Nothing new, everything clear

The testimony of former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill and Foreign Service officer David Holmes today has confirmed what we already knew: President Trump was pressing Ukrainian President Zelensky for investigations not to serve the nation’s interest, but rather to serve Trump’s own electoral ambitions. Russian security services planted the cock and bull story Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was plugging about Ukrainian involvement in interfering in the 2016 US election and the need for an investigation of the Bidens, father and son.

Combined with US Ambassador to the EU Sondland’s testimony yesterday, it is clear that not only Trump but also Secretary of State Pompeo and Acting OMB Director Mulvaney were in on this scheme to defraud the American people and give Trump a leg up in the 2020 electoral contest. This was no rogue operation but a conspiracy against the United States that the President directed. How anyone at this point can stomach the thought of such a president in the White House is beyond me. Just imagine how Republicans would have reacted had President Obama done something comparable. I guarantee most Democrats in the Senate would not have stayed loyal.

So far however the Republicans have, because they don’t see the loss of Trump’s popularity in the electorate that would endanger their own re-election campaigns. They are putting at risk the national security of the United States for their own interests. Just remember this: Russian President Putin, whose services surely listen to non-encrypted phone calls with the White House, knew what was going on and could use that knowledge to blackmail Trump. Not that they necessarily had to: he seems to be at the very least a willing Moscow dupe, and maybe an agent.

It is high time America is rescued from this nightmare Administration, where the principal architect of immigration policy is a white supremacist, the Secretary of State is an evangelical ideologue, and the Attorney General is a partisan hack, not to mention the extremists determined to undermine their own agencies leading Commerce, Education, Interior, and other government departments and several embassies. Honest non-partisan experts are fleeing in droves. Inexperienced careerists are everywhere. None of it is new, all of it is clear.

PS November 22: Laurence Tribe did a great job of drawing out the conclusions on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show last night:

Here is a Fox News commentator who sees the situation much as Tribe does: