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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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President Trump was cranky when they spoke on the phone in September, Ambassador Gordon Sondland told members of Congress, but his words were clear: Trump wanted no quid pro quo with Ukraine.
“This is Ambassador Sondland speaking to me,” Trump said outside the White House last week, looking down to read notes he’d taken of Sondland’s testimony. “Here’s my response that he just gave: ‘I want nothing. . . . I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.’ ”
Sondland’s recollection of a phone conversation that he said took place on Sept. 9 has emerged as a centerpiece of Trump’s defense as House Democrats argue in an impeachment inquiry that he abused his office to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrats.
However, no other witness testimony or documents have emerged that corroborate Sondland’s description of a call that day.
Trump himself, in describing the conversation, has referred only to the ambassador’s account of the call, which — based on Sondland’s activities — would have occurred before dawn in Washington. And the White House has not located a record in its switchboard logs of a call between Trump and Sondland on Sept. 9, according to an administration official who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
But there is evidence of another call between Trump and Sondland that occurred a few days earlier — one with a very different thrust, in which the president made clear that he wanted his Ukrainian counterpart to personally announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents.
The conflicting information raises serious questions about the accuracy of Sondland’s account, one that Trump has embraced to counter a growing body of evidence that he and his allies pressured Ukraine for his own political benefit.
The president’s argument that the call proves he was not seeking favors from Ukraine is undercut by the timing: At the end of August, White House lawyers had briefed Trump on the existence of a whistleblower complaint describing the administration’s pressure campaign on Ukraine and the possibility that Trump abused his power, according to a person familiar with the situation. By early September, the president had also begun to confront public questions about why U.S. aid to Ukraine was stalled.
So if Trump did tell Sondland flatly that he wanted “no quid pro quo,” he did so knowing there was growing scrutiny of his posture toward Ukraine.
The way witnesses describe a call between the two men in early September is not as favorable for Trump as Sondland’s version of a Sept. 9 call with the president. According to their testimony, Trump said he was not seeking a “quid pro quo,” but he also relayed a specific demand to the ambassador: that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally and publicly announce the investigations Trump was seeking.
At the heart of the impeachment inquiry, members of Congress may have been mistakenly led to believe that there were two phone calls between President Donald Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland in early September—with the second call having the possibility of helping the President’s case. That’s not what happened. There was only one call, and it was highly incriminating.
The call occurred on September 7th. In this call, Trump did say there was “no quid pro quo” with Ukraine, but he then went on to outline his preconditions for releasing the security assistance and granting a White House visit. The call was so alarming that when John Bolton learned of it, he ordered his’ deputy Tim Morrison to immediately report it to the National Security Council lawyers.
Sondland has testified there was a call on September 9th in which Trump said there was “no quid pro quo,” but that he wanted President Zelenskyy “to do” the right thing. A close reading of the publicly available evidence shows that the latter call was actually the very one that sent Morrison to the lawyers, and that Ambassador Bill Taylor foregrounded in his written deposition to inform Congress of the quid pro quo.
As this article was in the publication process at Just Security, the Washington Post published a https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/witness-testimony-and-records-raise-questions-about-account-of-trumps-no-quid-pro-quo-call/2019/11/27/425545c2-0d49-11ea-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html (report) raising doubts about the existence of the September 9 call. The analysis that follows is consistent with the Post’s report and, among other points, shows why Sondland’s “no quid pro quo” call is in fact the same as the September 7th call that Morrison reported to NSC lawyers on September 7th.
Mr. Trump is heading to London again next week, this time for a NATO summit marking the alliance’s 70th anniversary. Mrs. May is long gone from Downing Street. Mr. Johnson, still a favorite of the president, is prime minister and facing his own unpredictable election a little over a week after the NATO gathering on Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Friday, senior administration officials said the visit will include one-on-one meetings with President Emmanuel Macron of France, who recently warned about the “brain death” of NATO and suggested that Europe can no longer assume unwavering support from the United States. Mr. Trump will also meet with Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, and attend a reception at Buckingham Palace hosted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Conspicuous for his absence from the list was Mr. Johnson. It is unusual for the president not to participate in a bilateral meeting with the leader of NATO’s host country. While the president’s schedule was still in flux, one official said the reason for not scheduling a meeting was that Mr. Trump was “very conscious of the fact that we do not interfere” in other country’s elections.
Donald Trump, Jr. cruised into the Thanksgiving weekend on the heels of an enormous literary triumph. His opus Triggered had spent two solid weeks on the top of The New York Times non-fiction best seller list. Junior’s run ended this week when he was knocked off by A Warning. But despite this displacement, Triggered represents a triumph for the young scribe, who has now accomplished something on his own. His father’s namesake is, finally, not a failson.
What’s a failson (pronounced exactly like it looks, just a combination of “fail” and “son”)? He is an upper- (or upper-middle) class incompetent who is protected by familial wealth from the consequences of his actions. The term seems to have been coined by one Will Menaker of the podcast Chapo Trap House, as documented in The New Yorker in this 2016 article.
One is not born a failson. Nor does one simply inherit the status of failson. No—failson status is earned through a display of equal parts incompetence, stupidity, and arrogance. And until his book, no person in America—or maybe even the world, so bursting at the seams with louche heirs and dissolute royals with no throne to sit their pampered arses on—illustrated all the facets of a failson better than Junior.
It is time to take Donald Trump’s disregard for climate crisis seriously. As Commander in Chief, Trump is abdicating his duties to protect his people, instead actively aiding and abetting the corporate polluters who are causing the climate chaos. Trump is wasting irreplaceable time that we need to prevent a worsening climate crisis. Trump’s actions, expanding the fossil fuel industry’s emissions, make the perils even worse. This is another reason for impeachment—climate crisis jeopardizes the American people in major ways.
Trump denies the overwhelming scientific warnings about the devastating destruction of the global climate crisis. He calls climate disruption a “Chinese hoax,” taking his delusionary persona to loony, dangerous levels.
The world is experiencing unheard of environmental upheaval: unprecedented heat waves, rapidly melting glaciers and permafrost, record floods, intensifying hurricanes, more frequent and severe droughts, and massive habitat convulsions. Despite the clear warning signs the worse is yet to come, Trump is shredding regulatory standards designed by law to curb the emission of greenhouse gases by fossil fuels, such as coal. He is opening large areas to oil and gas production, including those on our federal lands, the Arctic wildlife refuge, and offshore.
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Trumpland is where desired ignorance replaces presidential intellect, where reckless disregard of mounting property losses and human casualties become photo opportunities for alighting from Air Force One. Trump makes vague promises of aid only to then provide far less than what the devastated communities desperately need.
Translated into constitutional terms, Mr. Trump is deliberately refusing to enforce the laws mandated by Congress for environmental and workplace protection. He has given our government over to corporations, putting in charge corrupt corporatists qualified only to dismantle and disable these health and safety agencies. His crony capitalists are pushing out the scientists and crushing the civil servants who have sworn to uphold the law.
