One of the wildest aspects of Donald Trump’s plot to extort Ukraine is that both the president and his accomplices, who believe Democrats should be charged with high treason for this outrageous impeachment business, have basically already admitted to almost everything. Sure, they turn around and insist otherwise within the span of minutes or sometimes even seconds, but when it comes to key aspects of the crime, they’ve just come out and copped to it all—in public! And, for some reason that a less scrupulous publication might suggest was a matter of guilty conscience or brain damage associated with repeatedly and willfully pushing Q-Tips further into the ear canal than the manufacturer ever intended them to go, they can’t stop doing it.
In October Trump stood on the White House lawn and told reporters he wanted Ukraine to “start a major investigation into the Bidens.” Several weeks earlier, he said at the United Nations that of course he withheld aid from the country and, in fact, he’d “do it again.” (At the same gathering he sat beside Volodymyr Zelensky and said, on camera, that the Ukraine president should do “whatever he can do in terms of” the Bidens’ corruption.) Shortly thereafter, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney famously admitted that the president held up nearly $400 million in military aid in part to pressure Zelensky to dig up dirt on the Bidens and help discredit the Mueller investigation, insisting the tactic was totally above board. “That’s why we held up the money,” Mulvaney explained casually, as if he were running the press corps through the standard protocol of Thanksgiving turkey pardons. (“First, the birds check in for the night at the Willard InterContinental…“) “I have news for everybody,” Mulvaney continued. “Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy. Elections do have consequences and they should, and your foreign policy is going to change…there’s no problem with that.”
And then, of course, you have the numerous admissions by the president’s personal lawyer, reanimated cadaver Rudy Giuliani. Long before the formal impeachment inquiry was launched, the former mayor was telling anyone who would listen—including the New York Times and Fox News—that he was pushing Ukraine to open investigations he hoped would help Trump. After the Washington Post broke the news of the whistleblower complaint in September, Giuliani went on CNN for a media appearance for the ages, during which he insisted to Chris Cuomo that he had never asked Ukraine officials to investigate Joe Biden, and less than 30 seconds later yelled, “Of course I did!” as if he were feuding with a cocktail waitress about asking for extra bar snacks while waiting for his next martini.
And in the latest instance of “yeah we did it” from Team Trump, we have Giuliani telling New Yorker reporter Adam Entous that he totally worked behind the scenes to push outMarie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, as part of the campaign to get Ukraine to do Trump’s political bidding