Trump, in his inimitable incoherent style addressed reporters on September 22nd and said the following about his controversial call with the president of Ukraine: “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine, and Ukraine’s got a lot of problems.” Were it that the articles of impeachment against Trump would include something about his ongoing crimes against grammar and coherent thought.
This much we know, Nancy Pelosi has announced that she has decided that it is time to initiate impeachment hearings against Trump. This is incredibly noteworthy as Pelosi had been insisting all along that impeachment was pointless unless there was sufficient evidence to get momentum going to move impeachment hearings beyond their initial stage. This means that Pelosi has concluded, based on all the information available to her as Speaker of the House, that yes, there is enough to convict Trump in the Senate.
Evidence of this is borne by the unanimous decision in the Senate to demand that the White House release the whistleblower complaint to Congress.
What we do not know at this time is the extent to which the whistleblower complaint is indeed exclusively about a telephone conversation with the president of Ukraine. It may be that the whistleblower complaint is about something entirely different and Trump has just copped to a different crime.
But not straying from the facts still leaves us with the possibility that Trump withheld aid to the Ukraine precisely because he wanted leverage. Trump waited until the day after Mueller’s testimony before Congress to call the president of Ukraine and demanded no fewer than eight times that the Biden family be investigated.
What did Biden do for his son? In short nothing. As Vice President, Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to do more about investigating corruption and to fire the prosecutor who had done little to advance the rule of law. Of course, Trump’s enablers are working overtime to advance the idea that it was the other way around. This is classic Trumpian deflection but it will not work this time. The facts are too many and they are stacked precisely against the Trumpian interpretation of events. Biden had joined with other world leaders in calling for the firing of the prosecutor, so the charge that Biden was protecting his son is baseless.
Trump thinks of himself as being above the law. His attempt to use American foreign aid to benefit his chances for re-election may finally be the straw that broke the camel’s back.