Thread by @RadioFreeTom

Okay, since the Republicans are going down this road, a quick explainer.
GOP questioners are saying that the President has the right to hold up legally-approved aid.
He does. But that's not what happened here. They're counting on their supporters being too stupid to know it. /1

The President can determine if a country has not met the legal conditions for providing aid. If Country X has a bad human rights record, and the aid says "on condition that Country X stop arresting dissidents," POTUS can choose to determine the conditions have not been met. /2

But those are *public* conditions in the aid package, usually made as a determination after interagency working groups have advised the President that Country X is or isn't in compliance with the conditions of the aid. Congress, if it disagrees, can query WH officials. /3

That is not this. In the Ukraine case, the executive branch officials (as Cooper is testifying now) determined that Ukraine had met the conditions attached to aid. Trump then added *secret* conditions through the Three Amigos that were purely to benefit *him*. /4

In other words, Ukraine had met the conditions specified when Congress passed the law to grant the aid, but Trump wanted his own set of conditions that amounted to a promise by the Ukrainian president to embarrass Joe Biden on U.S. national television. /5

In other words, Trump ignored the conditions set by the law, ignored his own experts, ignored U.S. national security requirements, and said: "None of this moves until Zelensky does this humiliating thing that benefits no one else in the world but me, personally." /6

This is soliciting a bribe...worse, *extorting* a country under attack by Russia, not a normal "hold" on aid. Every member of Congress in that room knows this. They *know* it. But they are counting on their viewers over on Fox not to know it. Hideous. /7x