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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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WASHINGTON — Senior White House officials suspected that a colleague whom they viewed as a political partisan was ferrying documents about Ukraine in recent months to President Trump, effectively creating another back channel to him that could warp American policy, according to congressional testimony and interviews.
Colleagues grew alarmed after hearing that Mr. Trump had referred to Kashyap Patel, a National Security Council aide who figured prominently in Republicans’ efforts to undermine the Russia investigation, as one of his top Ukraine policy specialists and that the president wanted to discuss related documents with him, according to people briefed on the matter. Mr. Patel, who is known as Kash, is assigned to work on counterterrorism issues, not Ukraine policy.
The contents of the documents were not clear, nor was it clear how Mr. Trump got them. Typically, aides prepare policy briefings for presidents that several agencies sign off on in a highly controlled process. But Mr. Trump has adopted a much more freewheeling approach, taking in unverified information from sources both inside and outside the White House and seeking out and promoting assertions that fit his narrative.
Any involvement by Mr. Patel in Ukraine issues would mark another attempt by Mr. Trump’s political loyalists to go around American policymakers to shape policy toward Kiev. It was separate, two of the people said, from the irregular, informal channel led by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, that is the subject of House Democrats’ impeachment investigation.
It is clear from Taylor’s testimony that more is to come. A smart defense team would get ahead of this by admitting that there was a quid pro quo, falling back to the argument advanced by some on the right like Tucker Carlson—that the conduct was wrong but that impeachment is too severe of a remedy.
If Republicans quickly admitted what Trump did but insisted that they wanted the American people to decide Trump’s fate in December, they might reduce the damage and move past this episode, assuming they had the votes in the U.S. Senate to prevent conviction. If Trump refuses to allow them to adopt that strategy, he becomes Republicans’ own worst enemy. Because if Taylor’s testimony is any guide, they will reach that point eventually, and the road getting there will be rocky for the administration.
ROME — Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said his country’s intelligence services had informed the American attorney general, William P. Barr, that they played no role in the events leading to the Russia investigation, taking the air out of an unsubstantiated theory promoted by President Trump and his allies in recent weeks.
“Our intelligence is completely unrelated to the so-called Russiagate and that has been made clear,” Mr. Conte said in a news conference in Rome on Wednesday evening after spending hours describing Italy’s discussions with Mr. Barr to the parliamentary committee on intelligence.
Mr. Conte publicly acknowledged for the first time that Mr. Barr had twice met with the leaders of Italy’s intelligence agencies after asking them to clarify their role in a 2016 meeting between a Maltese professor and a Trump campaign adviser on a small college campus in Rome, Link Campus University.
During a subsequent meeting, the professor, Joseph Mifsud, told the adviser, George Papadopolous, that Russia had obtained damaging information about Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” according to the special counsel’s report into Russian meddling in the 2016 American election. Mr. Papadopolous later shared that information with foreign diplomats, which eventually set off alarms among American intelligence officials about Russian interference.
Mr. Trump and his associates have asserted, without evidence, that Mr. Mifsud is not a professor with links to Russia, as the special counsel’s report states, but a Western intelligence asset working as part of an Obama administration plot to spy on the Trump campaign. That theory, once relegated to the far-right margins, has become a frequent talking point of Mr. Trump’s as he seeks to undermine the special counsel’s report.
Mr. Barr at least twice visited Rome to investigate the allegations, on Aug. 15 and Sept. 27.
WASHINGTON—A senior student-loan official in the Trump administration said he would resign Thursday and endorse canceling most of the nation’s outstanding student debt, calling the student-loan system “fundamentally broken.”
A. Wayne Johnson was appointed in 2017 by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as chief operating officer of the Office of Federal Student Aid, overseeing the $1.5 trillion student-loan portfolio. After seven months, he moved into a different role as chief strategy and transformation officer, leading a revamp of how the agency deals with borrowers and the companies that service the debt.
Mr. Johnson said repayment trends suggest much of the debt will likely never be repaid, and he is calling for moving toward a system that gets the government out of student lending.
“We run through the process of putting this debt burden on somebody…but it rides on their credit files—it rides on their back—for decades,” he said, adding, “The time has come for us to end and stop the insanity.”
President Trump’s failed bid to host the Group of Seven (G-7) summit — a gathering of key world leaders — at his own resort next year is a dangerous sign of things to come, and the public’s need for information about his administration’s activities has never been greater. On Oct. 17, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney https://bit.ly/2MYOTG1 the selection of the Trump National Doral Miami resort in Florida to host the G-7 summit in 2020. Two days later, amid an avalanche of public fury and expressions of concern by his https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-reversed-course-on-hosting-g-7-at-his-club-after-learning-that-impeachment-weary-republicans-were-tired-of-defending-him/2019/10/20/edbb3f36-f36b-11e9-829d-87b12c2f85dd_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_2 (political allies), Trump personally rescinded the selection of his resort by tweet at 9:52 p.m. on Saturday.
But questions remain about how this previously unimaginable ethical failure could have occurred, and we urgently need the kind of answers that the State Department’s inspector general can provide. These answers would help us anticipate future ethical breaches and could be relevant to the ongoing impeachment inquiry, which is reportedly examining various facets of the president’s abuses of power.
The Doral scandal must be viewed in the context of the Ukraine scandal, which similarly represents a significant escalation of Trump’s abuse of power for private gain. That these scandals unfolded at the same time suggests the ethics crisis at the highest level of government has entered a dangerous new phase.
