Tuesday was bad for Trump; today could be worse
by Tom Sullivan
If you're reading this before 10 a.m. EDT, you may want to tune into this. Otherwise, read on.
Acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor's closed-door testimony before House investigators was devastating for the president's "no quid pro quo" defenders across the capitol. His prepared statement made public Tuesday afternoon details the lengths to which President Trump through an "irregular" policy channel went to coerce — extort is not too strong a word — a public statement from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine was investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.
“‘Everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,” Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told Taylor in early September. Trump held hostage $391 million in military aid authorized and appropriated by Congress and critical to Ukraine's defense against Russian occupying forces. Trump was more interested in a public relations bludgeon to wield against his likely 2020 Democratic opponent.
Taylor testified Sondland told him, "President Trump wanted President Zelenskyy 'in a public box' by making a public statement about ordering such investigations." No public statement, no military aid.
Taylor slowly became aware of this irregular policy channel after taking over the American embassy in Ukraine in mid-June. A month later, it became clear it was subverting official U.S. policy:
On a video conference call with White House officials on July 18, Taylor heard the voice of someone out of the camera’s frame, an official from the Office of Management and Budget informing the group that she had been instructed not to allow any additional military aid to flow to Ukraine until further notice.John Podhoretz, conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter, told MSNBC's "The Beat," Taylor's testimony was "the worst day for the Trump presidency."
“I and others sat in astonishment,” Taylor said. “The Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons, but also the assurance of U.S. support.” The OMB official offered no explanation for the sudden suspension of this aid, except to say that “the directive had come from the president to the chief of staff to OMB.”
“In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened,” Taylor testified. “The irregular policy channel was running contrary to the goals of longstanding U.S. policy.”
As previously reported by Law&Crime, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance in August subpoenaed eight years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns from the [resident’s finance firm Mazars USA as part of an investigation into whether Trump or the Trump Organization violated state laws in connection with the hush payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal.In his 75-page ruling, Marrero rejected Trump's assertion of executive immunity as "repugnant to the nation's governmental structure and constitutional values." Marrero wrote:
Trump’s attorneys filed the appeal with the Second Circuit after U.S. District judge Victor Marrero earlier this month denied the president’s request to prevent Vance’s office from enforcing the subpoenas demanding his tax returns. Marrero rejected the “extraordinary claim” that Trump, as president, was completely immune from complying with any criminal proceedings against him or his businesses.
The notion of federal supremacy and presidential immunity from judicial process that the President here invokes, unqualified and boundless in its reach as described above, cuts across the grain of these constitutional precedents. It also ignores the analytic framework that the Supreme Court has counseled should guide review of presidential claims of immunity from judicial process. Of equal fundamental concern, the President's claim would tread upon principles of federalism and comity that form essential components of our constitutional structure and the federal/state balance of governmental powers and functions. Bared to its core, the proposition the President advances reduces to the very notion that the Founders rejected at the inception of the Republic, and that the Supreme Court has since unequivocally repudiated: that a constitutional domain exists in this country in which not only the President, but, derivatively relatives and persons and business entities associated with him in potentially unlawful private activities, are in fact above the law.Because the president's claim rests on the series of Department of Justice memos that preclude the DOJ (and lately, Robert Mueller) from indicting a sitting president, Marrero spent much of his ruling examining their legal merits. He concludes their claims rely on "suppositions, practicalitiess, and public policy, as well as on conjurings of remote prospects and hyperbolic horrors," and that "the DOJ Memos do not constitute authoritative judicial interpretation of the Constitution."