Ukraine scandal:
All the president’s men
“President Trump’s assaults on democracy are rarely solo endeavors,” said The New York Times in an editorial. The scheme to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into digging up dirt on Trump’s political opponents is no exception. We now know that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was one of the officials who listened in on the July 25 phone call in which Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, suggesting American military aid depended on Zelensky’s cooperation. Officials considered the call so potentially explosive, they moved the transcript to an ultrasecure server reserved for highly classified information. Attorney General William Barr is also “neck-deep” in the scandal. Trump told Zelensky to work with Barr to investigate Biden, and the AG is explicitly named in the whistleblower complaint about the call. Yet Barr’s Justice Department not only declined to open an investigation after receiving the complaint, it also advised the acting director of national intelligence not to share it with Congress. And, at the center of it all, there’s Rudy Giuliani. The president’s personal lawyer has been conducting a months-long pressure campaign to get Ukraine’s help in smearing Joe Biden, a leading Democratic presidential contender. The House impeachment inquiry must hear from everyone involved in this “sprawling, Trumpian mess.”
Giuliani is “at the heart of the burgeoning impeachment probe,” said Rebecca Ballhaus in The Wall Street Journal. The whistleblower complaint describes the former New York City mayor eagerly inserting himself into American foreign policy in Ukraine, sometimes working with U.S. officials, other times going it alone. Although Giuliani is technically a private citizen, “Ukrainians seeking influence in Washington viewed him as a direct conduit to Trump.” One of Giuliani’s key sources was Yuri Lutsenko, who served as Ukraine’s top prosecutor from 2016 until this August, said Josh Dawsey in The Washington Post. Attempting to curry favor with the U.S., Lutsenko helped Giuliani circulate rumors that, as vice president, Biden pushed for the dismissal of Lutsenko’s predecessor to quash an investigation into a Ukrainian gas company where his son served on the board. (Lutsenko now says the Bidens did nothing illegal.) When the U.S. ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, clashed with Lutsenko over his efforts to impede a new Ukrainian anti-corruption bureau, Giuliani attacked the Obama appointee relentlessly in the right-wing media. The White House abruptly recalled Yovanovitch from Kiev in May, leaving longtime State Department officials “baffled and confused” at the removal of a well-respected diplomat. “Rudy—he did all of this,” one U.S. official said. “This s---show that we’re in, it’s him injecting himself into the process.”
Rudy’s “amateur diplomacy” was a disaster, said Rich Lowry in NationalReview.com. There are legitimate questions about Hunter Biden, who “had no evident talent worthy of a $50,000-a-month gig with a Ukrainian energy company.” If Giuliani had acted alone in trying to ferret out damaging information about the Bidens, “it would be standard hard-ball politics.” But he let Trump get personally involved in this “harebrained” scheme. “It’s hard to think of another president who has so desperately needed good lawyering, and who has been so flagrantly failed by someone who is supposed to be his attorney.” But there was “nothing wrong or inappropriate” about Trump’s request to Zelensky, said Jed Babbin in Spectator.org. Biden’s activities in Ukraine are fair game. “Just because someone is your political opponent doesn’t mean he’s exempt from prosecution.”
If no one did anything wrong, why all the finger pointing? asked Ben Mathis-Lilley in Slate.com. Trump and Giuliani are inadvertently identifying lots of potential witnesses for the House impeachment inquiry in their efforts to pass the buck. Trump told reporters they should ask Vice President Mike Pence about his calls to Ukraine. Giuliani shared texts from Kurt Volker, U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, to show that the State Department was aware of Giuliani’s work. Volker has since resigned and is set to testify before Congress. “Typically, in an investigation of an organized-crime scheme, you ‘flip’ low-ranking participants in order to get them to ‘rat’ on their bosses. In this case, though, the rats appear to be the ones at the top.” The big picture is what makes this scandal so disturbing, said Philip Rotner in TheBulwark.com. Trump has dragged the entire executive branch down to his level. Even though it appears that more than a dozen White House officials at all levels were involved, only one whistleblower had the courage to stand up to the president’s misconduct. “This corruption is a far greater danger to our democracy than Trump’s clumsy quid pro quo with Ukraine.”