Mick Mulvaney Is Getting Fed to the Wolves on Ukraine

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

01 January 20

While Speaker Nancy Pelosi plays this whole impeachment thing just right.

his latest account of how everyone is scrambling for the ratlines down at Camp Runamuck leaves me with two distinct impressions: a) it is beyond foolish to cancel your subscription to The New York Times based on the the fact that a couple of people have set up landfills on the op-ed page; and b) that Nancy Pelosi is playing this whole impeachment thing like a Stradivarius. Just figuring out how and why this information arrived at the Times at this particular moment is entertaining enough—how long various people had to grapple for the flare gun is worth a long spell of speculation. But, however it got loose, the information is an extraordinary look at how influential people come apart at every nail, to borrow a phrase from Neil Young.

What emerges is the story of how Mr. Trump’s demands sent shock waves through the White House and the Pentagon, created deep rifts within the senior ranks of his administration, left key aides like Mr. Mulvaney under intensifying scrutiny — and ended only after Mr. Trump learned of a damning whistle-blower report and came under pressure from influential Republican lawmakers.

OK, so we all knew that.

Opposition to the order from his top national security advisers was more intense than previously known. In late August, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John R. Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, for a previously undisclosed Oval Office meeting with the president where they tried but failed to convince him that releasing the aid was in interests of the United States.By late summer, top lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget who had spoken to lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department in the weeks beforehand, were developing an argument — not previously divulged publicly — that Mr. Trump’s role as commander in chief would simply allow him to override Congress on the issue. And Mr. Mulvaney is shown to have been deeply involved as a key conduit for transmitting Mr. Trump’s demands for the freeze across the administration.

Wait. We didn’t know that. Suspected, sure, but now, it seems, people are giving up other people wholesale.

Mr. Mulvaney is said by associates to have stepped out of the room whenever Mr. Trump would talk with Mr. Giuliani to preserve Mr. Trump’s attorney-client privilege, leaving him with limited knowledge about their efforts regarding Ukraine. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he learned of the substance of Mr. Trump’s July 25 call weeks after the fact.

I’m sorry, but this absolutely is Mob behavior. Send the witness out of the room to preserve the privilege? The president* learned well from all his Mob-adjacent mentors—hello, Roy Cohn—and all his Mob-adjacent businesses. And it looks at the moment like Mick Mulvaney is being fed to the wolves.

On Sept. 10, the day before Mr. Trump changed his mind, a political appointee at the budget office, Michael P. Duffey, wrote a lengthy email to the Pentagon’s top budget official, with whom he had been at odds throughout the summer about how long the agency could withhold the aid. He asserted that the Defense Department had the authority to do more to ensure that the aid could be released to Ukraine by the congressionally mandated deadline of the end of that month, suggesting that responsibility for any failure should not rest with the White House. Forty-three minutes later, the Pentagon official, Elaine McCusker, hit send on a brief but stinging reply. “You can’t be serious,” she wrote. “I am speechless.”

You and me both, Ms. McCusker. But maybe we should be used to this foolishness by now.

Typical of the Trump White House, the inquiry was not born of a rigorous policy process. Aides speculated that someone had shown Mr. Trump a news article about the Ukraine assistance and he demanded to know more. Mr. Vought and his team took to Google, and came upon a piece in the conservative Washington Examiner saying that the Pentagon would pay for weapons and other military equipment for Ukraine, bringing American security aid to the country to $1.5 billion since 2014.

And, when the time to bet comes around again, Madame Speaker checks again. Check, check, check. The rest of the folks at the table start sweating.

This New Year Look Back to Understand Where We Are Going

By Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page

01 January 20

s New Years a time to look forward, or back? In truth it is both, a moment when all of us are forced to take stock of the passage of time.

The Christmas season has slipped past, a joyous one for me this year of family and friends, but I know a difficult one for many. A cycle of more normalcy awaits in January. For now, however, we sit in a sort of calendrical portal, wondering where we are going, buffeted by where we have been.

We live in an age where many feel a significant weight of historical import. The daily headlines are shocking and dispiriting on many fronts, perhaps most significantly our rising threshold for outrage. More than any one story, there is the churning discontent and disorientation of the cumulative assaults on reason , democracy and justice.

It has been a bit surreal to walk this path with you from my perch here online. I hear the immediacy of your concerns. We engage in a conversation across the imperfect medium of social media.

My hope is that I can provide whatever approximates a notion of wisdom from the vantage point of having lived long and seen many things. And this New Years, I am reminded by the ubiquitous memorial tributes, how many who shared my time on this planet are leaving us.

One of the truisms of the cycle of life is that we as a society are in a constant state of losing our collective memories. With the written word and historical scholarship, we can pass along the past to learn from it. That is a precious gift, but it is different from living through it.

When people come to me and share their deep fears about all the serious challenges we face, I understand the anxiety and worry. I am asked: Can we do it? Have you ever seen anything like this? There has never been anything like this, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t seen dark days when previous generations asked similar questions.

For those who were not alive, I cannot fully relate the sheer terror of World War II. Death, destruction, cruelty, and horror cascaded on a scale that I don’t think the human mind can fully comprehend. I remember the days when it seemed the Axis powers would win.

For those who did not witness it, I cannot fully convey the evils and menace of Jim Crow. For all the talk of shattered norms in our government today, we must remember that it was the norm to tolerate the terrorizing of African Americans, the complete disenfranchisement, the legal and social belief that separate - which was never believed to be equal - was the natural order. This is not to say we don’t have much work that must be done on racial justice in America. But if you could walk through a segregated town in 1962...

Moments like these crowd my memory. The idea that the world could end during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the slaughter of Vietnam, the stigmatized death sentence of AIDS, the wake of assassinations: JFK, MLK, RFK, children stricken by polio, apartheid in South Africa, murderous dictators, on and on.

For me, all of these summon forth pictures and feelings of where I was, how I was struck. When I read the history of the Underground Railroad, the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa Massacre, Gettysburg, Valley Forge, the pogroms, the potato famine, and back, to the plague, the crusades, the many, many wars, the many, many held in bondage, the crushing poverty that existed for the vast, vast majority of people on Earth for most of human history, I think that those were once memories as well. Now we study them, lines in textbooks or perhaps a bit more if we are interested, but we will never feel them.

All this is to say that we have our moment now for action. We have a planet threatened by a climate crisis and a politics in dangerous disarray. But we do a disservice to ourselves and our ancestors to succumb to cynicism or hopelessness. We feel this moment. We are living it. It is what we know. Some day, our descendants will read about it. What will they go on to next in the textbook? That is up to us to write.

On this New Years, I do find myself thinking back a lot. But it is not with nostalgia. It is to better understand where I am going, where we all are going, and how to do whatever I can to help those yet to come. They will not have the burden or responsibility to remember this time. That is our charge. I see such energy and ingenuity that I know, if we find ways to harness a forward momentum, we can persevere and even thrive in the new year, and the years to come.

Happy New Year. And thank you all for joining me on this journey.