Donald Trump’s Ukraine Scandal Has Its Roots in Russia
Both
situations stem from the President’s apparent willingness to accept
political favors from foreign leaders, and his eagerness to do Putin’s
bidding.
President
Trump and his allies nearly succeeded in consigning the Mueller report
to oblivion. William Barr, Trump’s compliant Attorney General, got a
jump on the process when he preëmpted the public release of the report
by providing a misleading summary, which minimized the special counsel’s
findings on Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Trump compounded
Barr’s distortions by falsely and endlessly repeating that the report
found “no collusion, no obstruction.” Congressional Democrats did little
for the cause of clarity by using the report as an occasion to debate
the semantics of what constitutes an impeachment investigation. And
Robert Mueller himself invited a certain measure of confusion by telling
his story in dense, legalistic prose. Barely six months after he
delivered the report, it had already faded into the mists of Trumpiana:
post-Sean Spicer, pre-whistle-blower.
The whistle-blower revealed
Trump’s July 25th phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of
Ukraine, in which, according to the official memorandum, Trump said that
he wanted a “favor,” then asked Zelensky to look into negative
information concerning Joe Biden, at the time the Democratic
front-runner for 2020. The request was so plainly an abuse of
Presidential power—Zelensky was awaiting delivery of military aid
already approved by Congress—that Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the
House, launched an investigation focussed on impeachment, to be led by
Adam Schiff, the chair of the Intelligence Committee. Mueller and Russia
are out; Schiff and Ukraine are in.
But the Russia and Ukraine
scandals are, in fact, one story. Indeed, the President’s false denials
in both of them capture the common themes: soliciting help from foreign
interests for partisan gain, followed by obstruction of efforts to
uncover what happened. Both, too, share roots in Vladimir Putin’s
Russia. Mueller’s two indictments of Russian interests—the first
involving the use of social media and the second the hacking of
Democratic Party e-mails—are perhaps the most detailed chronicle ever
published of foreign interference in a U.S. political campaign. Trump’s
team was appreciative. When a public-relations adviser to a Russian
oligarch’s family e-mailed Donald Trump, Jr., offering dirt on Hillary
Clinton that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr.
Trump,” the candidate’s son gave a straightforward reply: “If it’s what
you say I love it.”
Just two years earlier, Putin had invaded
Ukraine and annexed Crimea. The government in Kiev went back and forth
between leaders who wanted to accommodate Putin’s regime and others who
wanted to enlist the help of the West to push back against it. The
political consultant of choice for the pro-Russian faction was Paul
Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chair in the summer of 2016. As
Mueller documented, Manafort passed proprietary campaign polling data
to pro-Russian Ukrainians. The campaign-era Trump portrayed in the
report suffered from one major limitation: he wasn’t President. He
clearly welcomed Putin’s assistance, and promised a better relationship
with Russia, but he was still just a businessman from New York. The
whistle-blower’s complaint is the epilogue to Mueller’s report: the
coming of age of an aspiring colluder.
It’s important to note, as
well, that, in the Ukrainian chapter, Trump has done Putin’s bidding, to
the extent that he can, going so far as to embrace a discredited
conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016
campaign. The rest of the U.S. government has never been as enamored of
Putin as Trump is. That includes Republicans in Congress, who joined the
Democrats in voting for military aid to Ukraine. Trump wants no part of
conflict with Putin, but the aid package tied his hands. There was a
revealing moment in his joint news conference with Zelensky at the
United Nations last month. Almost as an aside, Trump said, “I really
believe that President Putin would like to do something. I really hope
that you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem.”
Ukraine doesn’t have a “problem” with Putin—it has an invasion by Putin.
In
the July 25th phone call, Trump did what he couldn’t do as a candidate:
he tried to leverage the power of the Presidency to extract partisan
political advantage. Texts of U.S. officials, released last week,
further suggest an attempted quid pro quo. On September 1st, William
Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Kiev, asked, “Are we now saying that
security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?”
Gordon Sondland, a former Republican fund-raiser who is Trump’s
Ambassador to the European Union, replied, “Call me.”
Mueller
did chronicle Trump’s efforts, as President, to interfere with his
investigation. Trump made repeated attempts to rein in or fire Mueller,
and was saved from that misconduct only by the refusal of people around
him (including Don McGahn, his White House counsel; Rob Porter, his
staff secretary; and even Corey Lewandowski, his otherwise zealous
onetime campaign manager) to carry out his directives. The lesson of the
past few weeks is that those restraining figures have left the
building, literally and figuratively. Trump is currently surrounded by
people like Barr and Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, who are
willing to debase their offices to indulge Trump’s abuse of power. The
unhinged arias of Rudolph Giuliani, his personal lawyer, are a constant
from the Russian chapter to the Ukrainian. In customary fashion, Trump
has sought to normalize his corruption, by bragging that he could
recruit even more countries, including China, to conduct political
investigations for him. That’s still an abuse of power, even though he’s now doing it in public, rather than bothering to try to hide it.
Mueller
famously closed his investigation without rendering a judgment on
whether the President committed crimes. “We did not draw ultimate
conclusions about the President’s conduct,” he wrote. The time, though,
for ultimate conclusions is approaching. One way of looking at Trump’s
evolution from candidate to President, from Mueller’s time to Schiff’s,
is that his abuses are accelerating, with each unpunished act serving as
a license for more. The Constitution gives Congress the tools to halt
this cycle in Trump’s out-of-control Presidency. The question now is
whether the people’s representatives will use them. ♦
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