wednesday
18 december 2019
Today, the House of Representatives will vote on whether to impeach president Donald Trump. Trump faces two charges. First, he is accused of putting pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden’s part in firing the prosecutor looking into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas firm that paid Biden’s son Hunter at least 50,000 dollars a month. Second, he is accused of obstructing Congress’s impeachment investigation. If the vote passes, as is likely in a Democratic-controlled House, it will lead to a trial in the Senate, held by the Republicans. There, the two-thirds majority that would see Trump removed from office seems elusive. ‘For Democrats, Ukrainegate also poses self-defeating risks: just as Russiagate centred on the stolen Democratic Party emails that exposed malfeasance by the Democrats’ governing body, the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and its presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Ukrainegate draws attention to questions of corruption of another presidential candidate, Joe Biden.’ Despite the electoral weakness of Democratic insiders like Clinton, Biden is currently the favourite to be the party’s nominee.
Every single road leads to Ukraine
Will Donald Trump really be impeached?
by Aaron Maté
What next? Representative Lee Zeldin at a press conference alongside House Republicans on Capitol Hill on 23 October
Alex Wroblewski · Getty
One day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony put a permanent end to ‘Russiagate’, President Donald Trump gave new life to the Democrats’ impeachment hopes. In a phone call on 25 July, Trump asked the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to assist Attorney General William Barr’s ongoing review of the origins of the Russia probe which, Trump mumbled, may have ‘started with Ukraine’. Trump also requested help with a potential investigation of Joe Biden, the former US vice-president (2009-17) and potential Democratic 2020 presidential nominee, for his role in the 2014 firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that was then paying his son Hunter at least $50,000 per month.
Trump’s conversation with Zelensky came shortly after he froze a military assistance package to Ukraine, and coincided with private manoeuvres there by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. All of this set off alarm bells for a group of White House and intelligence officials, who worried that Trump was seeking to leverage military aid to Ukraine for political help. They shared their concerns with a CIA whistleblower, whose subsequent complaint set off the current impeachment inquiry consuming Washington.
Ukrainegate shares several features with Russiagate. Once more, the national security state is the source of the anti-Trump grievance, and the dispute is again an intra-elite battle, pitting Trump and his Republican allies against powerful converging forces — Democratic leaders, mainstream media outlets, national security state officials, neoconservatives — who view the president as an inadequate steward of the global US empire. Cold war dogma is presupposed to be legitimate: in 2016 it was the Russians who had attacked the US to install Trump; in 2019 it is Trump who is now trying to stay in power while leaving our defenceless Ukrainian ally open to Russian attacks.
For Democrats, Ukrainegate also poses self-defeating risks: just as Russiagate centred on the stolen Democratic Party emails that exposed malfeasance by the Democrats’ governing body, the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and its presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Ukrainegate draws attention to questions of corruption of another presidential candidate, Joe Biden. And once again, this intra-elite battle is consuming political and media attention, overshadowing all others, including a spirited and substantive Democratic presidential primary.
‘Abuse of office for personal gain’
But Ukrainegate does have one clear difference. Unlike Russiagate, which was premised on uncovering a non-existent Trump-Russia conspiracy, this time it is clear that Trump engaged in unethical conduct. No matter whether the Biden family had unsavoury dealings in Ukraine, Trump has no business enrolling the country’s leader in an effort to find out. So the whistleblower’s concern that Trump attempted to ‘abuse his office for personal gain’ is worthy of investigation.
Whether that justifies an all-consuming impeachment inquiry is not so clear. For a start, the prevailing belief that Trump put pressure on Ukraine by delaying military aid in order to compel an investigation into Biden is far from established. Trump had frozen the aid by the time of his telephone call with Zelensky, but it did not come up during their conversation. The Ukrainian government did not even learn that the military aid had been held up until more than one month later. Democratic senator Chris Murphy, who met with Zelensky in early September, told CNN on 26 September that the Ukrainian president ‘did not make any connection between the aid that had been cut off and the requests that he was getting from [Trump attorney Rudy] Giuliani’. It will be difficult to prove that extortion occurred if Trump’s purported target was unaware of the plot, and the ransom.
The dispute is again an intra-elite battle, pitting Trump against powerful converging forces who view him as an inadequate steward of the global US empire
It is also unclear from the White House transcript of the call what exactly Trump wants Zelensky to do: its rambling leaves room for ambiguity. On the Biden front, Trump tells Zelensky that ‘whatever you can do with the Attorney General [William Barr] would be great’ and also asks him to ‘look into it’. But Barr says that he and Trump never spoke about investigating Biden or contacting Ukraine (1); Zelensky says that he did not feel any pressure to investigate Biden; and ‘look into it’ can be interpreted in different ways, from damning to benign.
Moreover, Trump’s foremost concern — and the object of the ‘favour’ he asks from Zelensky — is not Biden, but securing the Ukrainian president’s assistance with Barr’s review of the origins of the Russia investigation. As incoherent as he appears, Trump is within his rights to ask for Ukraine’s cooperation given that Ukrainian officials meddled in the 2016 election, with the explicit aim of hurting Trump’s candidacy, by leaking damaging information about his campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Biden ‘not a topic of conversation’
Leaked details of the testimony advance the case against Trump, but not as far as suggested. ‘I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,’ Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, wrote to colleagues on 9 September. But Kurt Volker, the US special envoy to Ukraine, who recently resigned, told lawmakers that Taylor was responding to media reports, not inside information. According to Volker, Biden ‘was never a topic of discussion’ in his dealings with his counterparts in Kiev, and the bid for a Ukrainian investigation of some kind was ultimately abandoned.
Taylor told Congress on 22 October that Ukrainian officials were informed at a meeting in Warsaw that they had to investigate Burisma in order to receive military aid. But as the Washington Post noted the same day, Taylor’s evidence was ‘second-hand’: he had heard from a US official, Tim Morrison, what another US official, Gordon Sondland, supposedly told a Ukrainian official. Sondland’s attorney responded that his client either rejected Taylor’s accusations or did not recall the Warsaw conversation that Taylor claims to have heard about. So the impeachment question may come down to which bit of hearsay from which US bureaucrat we choose to believe.
This leaves us with multiple scenarios: perhaps Trump intended to blackmail Ukraine, or perhaps he didn’t; perhaps he primarily wanted an investigation into Ukrainian interference in 2016, or into Biden, or both. If he wanted Ukraine to target Biden, that would be brazenly unethical; if he was more concerned with Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election, that would be a legitimate line of inquiry. If he tried to leverage military assistance — one that he was Congressionally mandated to deliver — that would be an abuse of power. But if he sought to leverage a coveted meeting — a White House prerogative — that could conceivably be more justifiable.
All of this raises the question of why Democrats have opted to pursue the most serious remedy — impeachment — on such a shaky foundation. And given how many immoral and destructive acts Trump commits daily, it is also worth asking why this one was deemed to be, in the words of Democratic representative Adam Schiff, the president’s ‘most serious misconduct thus far’ (CNN, 25 September).
The answer is not difficult. In Washington, elites generally face consequences for the harm they cause not to the general population but to other members of the club. The standard was laid bare in Watergate (1972-74), when Richard Nixon faced impeachment, not for mass murder in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but for targeting the opposing elite faction and trying to cover it up. George W Bush could have been impeached for the Iraq invasion in 2003 had this crime not been carried out with bi-partisan support.
Whistleblower from the CIA
In the Trump era, prominent Democratic and media figures have shaped their ‘resistance’ around the imperatives of the national security state. That is what gave us Russiagate, with US intelligence officials suspecting Trump of being a Russian agent for breaking with bipartisan hostility towards Moscow. Ukrainegate also began with the national security state. Its whistleblower came from the CIA and his sources occupied nearby perches, including inside the White House. One of those key officials is neoconservative John Bolton, ousted from his position as National Security Advisor in September. According to the Washington Post, Bolton ‘went ballistic’ over Giuliani’s involvement in talks with Ukraine (2), and even ordered an aide to report his concerns to White House lawyers.
The concern this time is not just Trump’s alleged corruption but also, in the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that ‘Russia has a hand in this’ (MSNBC, 27 September). The outcry presumes that Trump endangered Ukraine and emboldened Russia by pausing military assistance. In fact, President Barack Obama was concerned enough about a proxy war to resist pressure to provide that same military aid. Trump reversed Obama’s decision after facing the same Beltway pressure, with the added weight of allegations that he was not only soft on Russia but also its accomplice.
For Democrats to oppose Trump once again, via a militarist, cold war ‘scandal’, risks more danger for Ukraine, Russia, and the Democrats’ own 2020 prospects. We all know how the last scandal turned out: three years of innuendo, discredited ‘bombshells’, and an investigation that found no Trump-Russia conspiracy. It should now be clear what Russiagate means for the cause of defeating Trump in 2020. The media collusion hype not only took the focus off the harm Trump has done to the country and the world, but vindicated him when it collapsed.
Throughout Russiagate, the interests of national security state officials converged with those of neoliberal Democrats who lost to Trump in 2016. The unwavering focus on a conspiracy theory allowed Democratic elites to avoid the transformation that should have resulted from losing to a billionaire conman who posed as a working-class champion. Ukrainegate grants them yet one more extension: instead of a Democratic primary where issues like Medicare For All, education, climate change, immigrant rights, militarism and class warfare are addressed, the country risks another fixation with an intra-elite battle that relegates voters, and their concerns, to the margins. Democrats risk not only sidelining voters, but also their own best opportunity to reach them.
Aaron Maté
Aaron Maté is a journalist.
Original text in English
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