The Democratic House leadership’s decision that the Ukraine scandal merits an impeachment inquiry when all President’s Trump’s previous impeachable offenses did not was made for pragmatic as well as existential reasons: multiple representatives have indicated that the relative clarity of the scandal makes it easier to build public support than, say, the Russia-Trump campaign collusion nexus that Robert Mueller investigated. Yet even this “simple” story has layers and layers, like the proverbial onion, and the Democrats may well run a different type of risk if they decide to narrow the articles of impeachment to too narrow a slice of the Ukraine scandal. The basic and at this point clearly-evidenced political crime is that Donald Trump tried to use the power of the US government to bully a U.S. ally into investigating one of his political opponents, and to gin up a story that cleared Russia from its 2016 campaign interference. But though this is one hell of a damning indictment, it’s really only by examining the layers of this rotten high crimes onion that you can viscerally understand the soul-sucking, democracy-crushing corruption in which the president has engaged. While the Democrats will inevitably rest their case partly on high principle and appeals to abstractions like “national security” and “abuse of power,” the specific extent and details of the corruption need to be communicated and woven together with the high-falutin’ accusations as much as possible.
I’ve been thinking about this since reading last night’s Washington Post page-turner, “Holding Ukraine Hostage: How the President and His Allies, Chasing 2020 Ammunition, Fanned a Political Storm.” The detailed title is an accurate summary, but also leaves for the reader’s personal discovery the real power of the article: the way it shows how part of the federal government — in this case, State Department officials — specifically enacted the the president’s corrupt intentions. In relating its tale to strands that have already emerged into the public record (such as the the machinations of Rudy Giuliani), it helps us to understand the nitty-gritty of how the president’s self-serving pressure on Ukraine was implemented. Just as the summary transcript of Donald Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president clearly documented Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to sully Joe Biden’s reputation, so the narrative pieced together from interviews and texted discussions among State Department officials damningly shows how U.S. government officials had for months been laying the groundwork for that conversation between the two leaders. In doing so, it illustrates in grim detail what the broad allegations of abuse of power against the president involve: subversion of U.S. diplomacy for partisan ends; the way Trump political appointees are able to direct this subversion and bend non-partisan government officials to their purposes; and, last but not least, how Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors are not simply those he committed, but constitute a “multipronged political conspiracy” (in the article’s wording) that involves the complicity of many people beyond the Trump-Giuliani-Barr-Pompeo junta. You also get a sense of how such a conspiracy might be able to proceed outside of public view, but in gross abuse of the public interest, by people who have been entrusted to do America’s business with discretion and privacy: a reasonable person might have thought America’s top diplomats charged with Ukraine affairs would be busy supporting that U.S. ally against Russia’s ongoing destabilization, but that person would have been wrong.
And this leads us to a point that’s not directly addressed by the Post article, but which gets to the way the president’s undermining of “national security” needs to be understood concretely and in context. Ukraine is not simply some random U.S. ally like any other; it is a country that has literally be invaded and torn apart by Russia, as that country first annexed Crimea, and then has orchestrated secessionist movements and occupations of Ukraine itself. Ukraine is literally ground zero for Russia’s efforts to destabilize Western Europe, advance its authoritarian agenda, and undermine U.S. power and ideals. It is not an overstatement to say we are in a very hot Cold War with Russia; Donald Trump’s threats against Ukraine, unless it helps him take down Joe Biden and clear Russia of its attack on the 2016 elections, are unnervingly close to serving the ends of our adversary over those of the United States.
While the Post article is a gripping look at one facet of the Ukraine scandal, it also communicates the kinetic quality of this constitutional crisis; the damning narrative it puts together would not have been possible mere days ago, and yet now we have a fairly nuts-and-bolts understanding of what Trump and friends have been cooking up vis-a-vis Ukraine. Impeachment may center on Ukraine for now, but given how congressional and media investigations have already laid bare the corruption of American diplomacy and the involvement of numerous accomplices to the president’s crimes, it’s hard to see how Democrats will be able to limit the storyline — or why they’d want to, at least this early on.
Finally, I want to emphasize how effectively this article lays out the big picture even as it describes the disturbing minutiae of the Ukraine scandal. It’s admirably clear in what Donald Trump wanted from the Ukrainians: not to investigate Joe Biden and his son, which would rest on the false idea that there’s anything to actually investigate, but to “deliver damaging information on former vice president Joe Biden and undermine the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.” It also makes explicit both the fundamental wrongness of the American diplomats’ actions and the fact that the controversy involves not simply bad acts by the president, noting that, “The exchanges reveal the direct participation of State Department officials sworn to serve the country in events that increasingly bear the markings of a multipronged political conspiracy”; the assertion of conspiracy is well evidenced by the piece, and is crucial to understanding that the president’s schemes are quite deliberate and designed to evade constitutional accountability.