Today saw the real launch of Trump supporters' push back against the impeachment investigation and, as I told you would happen, they are confusing two issues and trying to get rid of both of them by attacking the whistleblower. The argument is that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rushed to impeach the president based on a second-hand report that was possibly written by a partisan traitor. This is a lie, designed to muddy the waters until no one can remember what really happened....
which is this: in mid-August, a whistleblower in the Intelligence Community witnessed and heard of behavior s/he thought jeopardized our national security and threatened the 2020 election. S/he FOLLOWED THE LAW and sent a complaint to the IC's Inspector General, Michael Atkinson, who had 14 days to decide if the complaint was credible and urgent. If he decided it was, the IG had to send it to the Director of National Intelligence, who had seven days to send it to the Congressional Intelligence Committees. Atkinson DID find the complaint credible and urgent, and sent it up the chain of command, as he was required to. But Joseph Maguire, the acting Director of National Intelligence, after the Director and Deputy Director both resigned about the time the complaint was made, refused to send the complaint forward, as the law requires.
When s/he realized the complaint was being withheld from Congress, the whistleblower made sure that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, found out that the complaint existed... but not what was in it. Schiff told Maguire to hand it over. After consulting with the Department of Justice, though, Maguire claimed that the matter was not "urgent" because it did not concern anyone within the Intelligence Community. This was illegal; he does not have the power to overrule the Inspector General on this issue. (By the way, we now know that Attorney General William Barr was named in the complaint, so it absolutely should never have gone to the Department of Justice. But we didn't know that when all this was going down.)
When Maguire refused to hand it over, Schiff subpoenaed it on September 13, accompanying the subpoena with a furious letter concerning Maguire's refusal to follow the law. (This letter is what I saw that made me realize something big was happening.) Within days, Atkinson testified before the committee that the withheld complaint was important.
As more people involved leaked to the media about what might be in the complaint, it seemed that it might be about Trump himself, Ukraine, and the withholding of US aid to Ukraine until it came up with dirt on Joe Biden, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, and his son Hunter.
Then Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Trump himself gave away the game. Giuliani went on TV to say he had talked with Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky, asking him to investigate the Bidens, and then Trump followed up by agreeing that he had withheld congressionally appropriated funds out of concerns about "corruption." This caused enough furor that seven freshmen representatives who had previously opposed impeachment made a public announcement they wanted an impeachment investigation. Trump tried to calm things down Monday by offering the readout of what he called a "perfect" phone call with Zelensky. But when the White House released the readout on Tuesday, it was even worse than anyone had imagined. It showed Trump making the request, then implicating Giuliani... and William Barr. Then, as the news media went into a frenzy, Trump tried to defend the idea his actions were national policy by implicating Vice President Pence, as well, telling reporters they should look at his calls, too.
Over the course of two days, support for impeachment among Democrats in Congress had gone from quite weak to over the required threshold. And no one had yet seen anything in the whistleblower's complaint. (Now, of course, we all have, and that has made things even worse, revealing, for example, that there is a secret server of politically embarrassing calls from Trump to foreign leaders, and tonight we learned that that's where they've put his communications with Vladimir Putin and the Saudi Prince MBS, among others).
Today Trump's people began their efforts to undercut this storm. They are arguing that Pelosi rushed to impeachment based on a second-hand report, and Trump suggested that the person is a traitor. This has the story completely wrong. Pelosi has not rushed to impeachment: we are simply beginning an impeachment investigation over the Ukraine scandal, which may or may not lead to articles of impeachment. And this effort is based not on the contents of the whistleblower's complaint, but on the fact that the complaint was illegally withheld from Congress and that Trump and his personal lawyer admitted in public that they might well have committed a crime. How could Congress NOT investigate after learning all that?
Oh, and the whistleblower followed the law. Far from being a traitor, s/he is a hero for standing up for the law, while so many in the White House seem to have been willing to break it.
