A Beautiful Call

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

“A lot of alleged criminals are not that smart. That’s how we catch them.” -Rudy Giuliani, today on Fox.

Considering its historical rarity, it's inconceivable that this has happened twice in my lifetime: That a president broke the law, thought he was bulletproof but engineered a coverup, anyway. Except in the case of Donald Trump, there was no coverup because, moreso than Richard Nixon, Trump thought he was bulletproof to the point of divulging the abstracts of his "beautiful call" with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky to the point where the White House declassifying the transcript is good only as far as actionable evidence goes.

     Privately, the Republican Senate as well as the Republican White House, are grousing that Trump authorizing the release of the transcript of the July 25th (or the day after Robert Mueller's frustrating testimony before Congress) phone call to Zelensky was a huge mistake. But after Trump heard at the UN yesterday that the US Senate had voted 100-0 by unanimous consent to release the whistleblower report, Trump hurried the declassification process and released... the so-called complete transcript of the call.

     It turned out to be just as bad as we'd feared. Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff said it "read like a mob shakedown." Because that's exactly what it was. But it's not the entire transcript like everyone assumes. The problem I have with its completedness starts with the header. It reads:

MEMORANDUM OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION
SUBJECT: Telephone Conversation with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine
Participants: President Zelenskyy of Ukraine
Notetakers: The White House Situation Room
Date, Time July 25, 2019, 9:03-9:33 am EDT
and Place: Residence

     There are several things that are wrong with this. Number one, it specifies the call was made from the residence, meaning Trump, whom we all know never emerges from his bedroom until 11 or 12, initiated this call from his bedroom in the Executive Mansion in the West Wing. Generally, when the president calls another head of state, it's supposed to be done from the aforementioned White House Situation Room, whose remit is not just to take notes but to ensure the president's phone call is done through an encrypted, secure phone line.

     This obviously didn't happen.

     Secondly, the phone call, so the header says, started at 9:03 AM and lasted exactly a half hour. Yet when one looks at the length of the transcript (which is just under 1990 words long), it does not appear to be a half hour's worth of dialogue even with pauses and even if the men spoke slowly to each other.
     In short, it's my contention this report, which would be SOP for this White House, has been abridged. Not merely censored or redacted so we can get a more accurate sense of the call's length. It's been abridged and edited for sensitive content, just as Nixon had done in 1974.

"Stupid Watergate"

What's missing in this transcript of a phone call between a guy who played a fake president and a real fake president? Well, let's start by enumerating what is in it: There's the usual bullshit flattery flung across phone lines between a new leader who's all too aware that flattery with Donald Trump usually gets you far and is sucking up to him in the most delicate and diplomatic ways that he really, really wants and needs that quarter billion dollars in US defense aid. Zelensky even mentions the Javelins that he wants to buy from us. 

     Trump, in turn, is flattering a brand new leader in a very sensitive part of the world that's uniquely positioned to investigate the son of one of his top political rivals, Hunter Biden. Think of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, only one not trying to impart Forbidden Knowledge but trying to obtain it.
     Both sides are bullshitting each other, both sides know it but this had to be done, anyway. Trump may be a walking brain stem but even he knows enough about diplomacy to know that. Several times, Trump offers to put Zelensky in touch with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his other personal attorney, Bill Barr, to help him investigate the Bidens. By releasing this part, as Charlie Pierce notes, he threw them both under the bus.
     Here's what isn't in the transcript:
     The eight mentions of the Bidens that we'd heard about. In the transcript, he only mentions Biden once by name and his son only tangentially. What happened to the other seven times? There's also hardly an implicit threat to withhold the quarter billion dollars in defense aid already allocated by Congress.
     In my humble opinion, those are exactly the parts that were abridged from the transcript without a trace. There is no assurance in the header that this is a complete, unabridged, unredacted copy of the transcript of the July 25th call. That, also, could be construed as a preemptive attempt at legal deniability.
     Trump did a head fake and, with the plausible deniability that only censorship of incriminating documents offers, Democrats are swallowing this hook, line and sinker. The Democrats need to be much more suspicious that, even when this administration makes a show of transparency, it's merely another form of opacity (such as the heavily redacted Mueller Report) designed to simply hide incriminating evidence of wrongdoing, which is a hallmark of this administration.).

The Democrats' Beautiful Call

As Republicans were in the absurd position of trying to get ahead of this while at the same time trying to put this Ukraine business behind them, the Democrats stopped acting like legislative zombies and acted like real legislators. As stated, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded the release of the whistleblower report in its entirety and, in leading the charge, got the usually slothful Mitch McConnell to fast-track the vote. The final result was a 100-0 vote by unanimous consent, indeed a miracle of bipartisanship in the do-nothing age of Moscow Mitch.

     At around the same time, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered a brief speech that amounted to an announcement that she was going to stop putting her frail, bony little bony on the tracks and to allow impeachment proceedings to begin. For years, Democrats have been loathe to even think about impeachment despite a growing amount of evidence against Trump. And that includes the nearly nine months they've been in control of the lower chamber.

     During these frustrating nine months, we've been hearing bullshit from establishment Democrats and neoliberal voters about how Pelosi had been "playing three dimensional chess" and just waiting for the right moment. They were waiting in vain for a bulletproof case against Trump that he and his flacks have simply not been providing even in violation of the law (such as the withholding of the whistleblower report on the part of Acting DNI head Maguire, who's testifying before Congress tomorrow.). In short, as with the Republicans, Democrats were paralyzed with indecision, worrying that acting one way or the other would hurt their reelection chances next year.

     So, a "president" who thought he was bulletproof finally handed some armor-piercing rounds to Congress and, for now, even the Republicans are on board the Transparency Train. The Democrats finally have their bulletproof case. Because the transcript doesn't need to be complete in order to establish that Trump violated, at the very least, the Hatch Act in trying to hamstring Joe Biden's chances for the Democratic nomination. He also broke 52 U.S. Code § 30121 by soliciting help in obtaining "something of value" (i.e. a favorable election result), in this case from Ukraine.

     Once that's established, the censored part, where Trump actually dangled the quarter billion dollars in defense aid to Ukraine, is almost inconsequential (And within the last couple of days, Trump even admitted to initially withholding the funding to Zelensky's government citing, ironically concerns of corruption within that government).

     So, the Democrats essentially stuck their fingers in their mealy mouths, held them up to see which way the wind blew and realized the time was right to order documents to be released and to begin with impeachment proceedings. Congress got it right when they nearly impeached Nixon in 1974. Despite the greater seriousness and severity of Trump's crimes, we need to remember this is a completely different Congress facing alltime highs of partisanship and dirty tricks.