#President Trump has time-and-again contended that his call to Ukraine's President Zelensky was "perfect." What this means is that in order for every call to a foreign leader to be "perfect" it must include a "favor" that is politically beneficial to Trump.
#When Mick Mulvaney described a quid pro quo between Ukraine's role in meddling in the U.S. 2016 presidential election and the freeze on military aid, he said this sort of thing happens all the time, and everyone should just "get over it." It is deeply troubling that Mulvaney is forecasting that every time Trump calls or meets with a foreign leader, it will involve a quid pro quo personally beneficial to Trump.
#Sen. Lindsey Graham is proving to be the master of the inane: He has said that: 1.) It is sad that Trump is going to be impeached due to one phone call, when Trump's entire tenure in office has been chuck-a-block with instances of abuse of power; 2.) He has said that he is not going to read any transcripts related to the impeachment; and 3.) He has vowed to shut down the impeachment proceedings in the Senate before they begin.
#Trump contends that he was interested in rooting out corruption in Ukraine; however there is no public record of him taking any action to root out corruption in that country. There is abundant evidence that he has been trying to corrupt a very inexperienced Ukraine leader.
#The GOP is trying to make a point that Trump did not mention freezing military aid in the July 25 call. The White House initially announced that the aid would be released on February 28, and then reasserted the release on May 23. In mid-July, President Trump directed acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to attribute the freeze to an "interagency process." Mulvaney then passed the word to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). High OMB officials have confirmed that the directive came from Trump, but no reason was given for the freeze. Once more, a deputy Defense Department official centrally involved in the dispersal of appropriated funds, has testified that Ukraine officials she was in contact with, were flummoxed by the withholding of the military aid.
#The GOP has made a big case that the first whistleblower (WB) did not have first-hand knowledge of the July 25 phone call, not only does the lawyer for the first WB have as a client a second WB with first-hand knowledge, but two major witnesses -- Lt. Col. Alexander Vineland, a National Security Council official, and Tim Morrison, another National Security Council official -- listened to the July 25 call.
#Rep. Jim Jordan wanted to have Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the EU, testify in public because he had said in a December 9 text message that there was no quid pro quo. Later, Sondland admitted that he did not have independent knowledge, but was merely repeating what Trump had instructed him to say. Then, Sondland said his memory had been "refreshed" and he said that "everything" was conditioned on the Ukraine government publicly announcing the opening of the two demanded investigations.
#A big talking point for the GOP is that impeachment would nullify the 2016 election of Trump. Any impeachment of a president would nullify the prior election of a president. The impeachment clause in the Constitution would become a dead letter. Since a Justice Department memo says that a sitting president can't be tried in a court of law, and an elected president can't be impeached, this nation that rebelled against the rule of a British king, would have established a U.S. king totally above the law.
#The "three amigos," Gordon Sondland, Kurt Volker and Rick Perry, head of the Department of Energy, tried to dissuade Trump from his position on Ukraine, but were unsuccessful.
#A member of the GOP House leadership, Rep. Steve Scalise, has compared the House investigative committee hearings as Soviet-style in nature. Scalise doesn't seem to understand the Soviet "show" trials of the 1930s usually resulted in the execution of those convicted, or being sent away to hard labor in the Siberian Gulag.
#When the GOP got the public hearings they had been demanding, they unanimously voted against them. The GOP lawmakers said in effect, that it was "too little, too late." The GOP claim that the Democrats were being unfair to Trump should have been washed away by the fact that the rules voted into being on October 31 essentially adopted the GOP rules adopted in 2015. The charge of unfairness to Trump is ludicrous when one considers the law-breaking he has allowed to get away with; the democratic norms he has trampled; and the severe damage he has done to the checks and balances structure of the U.S. government by stonewalling on documents and witnesses.
#In June, President Trump ordered John Bolton and Defense Secretary Mark Esper to conduct a policy review; however, John C. Rood, the undersecretary for defense, had already sent a letter to congressional committees in May -- including the committee chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley -- to give assurance that the "Government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purpose of decreasing corruption, increasing accountability, sustaining improvements of combat capability enabled by U.S. assistance."
#May 7 may become an important day in the Ukraine scandal, as The New York Times has cited three sources in describing a meeting largely devoted to discussing an investigation of Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company, on whose board Hunter Biden served. How and why did Burisma come up when it had been investigated long before?
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