And they're appalling. Republican's plans going forward are, to the extent that this memo accurately reflects them, to simply lie. About everything. To engage in their usual protofascist aggrievement politics without any concern for the facts.
The memo opens with more than a page of the same largely meaningless process complaints Republicans have voiced for weeks but that, unmentioned, have already been addressed. Republicans have long insisted--baselessly--that an impeachment inquiry requires a formal vote of the House. Trump sent Justice Department lawyers into court to argue his position that there is no impeachment inquiry without a formal vote on holding one, a position without basis in either law of the constitution. It was essentially laughed out of court weeks ago. In October, the House passed a resolution formalizing the public end of the inquiry. And after all that, the memo refers to "the Democrats' 'impeachment inquiry,'" putting it in quotes as if its status as exactly that was ever in any question.
The memo goes into a section intended to provide background for what the Trump administration did. It spends some time outlining the fact that "Ukraine has a long history of pervasive corruption," then it starts to dance, arguing hopefully that "President Trump has a deep-seated, genuine and reasonable skepticism about Ukraine due to its history of pervasive corruption." While multiple witnesses, recounted in the memo, have attested to Trump's expressed concern about corruption in the Ukraine, the memo fails to address critical, relevant facts. The Washington Post reported weeks ago, for example, that Trump has, in his budget requests, consistently tried to absolutely dismember U.S. programs aimed at assisting the Ukraine in battling corruption. This doesn't bespeak any real concern with Ukrainian corruption. This focus on this matter raises another serious logical problem for Trump's defense: he believed the Ukrainian government was so terribly corrupt but wanted it to carry out an investigation of his political rival? It's also the case, as I've recently written, that Trump's operatives and sources in these Ukraine intrigues are, in fact, criminals, con-men and corrupt former Ukrainian officials. Trump uncritically repeats their lies, using them as the premise for everything he's done in this matter while smearing and trying to monkeywrench reformers. Throughout this affair, he has, as I wrote, been "actively taking the side of the old Ukraine, the profoundly corrupt Ukraine run by oligarchs, gangsters and corrupt officials."
The memo goes on to assert that "senior Ukrainian government officials interfered in the 2016 presidential election in opposition to President Trump," but it does some shuffling, and the presentation is primarily focused--like most of the rest of the memo--on providing context-free anecdotes intended for use in inflaming partisans who don't know any better.
"President Trump's skepticism about Ukraine was compounded by statements made by senior Ukrainian government officials in 2016 that were critical of then-candidate Trump and supportive of his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Although Democrats have attempted to discredit these assertions as 'debunked,' the publicly available statements by Ukrainian leaders speak for themselves."But Democrats haven't claimed any statements made in public have been "debunked." That regards, instead, claims about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. The memo quotes some comments critical of Trump made by Ukrainian officials in 2016 but fails to put them into context. Russia had invaded Crimea. It was an ever-present threat occupying a big stretch of Ukrainian territory, and was supporting rebels waging a war against the Ukrainian government. On the campaign trail, Trump had made voluminous comments expressing his admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin. He was supported by the the pro-Russian forces of deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. He intervened to remove from the Republican party platform a reference about providing arms to Ukraine. Perhaps most distressingly, he'd said he may, if elected, recognize Russia's annexation of the Crimea. Trump was perceived by many in Ukraine as a threat to their continued existence. In such circumstances, it's only natural that some would be critical of him. The memo doesn't touch any of this though, just quotes the criticism.
--Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine's then-ambassador to the U.S., is spotlighted for an op-ed she wrote that was critical of some comments candidate Trump made regarding Russian occupation of Ukraine but--as the memo itself notes--Chaly served in the previous government of Petro Poroshenko and was recalled by the current government of Volodomyr Zelensky.
--The memo points to a Financial Times article which, it says, "quoted Serhiy Leschenko, a Ukrainian Member of Parliament, to detail how the Ukrainian government was supporting Secretary Clinton's candidacy," but the quote in question is merely Leschenko's assertion that a majority of Ukraine's politicians are "on Hillary Clinton's side," which does nothing to establish any election interference. The original Financial Times article does, however, explain why so many Ukrainian politicians were opposed to Trump--that missing context just described. The election interference it describes is Leschenko releasing the "black ledger," a book detailing payments made by Poroshenko's party to, among others, Paul Manafort, then Trump's campaign manager. Manafort was forced out of Trump's campaign by the revelation and later successfully prosecuted for related financial crimes.[1] Leschenko was a member of the Verkhovna Rada who lost his seat to a candidate of Zelensky's Servant of the People party.
--It quotes critical comments by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk but Yatsenyuk hasn't been Prime Minister since April 2016.
The memo, recall, is intended as a defense of Trump in his dealings with Ukraine this year but these efforts to rationalize Trump's behavior as some sort of legitimate policy consideration don't even make sense. These and every other public comment by Ukrainian officials during the 2016 election occurred during the prior Poroshenko government. The government Trump was trying to extort, on the other hand, was that of Zelensky, the new president who defeated Poroshenko by running on a reformist ticket and took office in May. Trump had supported the Poroshenko government right to its end, even supplying it with arms.
The memo entirely fails to come to terms with these facts, which is even more egregious as it moves into trying to prove that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. It references a Politico article by Ken Vogel and David Stern[2]:
"According to Vogel's reporting, the Ukrainian government worked with a Democrat operative and the media in 2016 to boost Secretary Clinton's candidacy and hurt then-candidate Trump."This makes it sound as if there was a significant, concerted campaign by Ukraine to accomplish these ends but while Vogel and Stern used some careless (and, in this writer's view, irresponsible) language that could have misled readers on this point, they were also clear this was nothing like, for example, the Russian campaign in 2016:
"There’s little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country--not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia--would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country’s election."Instead, what they offer are quite scattered anecdotes describing what would be, by the worst possible reading of events, unorganized efforts to work against Trump. The center of the story is Alexandra Chalupa, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants and a DNC consultant working on outreach. In 2014, she began researching Paul Manafort's role in the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime and eventually predicted Manafort would become involved in the Trump campaign long before he did. She continued on with her research, sometimes talking about it with Democratic officials (both she and the DNC note the DNC wasn't directing her in any of this). Some officials in the Ukrainian embassy in the U.S. may or may not have been helpful in her research--there are conflicting stories and no real evidence one way or the other. An embassy official, Andriy Telizhenko, claimed he was told to assist Chalupa, but he has since proven to be an erratic pro-Trump attention-hog whose story later radically escalated. Make of that what one will.[3]
Vogel/Stern also spend time on the "black ledger" and Leschenko's efforts to publicize it.
"...an operative who has worked extensively in Ukraine, including as an adviser to Poroshenko, said it was highly unlikely that either Leshchenko or the anti-corruption bureau would have pushed the [black ledger] issue without at least tacit approval from Poroshenko or his closest allies.Even if one accepts this (and there's little real reason to do so anyway), this is the Poroshenko regime--the one Trump supported right to its end--not the Zelensky government to whom Trump put the screws. The memo quotes several witnesses recounting how Trump thought Ukraine had opposed him but even if Poroshenko's people did stand against Trump, whom Ukrainians had good reason to oppose, it isn't relevant to what Trump did.
"'It was something that Poroshenko was probably aware of and could have stopped if he wanted to,”'said the operative."
The memo says "President Trump has been clear and consistent in his view that Europe should pay its fair share for regional defense," and then offers multiple general quotes from Trump on that subject but again, none of this is relevant.
The memo asserts that all of this information "colored President Trump's interaction with President Zelensky."
Next, it moves into "Key Points of Evidence" and becomes particularly heinous. The memo covers four points but they're centered on Trump's now-infamous 25 July conversation with Zelensky and completely ignores all of the other evidence that has been developed regarding the matter.
Some background: former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin has claimed he was fired at the behest of then-Vice President Joe Biden, who engineered his dismissal because Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, a company that employed Biden's son Hunter. In reality, Shokin was removed from his job in 2016 for corruption--he was refusing to pursue corruption investigations, actively stymying those who tried to pursue such cases and was implicated in criminal activity himself. Joe Biden was tasked by then-President Obama with arranging for Shokin's replacement. Trump, Rudy Giuliani and their minions have long promoted Shokin's own self-serving--and false--story.
The memo's first "point of evidence":
"The summary of the July 25 phone conversation showed no conditionality or pressure on Ukraine to investigate the President's political rivals."
This is lawyerly wording. The notes record Trump explicitly requesting an investigation of his potential 2020 Democratic rival Joe Biden and urging Zelensky to work with Giuliani, his hatchet-man who had been stirring this pot on that matter for months. Zelensky begins talking about Ukraine's need to buy Javelin missiles from the U.S. and Trump says "I would like you to do us a favor though"--the favor being the investigations.
The memo makes much of the fact that immediately after Trump asks for that "favor," he asks Zelensky to assist in 'get[ting] to the bottom' of foreign interference in the 2016 election," not Joe Biden, and chides Democrats for allegedly failing to make note of this, but it doesn't interrogate the utterly baseless Crowdstrike conspiracy theory Trump wanted "investigated"--he wanted to undermine the Mueller report and exonerate Russia of its interference in the 2016 election--and it badly misrepresents what happens next. Zelensky mentions Giuliani and Trump immediately goes into a rant about how Shokin was "a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved." He says:
"The other thing [the other part of the 'favor'], there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it..."Biden never bragged that he "stopped the prosecution" in the Burisma matter, nor did he do any such thing. Astonishingly, the memo refers to this--the heart of the impeachment matter--as "the President's passing reference to former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden..." It says Trump and Zelensky "did not discuss Hunter Biden substantively," which isn't relevant, and that "President Zelensky did not even reply to Trump's passing reference before the conversation continued to a different subject," which is flatly false; Zelensky's reply was to assure Trump that the next Prosecutor General "will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue... [W]e will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation..."
The memo briefly insists "there are legitimate questions about Hunter Biden's position on Burisma's board," but while it notes that position could be perceived as inappropriate, it can't outline any question of its legality. This is an important point that is seriously underappreciated, even among Trump's critics. With the Bidens, there was never anything to investigate. Thus what Trump is requesting is a fake--Trumped-up--investigation, one that has no rationale.
The next point: "Both President Zelensky and President Trump have publicly and repeatedly said there was no pressure to investigate the President's political rivals," but that claim is, in Trump's case, self-exculpatory and entirely self-serving, and Zelensky is still in the same tough spot he was when Trump was extorting him--almost entirely dependent on the U.S. for his nation's defense against a hostile foe that is already established within his borders. The memo notes that "Democrats will assert" that Zelensky wouldn't dare challenge Trump on this matter because of his position. Anyone with a more-than-half-functioning brain would suspect the same but the memo points to the fact that there is no evidence of Zelensky launching the investigations discussed in the 25 July call with Trump and insists that undercuts this claim. That ignores the information uncovered over the last few weeks. The Associated Press recently reported that after Zelensky was elected but prior to his inauguration, he "was already worried about pressure from the U.S. president to investigate his Democratic rival Joe Biden," and even convened a lengthy meeting with advisers to discuss it. The inquiry has also learned much about the back-and-forth negotiations over this matter between the Trump regime and the Zelensky government, which went on right up until the existence of the whistleblower's complaint, blowing this whole thing open, was revealed to congress.
...which brings us to...
The third point: "The Ukrainian government was not aware that U.S. security assistance was delayed at the time of the July 25 phone call." This is probably true but also irrelevant; shortly after the call, the Ukrainians became aware of the freeze placed on the assistance. The memo claims "Evidence also suggests that the Ukrainian government never even knew that U.S. security assistance was delayed until some point in August 2019, long after the July 25 phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky." This is false. The New York Times reported weeks ago that "word of the aid freeze had gotten to high-level Ukrainian officials by the first week in August, according to interviews and documents obtained by the New York Times"--the Ukrainians repeatedly discussed it with a Pentagon official within a few days of the call.
Here's what evidence developed by the impeachment inquiry itself shows: As a condition of meeting with Zelensky, Trump wanted a public announcement that Zelensky's government was going to launch these investigations. It wasn't enough that the Prosecutor General make the announcement; it had to come from Zelensky himself. It couldn't just be a general commitment to battle corruption; it had to specifically mention the Bidens. And Trump wanted Zelensky to announce this on CNN. Zelensky was told that any continued relationship with the Trump regime was dependent upon this happening. Bill Taylor, Trump's acting Ambassador to the Ukraine, testified to this;[4] Gordon Sondland, Trump's Ambassador to the EU, confirmed it,[5] as did Tim Morrison, the NSC's top presidential adviser on Europe and Russia (though he apparently said it would be ok if the Prosecutor General had made the announcement).
The memo completely ignores all of this. It also ignores a New York Times article from 7 Nov. that describes in some detail the turmoil caused within the Zelensky government by Trump's extortion, with aides agonizing over doing Trump's bidding and potentially losing bipartisan support in the U.S. or risking the loss of the security assistance for which they were so desperate. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Zelensky was eventually prepared to give in to Trump; he scheduled an interview for 13 Sept. on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show during which he was going to announce the investigations. Fortunately, he lucked out. On 9 Sept., the Intelligence Community Inspector General reported to congress the existence of the whistleblower complaint, which the administration had tried to bury. Two days later, Trump, seeing the jig was almost up, finally released the security assistance. Zelensky promptly canceled his scheduled interview.
The fourth point makes the memo's effort to send that down a Memory Hole even more egregious: "The United States provided security assistance to Ukraine and President Trump met with President Zelensky without Ukraine ever investigating President Trump's political rivals."
All of this was after congress had been notified of the existence of the whistleblower complaint, with knowledge that its content would soon be made public. Trump's scheme failed but he isn't being investigated based on how much success he had but on the fact that he'd undertaken such a scheme in the first place.
In its conclusion, the memo returns to the tiresome process complaints. It notes that transcripts of the testimony taken so far "cannot be a substitute for live witness testimony," but the decision to take the hearings public--to give Republicans exactly what they said they wanted on that point--draws scorn as well. The process established by the Democrats for public hearings is, the memo asserts, "one-sided, partisan and fundamentally unfair. There is no coequal subpoena power. There are no due process protections for the President. There is no guarantee that [Intelligence committee chairman Adam] Chairman Schiff will call witnesses put forward by Republicans."
Paul Rosenzweig, senior counsel to Kenneth Starr during the Clinton impeachment has pointed out that, in reality, "the process the Democrats have proposed is roughly analogous to the Clinton impeachment run by Republicans":
"In both inquiries, the majority controlled the process of subpoena issuance; in both inquiries the normal rules of rapid-fire five-minute questioning by members were relaxed to allow for lengthier examination; and in both inquiries there are mechanisms by which the president could offer rebuttal evidence."[6]Rather than independently evaluating the evidence that has been developed and rendering their own decisions, congressional Republicans have, insofar as this memo reflects their thinking, merely decided to act as Trump's defense team. It's a snapshot of elected officials who have adopted a poisonous "win"-at-all-cost ideology as virtually a religion, one almost entirely divorced from moral considerations. There's a much-quoted old lawyer's saw: If you have the facts, pound on the facts. If you have the law, pound no the law. If you have neither, pound on the table. The reason it's somewhat imperfectly invoked in these circumstances is because it shows concern for facts and law. While this memorandum pounds on the table--is, in fact, nothing more than table-pounding--it has no such concerns. It's nearly every major assertion is either grossly misleading or entirely fictional. It isn't an appraisal of the facts; it's just a string of lies meant to defend Trump by misinforming the public.
--j.
---
[1] Though investigators tracked down and verified some of the "black ledger" payments, it wasn't used in Manafort's trial.
[2] The memo refers to the Politico article as the sole work of Vogel, without ever acknowledging Stern, though both Vogel and Stern did the work. One suspects this was due to Stern having publicly refuted a lot of the claims various rightists figures, including Trump, have made about it.
[3] Chalupa's email was hacked and given to Wikileaks and her family cars twice burglarized. Nothing stolen, just the cars themselves ransacked. Someone also tried to break into her home. And there were the death-threats.
[4] As with the other witnesses it references, the memo uses Taylor's testimony to bolster various mostly-unimportant points but ignores it when it's inconvenient.
[5] In his initial testimony on the point, Sondland was squishy on the point but after apparently realizing it was going to be difficult to run his hotels from a jail cell, he revised this.
[6] Trump sycophant Sen. Lindsey Graham has been the Republican point-man in condemning the impeachment inquiry for its lack of "due process" for Trump but it's a basic point of law that "due process"--that ever-elastic concept--only applies in cases in which one's life, liberty or property are in danger, none of which apply to the impeachment inquiry. The House has extended essentially the same "due process" protections to Trump as it did to Clinton. Graham's "due process" demands would, on the other hand, give the president greater powers than he has ever, in the entire history of impeachments, had. Constitutionally, the House gets to set the rules for impeachment, which is roughly analogous to a grand jury (a process in which there is very little due process).
