Alarming Circumstances

The Distraction: Trump started the day by comparing the impeachment inquiry to a lynching and for a moment his attempt to distract from the impeachment inquiry worked.  Democrats immediately attacked him for once again injecting racism into an already fraught atmosphere and Michael Steele the former RNC Chair/current MSNBC pundit tweeted out a truly horrific picture of a lynching to drive home the point that Trump’s comparison, while not unprecedented, was out of line.  Lindsey Graham, the Senator from South Carolina, a state where many of those lynchings took place, defended Trump because that’s what he does but a number of other Republicans expressed frustration with Trump’s race baiting distraction including Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski who appears to be inching into Mitt Romney territory.  Even Senate Majority Leader McConnell said that he wouldn’t have used the lynching word while also denying that he’d ever told Trump that his call with Ukraine President Zelensky had been perfect, problematic for Trump because he keeps asserting that McConnell did say that. Anyway, as noted, this was all just a distraction.  While not sidling over to Romney land, he did refuse to bring up election protection legislation again yesterday, McConnell is exerting some independence these days.  Last week he penned an op-ed slamming Trump’s Syria policy though he never mentioned Trump by name.   

The Testimony: The real story of the day was the testimony provided to Congress by the current Acting Ambassador to the Ukraine Bill Taylor, a West Point graduate, Viet Nam vet and “model” long term diplomat who among his other impressive positions had previously served as Ambassador to Ukraine during the George W Bush administration.  In June, Secretary of State Pompeo asked him to rejoin the government to assume the Ukraine position being vacated by former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who was fired after her reputation was trashed at the hands of Rudy Giuliani and his cohorts. Taylor, who has an affinity for Ukraine, was aware of the way that Yovanovitch was treated so he accepted the position only after being reassured by Pompeo that their views on the importance of Ukraine as a US ally and as key to the continued stability of Europe in the face of Putin’s greater Russia ambitions were simpatico.  It didn’t take him long for him to realize that something nefarious was going on, that with Trump’s approval Rudy Giuliani was conducting parallel diplomacy, pushing Ukraine’s new President Zelensky to publicly announce that he was directing an investigation into the Bidens’ involvement with the Burisma gas company and faux Ukraine-Democratic party collusion in the 2016 election.  Following the Comey model, Taylor detailed his concerns in a series of contemporaneous notes, notes that included  EU Ambassador/Three Amigo/Trump contributor Gordon Sondland justifying Trump’s Zelensky quid pro quo demand as something that businessmen like Trump do because “when a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.”  When possible Taylor also documented events and conversations with implicating texts including his now famous one to Sondland, that it would be “crazy to withhold security money for help with a political campaign.” Though Taylor’s ten hours of testimony was provided behind closed doors, his fifteen pages of introductory remarks were leaked to the press yesterday afternoon. Based on those remarks and the comments uttered by the few members of Congress, all Democrats, who spoke after the very long session, it appears that Taylor’s testimony was enormously devastating for Trump and not so good for Sondland who will probably be invited back to “clean up” some of the things that he said last week, including those that now appear to be provable lies. Though as of this morning, Taylor is still the acting Ambassador to Ukraine, its hard to imagine that Trump will allow him to continue on the job and even if he still has his job, given the thuggish crowd that Giuliani hangs with, it probably would be better for him if he stays away from Kiev.  He may even want to consider requesting protective custody.  Assuming she actually shows up, Laura Cooper the deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia is due to testify today about the decision to “temporarily” withhold Ukraine military aid.  

The Reaction:  Trump’s usually loquacious Congressional contingent had little to say about the substance of Taylor’s testimony so instead they continued to attack Speaker Pelosi and House Intel Chair Adam Schiff for their process, mostly complaining that the hearings are still being held behind closed doors. True that they are still behind closed doors, but the public hearings are on the horizon, and that shouldn’t please Trump’s team because even with their usual shenanigans, those hearings will be devastating for Trump. The White House appears to be scrambling to come up with a coherent plan of attack so don’t be surprised if you start hearing that Taylor beats his wife while dropping kittens from high balconies.  For now the best they could muster was Press Secretary Grisham’s evening statement that Trump “has done nothing wrong, this is a coordinated smear campaign from far left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution” and so on.  As to smear campaigns, we also learned this week that both right wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin not so subtly fed Trump’s hatred for all things Ukraine, warning him that no Ukrainian, especially the new reform minded Zelensky, could be trusted and that former national security advisor John Bolton had been so concerned about Orban’s “malign influence” that he had tried to prevent the two from even meeting.

Shady Web:  Federal prosecutors in Chicago have told their New York counterparts that Rudy Guliani’s associates Lev Parnass and Igor Fruman are involved in their case against Ukrainian gas tycoon Dmytro Firtash, the oligarch currently fighting extradition to the US while under house arrest in Vienna, Austria. It’s thought that Lev and Igor had been on their way to Vienna to meet with Firtash when they were nabbed by US law enforcement.  Firtash who may or may not be a source of funding for Rudy and his guys is currently represented by the husband wife legal team of Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, the two uber conservative lawyers who at one point had been asked to formally join Trump’s legal team but didn’t due to other conflicts though their son does work for Barr’s Justice Department.  For now Lev and Igor have been busy shuffling their legal teams, Igor recently retained one of Paul Manfort’s lawyers, the two had previously retained Trump’s one time lawyer John Dowd for issues related to congressional subpoenaes however the usually quick to talk to anyone with a camera Rudy hasn’t appeared on TV at all this week, an indication that even he knows that he’s in bigly trouble.  Also worth noting, Lev’s Instagram account includes photos of him with lots of Trumpkins, flying around with Giuliani, and one of him with Trump’s other lawyer Jay Sekulow and Rudy “celebrating” the release of the “no collusion, no obstruction” Mueller report.    

Other News:  Ordinarily, events in Syria would dominate but given yesterday’s shattering testimony they’ve slipped from the front burner, just a little.  In a nutshell, Russia and Turkey have teamed up, making what they describe as a “historic” deal, one intended to drive Kurdish forces away from the Syria-Turkey border while enhancing Russia’s increasintly dominant role in the region.  Bottom line, if you are a Syria Kurd, you are screwed.  And though it’s not clear why the Christian aid group Frontier Alliance International thought that hosting their “A Night of Prayer for the Kurds” event at Trump’s Washington DC hotel was a good idea, it’s been cancelled by hotel management for fairly obvious reasons.  Also for obvious reasons, the Trump organization is in the process of removing the Trump name from both its Central Park ice skating rinks.  In other news apparently a number of Democratic donors are now entering the freak out zone, concerned that none of the many Democratic candidates are up to the task of unseating Trump.  They may be right, but they may also be very wrong.  Few thought that a one term African American Senator with a funny name could ever go the distance. And who’s to say that Trump will still be the Republican candidate come 2020?