Hey, remember what Donald Trump said back in June – it’s OK if you don’t; it’s impossible to keep up – when he was asked by ABC News whether he’d accept foreign dirt on Democratic rivals who seek to oust him in 2020?
He said that absolutely, he’d be all ears: “I think I’d take it…If somebody comes up and says, ‘Hey, I have information on your opponent,’ do you call the FBI? I’ll tell you what, I’ve seen a lot of things over my life. I don’t think in my whole life I’ve ever called the FBI.”
Given this guy’s checkered past, he has clearly never called the FBI. So at least, for once, he said something grounded in fact. The problem, however, is that his declared intention to accept foreign dirt on 2020 foes (much like his 2016 willingness to benefit from Russian interference) is a flagrant breach of federal law, which bars foreign meddling in our elections. As the Mueller report explained on page 184, “foreign nationals may not make – and no one may ‘solicit, accept, or receive’ from them – ‘a contribution or donation money or other thing of value…in connection with a federal, state, or local election.'”
Now we can begin to connect the dots. Last night, we got more insight into why an intelligence community official, who reportedly worked in the White House, blew the whistle on Trump in August and filed a formal complaint that the intelligence community’s inspector general calls an “urgent concern.” Trump, communicating with the president of Ukraine, appears to have threatened to withhold promised military aid unless Ukraine agreed to launch a corruption probe of Hunter Biden – the son of the Democratic candidate who’s pounding Trump in the polls.
And that new report connects to other dots. It’s widely known that Trump was holding back on promised military aid, and there have long been reports that Trump apparatchik Rudy Giuliani has been very interested in Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. Three House committees – Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight – have been investigating all this. They know that Trump spoke by phone with the Ukrainian president, two weeks before the whistle blower filed his complaint. And earlier this month, the three chairmen sent a letter to the White House: ““As the 2020 election draws closer, President Trump and his personal attorney appear to have increased pressure on the Ukrainian government and its justice system in service of President Trump’s reelection campaign, and the White House and the State Department may be abetting this scheme…to coerce the Ukrainian government into pursuing politically-motivated investigations.”
Just for the record, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg News back in May that there’s no evidence that Hunter Biden has done anything corrupt, or that Joe Biden tried to block a Ukrainian probe aimed at his son. (The latter is a fake MAGA charge that’s already making the rounds.) Lutsenko said that he’s conducting an unrelated corruption probe, but, in his words, “Biden was definitely not involved.”
Meanwhile, Giuliani surfaced last night on CNN and soiled himself anew. At first, when asked whether he’d ever asked Ukraine officials to investigate the Bidens, he yelled: “No!”
Moments later, after he said that he’d asked Ukraine to investigate what he called a suspicious case that may or may not have included the Bidens, host Chris Cuomo interrupted: “So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden.”
Giuliani: “Of course I did!”
He thus won the Jack Nicholson Prize, awarded to the person who best echoes the Nicholson character, in A Few Good Men, who ordered the Code Red (“You’re goddamn right I did!”).
All told, we’ll likely learn a lot more about the whistleblower’s complaint, and about the details of Trump’s apparent quest for a partisan quid pro quo with Ukraine, and a new willingness to benefit from foreign dirt (whether true or not). The plot will continue to thicken and sicken, as global politics professor Brian Klaas, who authors books on authoritarianism, rightly warned yesterday in a tweet: “Democracy doesn’t always die with a bang. It often decays as norm after norm – the soft guardrails of democracy – break down. Each time, previously unthinkable behavior becomes routine; the guardrails disappear; and it starts over again with ever more authoritarian behavior.”
By the way, Trump denies that anything is amiss. In a tweet yesterday, he said he’s on the phone with foreign leaders all the time: “Knowing this, is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say anything inappropriate…?”
Write your own punch line.