First, some good news: Donald Trump’s acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, seems to be sweating his own legal exposure in the Ukraine scandal, which suggests that the impeachment story is far from over.
To be clear, there’s good reasons to despair that Trump or anyone in his administration will ever face real justice for the scheme to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into publicly supporting debunked Trumpian conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and specifically about former Vice President Joe Biden, the current frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has gleefully flaunted the fact that no amount of evidence of Trump’s guilt will move Senate Republicans to convict him, or even to pretend to hold a real Senate trial.
And yet, the fat lady isn’t singing. On Sunday, the New York Times published a lengthy investigative report on the six-week period during which Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine as part of his extortion scheme. In the typical New York Times fashion, the piece carries way too much Trump water by exaggerating the possibility that he had a non-extortionate purpose for his actions. But even that doesn’t muddy the waters too much. The pattern of behavior shows not only that Trump was extorting Zelensky, but that he was directly and perhaps obsessively involved in running the scheme. Continue reading