To truly gauge the damage that diplomat William Taylor wreaked yesterday on Donald Trump’s criminal regime, you need only read the panicked riposte cooked up by Trump press secretary Stephanie Grishman. Swiping at Taylor, she proclaimed that her boss was being framed by “radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution.”
OK, let’s meet “radical unelected bureaucrat” Bill Taylor: A graduate of West Point; six years as an infantry officer, including service with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam; State Department tenures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jerusalem, and, most importantly Ukraine; and nonpartisan service under every administration, Republican and Democratic, starting with Ronald Reagan in 1985; three years as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine under George W. Bush.
Only the most bunker-dwelling Trumpists, and their increasingly nervous Republican enablers, can possibly dismiss the import of what Taylor told the House Intelligence Committee in his opening statement. Turns out, our top envoy to Ukraine had a front-row seat at the crime scene and personally witnessed “the withholding of of vital security assistance for domestic political reasons” – the most substantive confirmation we’ve yet heard that Trump illegally solicited Ukraine’s president for (fake) dirt on domestic foe Joe Biden.
Trump’s propagandists are still chanting “no quid pro quo,” because they seem to believe (or have deluded themselves into believing) that if they recite the phrase often enough, most Americans will buy it. But as Watergate convict John Mitchell famously declared five decades ago, in a remark that would come to haunt the Nixon regime, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
Thanks to Bill Taylor’s meticulous contemporaneous notes of his face-to-face meetings and phone calls (plus diplomatic cables and text messages), we can measure the chasm that separates what Trump and his minions say (“no quid pro quo”) from what they actually did. The results are so devastating that conservative commentator John Podhoretz thinks it’s game over: “This is the day that has ensured Donald Trump’s impeachment. That’s the ballgame.”
The House has more than it needs to impeach. It’s too soon to speculate whether the Senate Republicans, tasked with saving Trump’s butt, will treat Taylor’s testimony with the seriousness that it deserves. But drip by drip, they risk being flooded – because what Taylor witnessed will likely be buttressed by the evidence still to come. Heck, what we already know, about Taylor’s “alarming circumstances,” is bad enough.
Taylor took the job in May with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s assurance that Ukraine would get America’s full support in its fight to keep the Russian bear at bay; the first priority was to get the military aid that Congress had formally approved. But by late June, said Taylor, “I sensed something odd.” He was told, by people close to Trump, that the boss wanted Ukraine President Zelensky to commit to launching “investigations.” Zelensky wanted to meet with Trump, but it “was becoming clear” to Taylor that such a meeting “was conditioned on the investigations of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference on the 2016 U.S. elections.” (“Burisma” is Trumpist code for the Bidens, because son Hunter sat on that company’s board. “Ukrainian interference” in 2016 is a crackpot right-wing theory that absolves Russia.)
During a July 18 video conference call, Taylor learned in detail that Trump, via acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, was withholding the congressionally-mandated military aid: “I and others sat in astonishment – the Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons, but also the assurance of U.S. support.” Two days later, Taylor was told that Zelensky was being pressured to publicly announce that he was launching Trump’s desired probes, and that he should use language dictated by the White House (“I will leave no stone unturned”). That same day, a Ukrainian official complained to Taylor that Zelensky “did not want to be used as a pawn in a U.S. re-election campaign.”
All summer long, the military aid was withheld. Taylor testified, “Over 13,000 Ukrainians had been killed in the war” with Russia. “More Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. assistance.” But in August, a Trump official told Taylor that “the president doesn’t want to provide any assistance at all.” And on Sept. 1, Trump ally Gordon Sondland (the rich hotelier who’d bought himself an ambassadorship) outlined the quid pro quo during a phone call with Taylor. Here’s the smoking gun:
Sondland said that Trump still wanted Zelensky to launch investigations; indeed, Taylor testified, “Ambassador Sondland said ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance. He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.” Sondland repeated the same message in a phone call on Sept. 8 – which prompted Taylor to text, “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”
But this was my favorite passage in Taylor’s opening statement: “Ambassador Sondland tried to explain to me that President Trump is a businessman. When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.”
Wow, where to begin…You don’t conduct foreign policy like a hack real estate deal. A president does not “sign a check” using his own money. The money in question was our money, taxpayers’ money, earmarked by Congress for an ally in the name of national security. And as Taylor observed in his testimony, “(Sondland’s) explanation made no sense. The Ukrainians did not ‘owe’ President Trump anything.”
Translation: Demanding that Zelensky “pay up” with a Biden probe is further proof of Trump’s impeachable abuse of power.
What happens now? More witnesses, and perhaps more from witnesses who have already testified (starting with Sondland). Taylor’s substantive testimony notwithstanding, Trump’s defenders still insist that “the president has done nothing wrong,” but blind fealty doesn’t cut it. In the words of Charlie Dent, an ex-Pennsylvania Republican congressman on TV this morning, it’s a losing proposition to use one’s nose as “a heat-seeking missile for the president’s backside.”