As the Trumpworld turns, the plot thickens in Washington, D.C. – these days known as Impeachment Place.
On Thursday, even as Jennifer Williams, a special adviser to Vice President Mike Pence on Europe and Russia, was testifying thanks to a subpoena behind the closed doors of a House investigatory committee, Trump was lashing out at an attorney for the whistleblower in the Ukraine affair. That would be the whistleblower who first alerted our government that the president of the United States was pressuring the new president of Ukraine to find and give him some political dirt on his opponents in exchange for Trump lifting his hold on the congressionally allocated U.S. taxpayer money intended to aid Ukraine in its struggle against Russian aggression.
Meanwhile, Americans all over the country were reading or hearing versions of a Washington Post report that Trump in late September had tried to get Attorney General William Bar to hold a news conference declaring Trump broke no laws during the July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – the same call the whistleblower reported. And the same call that Pence’s aide, Ms. Williams, had listened in on.
In that call, after Zelenskyy said Ukraine hoped to buy military equipment from the U.S. with that aid, Trump said he needed “a favor, though.” And he asked repeatedly for Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, and find evidence to exonerate Russia in American 2016 election interference.
Barr declined. This was the same Barr who, heretofore, has prostrated himself to defend Trump, even to the point to misleading America for weeks about the actual and full findings of the Mueller Report.