Even if you’ve never watched Breaking Bad, you’ll get this from context:
Meth dealer Walter White would’ve saved his DEA brother-in-law a ton of time and effort if he’d simply gone on TV back in Season 1 and publicly confessed that he was involved in a criminal enterprise. At least that’s how Mick Mulvaney would’ve played it.
What we witnessed yesterday, live and in color, was truly historic: An acting White House chief of staff threw a president under the bus. And by freely confessing that the Trump regime pressured Ukraine to concoct Trump campaign propaganda, Mulvaney single-handedly demolished the desperate attempts by Trump’s minions to shield the tinpot autocrat from impending impeachment.
During a news conference, Mulvaney said that Trump is determined to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the Democratic National Committee’s server in 2016. (This crackpot right-wing theory, designed to absolve Russia, has no basis in fact. The longstanding U.S. intelligence community consensus, as confirmed in detail by the Mueller report, is that Russia was the culprit.) Mulvaney said that Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate that conspiracy theory – and that Trump held up the promised military aid to coerce Ukraine to investigate.
Mulvaney: “Did (Trump) also mention to me in the past the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that’s it. That’s why we held up the money…The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about.”
Bingo! Quid quo pro.
How refreshing it was to watch a top Trumpist break bad in public and sweep the GOP’s thin spin into the dustbin. Goodbye to “no quid pro quo.” Goodbye to “the whistleblower is lying.” Goodbye to “the complaint is just hearsay.” Once again, Trump’s Republican defenders have been left to twist in the wind; some are suffering poll erosion back home. When we combine Mulvaney’s confession with the phone summary transcript and all the diplomatic testimony on Capitol Hill (which confirms Trump’s related scheme to illegally squeeze Ukraine for domestic campaign dirt on Joe Biden), it’s clear that Congress has virtually all it needs to document Trump’s impeachable abuse of office.
The Mulvaney episode highlighted anew the Trump team’s arrogant malevolence; witness his fraudulent claim that all presidents withhold aid to foreign nations unless those nations agree to help the presidents’ domestic partisan agendas. He said, “I have news for everybody – get over it.” Fortunately, the regime’s malevolence is matched by its incompetence.
When the history of this dystopian era is written (hopefully sooner rather than later), it may well be recorded that those who sought to trash the Constitution were ultimately more skilled at slapstick than the Keystone Cops.
Mulvaney apparently ran his mouth without clearing it with anybody else. At one point, he said that the congressionally-mandated military aid was withheld this summer because it wasn’t clear whether Ukraine’s leaders “were cooperating in an ongoing investigation with our Department of Justice.” Which later prompted a Justice official to tell the press that “if the White House was withholding aid in regards to cooperation of any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us.”
More laughably, Mulvaney ‘fessed up on national TV without having first consulted Trump’s legal eagles. Apparently they didn’t believe that Mulvaney’s confession was good for Trump, because, a few hours later, lo and behold, there was Mulvaney again, trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube: “Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election.”
Yeah, sure. That desperate walk back was classic Watergate, circa 1973, when Richard Nixon’s flak, Ron Ziegler, would float preposterous lies and declare that his previous statements were “inoperative.” It was also classic Trump, who actually said last year that “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
There’s a school of thought that Mulvaney fully intended to say what he said, in order to further destabilize Trump’s presidency and grease the skids for his old pal Mike Pence, with whom he served in the House. But that sounds too clever by half. It’s far more likely that Mulvaney is over his head and feeling the heat from working inside a crime scene.
Whatever the reason, we should thank him for his clarity, for supplying an accelerant to an impeachment probe that’s moving at warp speed. Elijah Cummings, the key House chairman who died yesterday, framed the fundamental challenge: “When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked, in 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?”
Rest well, congressman. We’re doing it.