December 9th 2019

By Hunter

Daily Kos

It's Sunday, which means Donald Trump's most obsessive defenders are given free rein to mislead the public and ignore the facts on national television. The primary news this week was an announcement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the House would indeed be drafting and voting on articles of impeachment against Trump, based primarily but not exclusively on the use of his office to extort political favors from an at-war Ukraine. It was going to be a Sunday of heavy bullshitting in any event, but Pelosi's announcement appears to have set off a run of would-be and actual Republican accomplices, all angling to be the mouth that best repeats whatever Donald J. Trump most wants to hear.

On CNN, Rep. Mark Meadows simply rejected outright the "premise" that Trump specifically asked the Ukrainian president to investigate rival Joe Biden and his family despite the White House releasing a "perfect" transcript that documents Trump doing absolutely exactly that. There is no possible way Meadows does not know he is lying; there is no possible way Meadows does not fully understand that his actions are, if successful, intended to assert Trump's ongoing ability to commit crimes against the nation.

In a follow-up tweet, Meadows defended his attempt to gaslight the public by continuing to gaslight. "Questions like this make the false assumption that [Trump] had political motives. That’s not accurate. It’s not supported by the evidence." Instead, says the extravagantly crooked congressman, Trump was sincerely "making sure we weren't sending taxpayer funded aid to a corrupt nation."

This is a lie, and Meadows, who I repeat has shown himself to be deeply crooked in recent years, knows it. All testimony and documents confirm that Trump, Giuliani, Sondland and the others focused exclusively on demands that Ukraine announce two "investigations", targeting the Democratic National Committee and Joe Biden specifically. No other Ukrainian "corruption" was identified or even mentioned. (The DNC and "CrowdStrike" investigation was intended to promote a Russian-backed conspiracy theory clearing Russia of 2016 election hacking, further positing that Trump campaign head Paul Manafort was entrapped, when $2.4 million in secret payments from pro-Russia Ukrainian leaders surfaced. Manafort is currently rotting in prison.)

Rep. Matt Gaetz, another of the most brickheaded of Trump's defenders, was not as adept at the gaslighting as Meadows. Gaetz allowed that Rudy Giuliani's ongoing efforts in Ukraine, this time to film a swiftboat-styled "documentary" in which some of the most corrupt of the nation's ex-leaders declare themselves innocent and insist that Actually, Joe Biden is corrupt for some reason, is "weird." And, notes Gaetz, Trump "put out a statement that said [Rudy] does want to come to Congress and explain" himself. In fact, says Gaetz, all them fellers—Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney, and Mike Pompeo" should come testify, because surely that testimony would prove Trump and his allies to be super ultrainnocent.

Or, as Gaetz's memorized flash cards put it: "I think it would inure to the president's advantage to have people testify who could exculpate him."

Thank you, Merriam-Webster. Now if only we could look through our antonyms to deduce why all those sweaty creatures are in fact very insistently refusing to do exactly that.

If you'd like your gaslighting defenses of an international extortion scheme by the Trump White House to come with a wheelbarrow of self-humiliation, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has you covered. His declaration that he believes Ukraine did indeed "meddle" in the 2016 elections was met with audible laughter in the Meet the Press studios. It got no better after that moment, and Ted Cruz got not a stitch more respect. Even he, from the expression on his face, is disgusted with himself.

If Gaetz is pretending at being stupid, Meadows is bringing his usual ghastly corruption, and Ted Cruz is providing the best face of once-proud, now-humiliated Senate Republicans now plotting to attach themselves as co-conspirators to the narcissism-fueled idiot blowhard’s transparently criminal scheme, we only have one more Republican caucus to hear from: the collaborators.

Rep. Devin Nunes, who at this point may yet be revealed to be Vlad Putin’s secret nephew, managed to make it through nearly the whole of the House Intelligence impeachment hearings on Trump and Ukraine without revealing that he was, in fact, himself a fact witness who had repeated contacts with indicted Giuliani "associate" Lev Parnas—one of the key figures in the Trump-Giuliani scandal. After House Intelligence investigators discovered phone records between Nunes and Parnas, Nunes has responded mostly by fleeing questioners, but Nunes cannot fulfill his role as principle House saboteur of the investigation by remaining silent, but he resurfaced to talk about everything but that.

So, did he talk to Parnas or didn't he? He's still refusing to say, because who can remember who a sitting congressman talks to during his runabout schedule, but now his story has evolved yet again with an acknowledgement on Fox News Business that he, um, now remembers that he "got a call from a number that was Parnas' wife." And that he remembers "talking to someone." Just ... someone.

What that new recollection leaves out is that Nunes' phone records don't just indicate that "someone" used Lev Parnas' phone to call Devin Nunes, but that Nunes and Parnas exchanged multiple calls—some imitated by Parnas, and other by Nunes. It is extremely likely that Nunes' memory will evolve yet again—and the extent to which Nunes appears to have lied on this, and hidden information from the committee, may land him in bigger trouble than just the expected House Ethics inquiry. We can only hope.

We’re almost home, so let’s wrap this one up. Are there any administration collaborators who would like to defend themselves directly, on television rather than under oath, while still refusing to answer for the key events of both extortive act and ongoing cover-up? I see a hand in the back?

Indeed, the Sunday shows featured a genuine minor(?) accomplice to the Ukrainian extortion scheme in the form of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who has felt enough heat from his own involvement to necessitate an appearance on Fox News to defend both himself and boss. (Esper has also been smarting from backing Trump, and not the entire rest of the nation's military leadership, as Trump pardoned a trio of war criminals to widespread outrage.) In a not particularly successful interview with Chris Wallace, Esper was full of praise and flattery for the Criminal in Chief—but again defended, without elaboration, his refusal to provide Congress with subpoenaed documents. Esper also refused to answer Wallace's questions on whether Esper himself had gotten an explanation of why the military aid was held up, or whether he himself was told of "political considerations" for the move; he also defended Trump by saying "At the end of the day, the bottom line is most of that aid got out on time."

That is indeed one of the key administration defenses: Whether Trump's actions were criminal, violated his oath of office, or so forth or not, very little milk was spilled in the grand scheme of things and can best be ignored, constitutional crisis or not, and Trump, Barr, Giuliani, Mulvaney, Sondland, Pompeo and Esper need not face consequences. The bank robbery only needed a few thousand dollars, officers; you can hardly arrest a man for that.

Posted with permission