The Latest Sparkly Thing
by tristero
Damn straight it's damning. But no one should be distracted by this single sparkly thing because it's neither a verbatim record of what was said nor is it the entire story.
And that is my biggest concern, that the press will in its hive wisdom decide that it was damning enough and that now the story is complete. It is not.
The entire, original, complete, unredacted whistleblower complaint needs to be turned over to Congress. Now.
But the press coverage I've seen, with the exception of Maddow, still is minimizing the blatant lawbreaking that Trump, Barr, and Maguire are perpetrating. [SEE UPDATE 2 Below]
UPDATE: The Republicans desperately want reporting to stop with the transcript.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters that this transcript doesn't justify an impeachment.
"From my point of view, to impeach any president over a phone call like this would be insane," Graham said.
The GOP is trying to pretend the story begins and ends with a few remarks that have been reported in a paraphrased fashion.
Again, this non-transcript is just the latest sparkly thing. The press has to do its job. It simply must place this non-transcript in context and make it clear that it is just one of several pieces of the story. They have to aggressively report the lawless behavior of the the Trump administration in their attempt to suppress the whistleblower complaint. [Paragraph updated after posting to reflect the fact that transcript is in fact not a transcript.]
UPDATE 2: This is exactly what I mean by the press minimizing the story:
The release did not go far enough for many Democrats, who have demanded to see the full complaint about Mr. Trump’s actions lodged by a whistle-blower, which has not been shared with Congress.
The implications in what the reporter wrote are (1) that the non-verbatim release of a phone call's contents did go far enough; (2) that the "demands" are partisan; and (3) that this isn't a clear case of breaking the law but rather merely a "demand."
Once again, the release of a non-verbatim description of a phone call is just one piece of a larger story, the demands are not partisan, and this is a very clear case of the Trump administration deliberately breaking a law that could not have been written clearer.