Just some notes about the documents that have now been made public and are at the center of the Democrats' impeachment inquiry—the memo, in transcript form, of Trump's phone conversation with the president of the Ukraine (read it here) and the whistleblower's complaint (read it here).
1. First time I read through the phone conversation, I became too nauseated by the Ukrainian president's wheedling tone to notice any evidence of the American president's corruption. "Yes you are absolutely right, not only 100% but actually 1000%." "Actually last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower." And so on, and so forth, ad nauseum, too many instances to quote. While gagging, I might have given assent to the conclusion that, as evidence of an impeachable offense, the conversation is a "nothing-burger."
2. But the source of the Ukrainian president's flattery is of course his desperation. The Ukraine is under attack from Russia. It desperately needs the aid that has been approved by the Congress, though delivery has now been interrupted by the Trump administration. When he leaves off fellating Trump over the phone line in order to gingerly introduce this topic, the first words out of Trump's mouth are, "I would like you to do us a favor though."
3. At this point, the graphics on news shows sometimes introduce ellipses, skipping over the next confusing hundred words or so to get immediately to Trump's request regarding the Bidens. Some of Trump's defenders have argued that this is dishonest and unfair to Trump, but the elided material is actually evidence of how zany our president is. The material is confusing because it relates to an incoherent conspiracy theory about how the computer security firm CrowdStrike, hired by the DNC after its servers were hacked during the 2016 campaign, was in on a sinister scheme to frame Russia for the hack and that the server, which is in Ukraine, would show . . . ach, it's too bizarre for words, but, if you're interested in the details, it's pretty thoroughly described and debunked here, by Rachel Sandler, writing in that well-known purveyor of left-wing apologetics, Forbes magazine. The condensed version is that Trump's mind is not lucid and he's eager to believe crazy shit if it's flattering to him and tends to be reassuring on topics about which he's insecure, like his election victory.
4. On the topic of ellipses, they appear in the text of the document released by the White House, too. It doesn't seem likely that Team Trump is concerned about taxing our attention with chatter about the meteorological conditions in Kiev compared to Washington, D.C. It seems more likely that they want points for being transparent without actually being transparent. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump, in the call, pressed the Ukrainian president eight times to investigate the Bidens, a detail that the evidently abridged version of the conversation fails to corroborate. Hmmm.
5. The whistleblower, in his complaint, writes:
In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to "lock down" all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced—as is customary—by the White House Situation Room.
If this is true, then an official word-for-word transcript exists. Yet the released document contains ellipses. Does the Trump team think its reputation for honesty and straight-dealing will stop people from making the obvious inference?
6. In retrospect, it's sort of amusing to recall Trump talking about how his conversation with the Ukrainian president was "beautiful" and "perfect." It's such an odd, unnatural way to talk. Now we know that the "perfect" conversation was so "perfect" that the "perfect" details likely had to be hidden away on a server otherwise reserved for the country's top national security secrets. Cover up. Consciousness of guilt.
7. It's natural to wonder about the identity of the whistleblower. He certainly has access to the minds of a lot of "high-ranking officials," a circumstance that elicited a theory from a guest on one of the cable news shows yesterday—I think it was MTP Daily, though I can't remember the name of the guest. His surmise, however, was that a group of national security professionals had finally had enough. Like, maybe the misuse of the national security server put one of them over the edge. They decided to get together, pool everything they knew, and produce a complaint under the Whistleblower Statute. Then they drew straws, and the loser, as they had agreed beforehand, had to go forward as the whistleblower. Ingenious! It would be the short-straw person who had to go forward. Yesterday, Trump likened the whistleblower to a treasonous spy who deserved the death penalty. Witness intimidation qualifies as one of his relatively minor offenses.
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