DEMS Issue Final Intel Report: Trump Rants from London During NATO Summit

Pop Quiz: What does this face signify

(One of total fear and disconnect)

Synopsis from this fine Washington Post analysis (by Greg Sargent) of where we are today vis-à-vis impeachment process.

who has subverted the interests of the nation to his own by putting our foreign policy at the disposal of his naked personal and political needs.

This is the throbbing nexus of corruption at the core of this whole story, the driving force behind President Trump’s use of the power of his office — and the conditioning of official acts — to extort a foreign power into carrying out dirty deeds that would help his reelection campaign.

House Republicans have now formalized their defense of Trump with the release of a new report as the impeachment process shifts into its next phase, and at the center of it is an effort to make that corrupt motive disappear entirely.

The report’s new argument is that, yes, Trump might have made requests of Ukrainian President Zelensky to announce “investigations” that would validate Trump’s (invented) theory of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election and his (fabricated) narrative of corruption on the part of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in Ukraine.

But, Republicans say, Trump was right to do this, because his concerns about these things were legitimate and were subsumed into a much broader — and, again, legitimate — set of concerns about corruption.

That argument is a joke. 

But it also illustrates in a backhand way just how unconvincing any effort to sanitize away Trump’s corrupt motives must inevitably be.

The GOP argument requires ignoring voluminous evidence of those corrupt motives.

It also requires accepting the spectacularly absurd idea that the investigations Trump actually did ask for were not just motivated by a general desire to fight corruption but also benefited Trump politically out of pure coincidence.

The Narcissism Defense:

The report’s argument is that Trump didn’t baldly condition official acts (a White House meeting; hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid) on getting Zelensky to announce those investigations. But it was legitimate for Trump to hesitate in granting them, because his request for those investigations was reasonable.

To buttress this, the report claims Trump holds a “deep-seated, genuine, and reasonable skepticism” of Ukraine’s “history of pervasive corruption.” This means Trump’s “hesitation to grant the meeting and military aid was entirely prudent.”

The report selectively quotes testimony that Trump saw Ukraine as a corrupt country. But then the report brazenly cites Trump’s concerns about Ukrainians opposing him in the 2016 election as grounds for Trump’s dim views of Ukraine!

The report cites cherry-picked facts to suggest those concerns were legitimate. But as Glenn Kessler has shown, the full body of known facts doesn’t come remotely close to demonstrating the sort of state-level effort by Ukraine to interfere in our election that Russia actually did mount.

That aside, this aspect of the report is a spectacular self-own. It actually shows that for Trump, the view of Ukraine as corrupt was long hopelessly entangled with his theory that Ukraine tried to block him from winning in 2016.

My 2 cents: Full article continues here 

– thanks for stopping by.