Sounds like the gradual pivot to “OK, quid pro quo, but the good kind!” is locked in, which was unavoidable given all the testimony confirming both aid & a White House visit were conditioned on announcing investigations. But that argument has a lot of hurdles to jump.
1. If there’s nothing wrong with this quid pro quo, why has Trump been so insistent that there wasn’t one, though clearly there was? Prosecutors routinely treat an attempt to conceal conduct as evidence of bad intent.
2. Similarly, if everything was above board, why the internal efforts to hide what was being done? Locking down the call, refusing to say why aid was being held up, creating a shadow diplomatic team.
3. If the goal was public rather than personal benefit, why was the demand specifically for a public announcement? That would help Trump politically, but could easily hamper a subsequent investigation by alerting targets too early.
4. Why was Trump’s personal attorney the point man if the intent was not to help Trump personally? Why did Rudy characterize his actions as defending “my client” against false accusations? (Presumably a reference to the server nonsense & questioning Russia’s interference.)
5. If you were just promoting a U.S. policy of combatting corruption, why would you push so aggressively for an investigation of Burisma & the Bidens and not express concerns about any other companies or individuals? Are they really the only, or even the most serious, concern?
6. If you had a legitimate basis for probing whether Joe Biden acted with corrupt intent, why launder that through Ukraine? Wouldn’t evidence of THAT aspect be here in the U.S.? Isn’t that a job for DOJ, or the State Dept. IG?
7. Why was the Biden/Burisma demand paired with the CrowdStrike/server demand? That hasn’t got anything to do with “fighting corruption”; it’s just a kooky narrative whose validation helps Trump, which seems to be the common thread here.
8. If pressing for these investigations (or rather, a public announcement of these investigations) is defensible as foreign policy in pursuit of nonpartisan U.S. interests, why weren’t R members of Congress all saying so back in September? Why would that be a fallback argument?
9. Is there any internal documentation, beyond Giuliani forwarding crank articles to Trump, of any effort to weigh the what Trump demanded against other U.S. policy goals? Wouldn’t you consult with Ukraine experts to determine legitimate policy priorities?
10. If there were valid policy reasons for imposing conditions on congressionally approved aid, why wasn’t that explanation given to Republican committee members back in August? Why did even Mitch McConnell have “no idea what precipitated the delay”? cnn.com/2019/09/30/pol…
I mean, as a Republican member of Congress, I’d find it pretty awkward to be insisting there’s a perfectly innocent reason this was done, when two months ago the White House was refusing to give me that reason.
In short: In principle it might be justified to delay aid as a component of a legitimate U.S. policy to combat global corruption, but literally NOTHING about the way they went about this is consistent with that being the actual rationale.
Virtually everything they did is inexplicable and counterproductive on the premise they were trying to pursue a coherent anticorruption policy, & makes perfect sense if they were trying to covertly manufacture political propaganda. Occam’s Butter Knife would cut this one.
I suppose the one advantage of the new line is that if you refuse to draw even basic & obvious inferences, the only people who can *directly* testify to intent are the ones who are refusing to do so (and probably willing to lie if compelled).
First rule of dishonesty: Given an option, lie about the part that’s hardest to check.
