefed on it, but he uses this to make two asks that no briefing paper would *ever* ask for.
7/14 Imagine being a historian and reading a bunch of briefing documents prepared by different agencies for an important phone call with a new foreign leader, and then in the call itself the President veers wildly off script and makes only two unwritten and bonkers requests.
8/14 As a historian, this sets off a million red flags that something highly, highly unusual - inexplicable - is going on here. Its not normal diplomacy, and the fact that everyone listening in on the call promptly panicked and tried to deep six the transcript tells us so much.
9/14 If we are trying to put together a narrative of US-Ukrainian relations and policy, this is a moment that doesn't compute, and so the historian is forced to develop an explanation that accords with known - or alternative - facts.
10/14 Immediately after, the State Department, NSC, and other folks would have had to prepare policy guidance for lower level officials following up; in this case US Special Amb for Ukraine Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland. Here is where the 'narrative' would have to resume.
11/14 Congress must subpoena these documents, which will highlight just how unusual Trump’s call was. They certainly contain lots of walkbacks and reassurances re what the call *should* have been about, because no one is insane enough to operationalize Trump’s request in writing.
12/14 Historians writing about US Foreign Policy often have to make sense of of interpret competing policy factions, personal agendas, a President's emotional state or personality, his (and hopefully soon her) understanding of the world. That's all normal.
13/14 What is not normal is for a President to veer radically and inexplicably away from a policy process built up over months and years by a vast foreign policy and national security bureaucracy and ask for things that no one has ever asked for. That is just crazy - or criminal.
14/14 In any case, @RepAndyBarr is lying when he says this is normal diplomacy. No serious policymaker would ever say so. Its a red flag that the President was improvising an agenda that radically departed from the *written* understanding of US policy, and everyone knew it. END
