The GAO concludes Trump, cronies broke the law
President Donald J. Trump’s defenders have been bleating for weeks that he did not break any law and therefore should not have been impeached and should be acquitted in the Senate.
Well, whadda ya know. The Government Accountability Office – whose job it is to impartially examine questions about the legality of government actions for Congress – has concluded that he did.
The GAO issued a nine-page report Thursday finding that Trump and the Office of Budget and Management, which is directed by his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, did indeed break a federal law when they withheld $250 million in funds allocated by Congress to the government of Ukraine for its defense against armed attack by Russia. (The GAO is still looking into the other $141 million controlled by the State Department.)
According to the report, the Department of Defense certified to the president and Congress on May 23, 2019, that the new government of Ukraine had completed all of the institutional reforms required of it by – oh, delicious irony – the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, Public Law No. 115-232.
Just so there can be no confusion, that’s a federal law, one of the myriad federal laws the president swore to faithfully execute way back when (it seems a lifetime ago) he took the oath of office.
But beginning on July 25, 2019, OBM began issuing a series of “footnotes” to Defense Department documents saying there would be “a brief pause” in the forwarding of the funds to Ukraine while the government carried out “an interagency process to determine the best use of such funds.”
The footnote, it has been reported elsewhere, was sent over to DOD within 91 minutes after Trump’s famous July 25 phone conversation with Ukraine President Voldymyr Zelensky.
In that conversation the leader of the free world hinted broadly that the $391 million in aid to Ukraine would not be sent until Zelensky delivered on his promise to investigate – or at last announce he was investigating – former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and some weird, discredited conspiracy theories about the DNC server and the
2016 election.
New footnotes with identical wording were issued Aug. 8, 15,
20, 27, and 31, and on Sept.
5, 6 and 10, 2019, until Congress began to make a stink and the money was finally released.
The GAO report Thursday says:
“The president is not vested with the power to ignore or amend any such duly enacted law.”
“An appropriations act is a law like any other; therefore, unless Congress has enacted a law providing otherwise, the president must take care to ensure that appropriations are prudently obligated during their period of availability.”
“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law.” (Uh oh, the president’s plan to grab another
$7.2 billion for his precious wall may be in trouble, too.)
There’s a lot of jargon in the report but essentially it says the president broke the law by withholding the funds and he and the OMB had no good reason to do so.
The GAO also was not happy with the White House and OMB’s responses to its requests for information.
“We consider a reluctance to provide a fulsome response to have constitutional significance,” GAO General Counsel Thomas H. Armstrong wrote in his concluding paragraph.
Let me help you interpret that – this may be another example of the president’s alleged obstruction of Congress.
The days are not long enough and the weeks do not have enough days just to absorb the information that keeps coming out since the House voted to impeach Trump about his alleged blackmailing of Ukraine.
On both Wednesday and Thursday nights, an indicted Rudy Giuliani associate sang like a nightingale on Rachel Maddow’s show about the roles of Giuliani, Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and a host of others in the money-fordirt scheme.
Lev Parnas has also released plenty of information about the smear campaign Giuliani allegedly conducted against former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovich to get her out of the way so the money-for-dirt scheme could move forward.
“They were all in the loop,” he said. “There’s no way they didn’t know what was going on.”
Parnas also provided a ton of documentary material to support his assertions, including the contents of his phone and other devices, memos he wrote to himself on hotel stationery and numerous photographs of him with the president and other members of the Trump family who claim they don’t know him.
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who from all accounts vehemently disagreed with Giuliani’s lone wolf unauthorized conduct of our foreign policy, has trumpeted that he has plenty to say on the subject and is willing to testify if he is subpoenaed by the Senate.
The American public needs to hear from Parnas, Bolton, Mulvaney, Giuliani and others, under oath and under the hot lights of the TV cameras.
There are no “national security” secrets left to be protected and no constitutional or legal blanket “executive immunity” behind which the president can hide, as the Supreme Court determined in Watergate and does not need to determine again.
There is just Trump trying desperately to cover his backside so he can keep taking his Greatest Show on Earth (apologies to Barnum & Bailey) on the road and bask in the cheers and chants of his adoring reality show fans.
If, at this point, in the face of all that has come out both before and after the impeachment vote, the Senate Republicans refuse to hear witnesses or examine documentary evidence and vote to acquit him, they will go down as having been willing participants in the greatest coverup in U.S. history, and some of them may well go down in the election in November as well.
After Watergate, we all breathed a sigh of relief and told each other, “The system works.” Will we be able to do so this time?