Trump's corruption includes multiple agencies and Congress

At this point, the broad contours of the Ukraine scandal are well understood. President Trump appears to have used hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money appropriated as military aid to extort a vulnerable ally into helping him rig the 2020 election on his behalf.

  WaPo

Succinctly and clearly, that's it.

But there are two other aspects of this scandal that need elaboration. The first is the degree to which this whole scheme is corrupting multiple government agencies and effectively placing them at the disposal of Trump’s reelection effort.

The second is that two of the scheme’s goals — getting Ukraine to validate a conspiracy theory absolving Russia of 2016 sabotage, and to manufacture smears of one of Trump’s leading 2020 rivals — are really part of the same story.

The New York Times has a remarkable piece detailing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s role in this whole scheme.

[...]

As the Times points out, newly released transcripts of witness testimony in the impeachment inquiry fill in that part of the story. It involves a disinformation campaign directed at Yovanovitch, which Pompeo didn’t defend her from, despite her being a senior diplomat.

[...]

Mr. McKinley said he personally urged Mr. Pompeo three times to issue a defense; the revelation of that detail in a transcript released on Monday undercut a declaration Mr. Pompeo made in an interview last month that he “never heard” Mr. McKinley “say a single thing” about Ms. Yovanovitch’s ouster.

[...]

As the Times concludes, Pompeo “had direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s shadow policy, and seems to have enabled it.”

Crucially, Pompeo’s State Department has also sought to cover that project up. The department has tried to block the testimony of multiple officials.

[...]

Then there’s Attorney General William P. Barr. In an overlooked interview, the national spokesperson for the Republican National Committee claimed that when Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to carry out the “investigations” Trump wanted, he wasn’t trying to help himself.

Instead, Trump was merely trying to get Zelensky to cooperate with the ongoing Justice Department review of the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference, the RNC spokesperson, Liz Harrington, said.

[...]

In other words, Trump and top officials at the GOP’s main national political committee are using Barr’s review to confer legitimacy on Trump’s extortion of Zelensky for his own corrupt purposes.

Trump himself instructed Zelensky on the July 25 call to enlist Barr to help carry out the scheme.

[...]

[T]he Justice Department denied that Trump had discussed with Barr any direct assistance to Zelensky, and distanced itself from any suggestion that military aid was withheld to pressure Ukraine into cooperating with Barr’s review.

But Barr keeps popping up in the middle of the plot. The Justice Department has announced that Barr’s review is vaguely examining Ukraine’s role in 2016. Barr is enlisting other foreign governments in this effort.

[...]

Barr’s Justice Department, like Pompeo’s State Department, has worked to keep the truth about all of this buried. It advised against transmitting the whistleblower complaint sounding the alarm about it to Congress and declined to criminally investigate the whistleblower’s charges.

All this comes at a time when new documents from the special counsel are underscoring just how eager Trumpworld was to profit from the Russian interference effort.

[...]

Multiple government agencies are actively helping Trump absolve Russia of sabotaging the last presidential election on his behalf — thus burying his own campaign’s eagerness to benefit from it — and helping him cover up his effort to solicit more foreign help in cheating his way to victory in the next one.

Flashback to November 3 (a week ago):

I can read that in no other way than that he is asking Republicans to lie for him.  Another test of their loyalty and willingness to perjure and debase themselves for his benefit. To place themselves and their careers under his thumb. Joseph Stalin II in the making.

I wondered how many Republicans would be willing to comply. Or maybe I should say - which Republicans would be willing to comply.

This is a straight-up command to Republicans that they produce transcripts that vindicate him. What would that look like? We know the answer to this because Republicans have already told it to us.

For weeks, numerous Republicans have claimed that the publicly confirmed and very damning revelations about Trump’s corruption aren’t actually damning, because behind closed doors, the witnesses’ stories have fallen apart.

Republicans tried this trick to discredit Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr.’s devastating testimony.

[...]

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), a slavish Trump lickspittle, called for the release of the transcript of Taylor’s testimony, claiming: “Much of his leaked opening statement collapsed, but Schiff keeps the public in the dark on that!”

Zeldin then broadened his case. “The public is absolutely being misled about every single deposition that takes place,” Zeldin told the Washington Examiner.

[...]

Another Republican, Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah, claimed it’s “extraordinarily frustrating” that he cannot yet share the closed-door details supposedly showing that witness testimony has been debunked.

This line has also been pushed by Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio).

[...]

Let’s point out how ridiculous this whole line really is. First, much of the “leaked” testimony actually consisted of complete opening statements documented in black-letter text.

  WaPo

How could they be so stupid?  Or why would they risk it?

And now we have the actual testimony transcripts. I wonder what these people are saying now. It turns out Chris Stewart, a member of the Intelligence Committee only even attended half of the hearings. He skipped the big ones: Bill Taylor, Kurt Volker, Fiona Hill and George Kent.

Trump and Republicans know they can right now inject the claim into the discussion that the revelations were secretly debunked, because the media coverage won’t return to this, once the transcripts show what nonsense it is. [...] [T]he Times simply allowed Turner to float that claim, without pointing out its core absurdities.

Indeed, Trump and Republicans also know that once the transcripts are released, they can simply change the subject by lying about what they actually do show. They’ll do this knowing that their propaganda network will amplify those lies, and that all-too-many mainstream outlets will launder them by treating them as merely one side in a legitimate good-faith dispute over the transcripts’ content and meaning.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.