Trump's "No Quid Pro Quo" Statements Are Clear Evidence of His Ukraine Motives

By William Saletan, Slate

29 November 19

A new report shows the president was launching his cover story, not telling the truth.

epublicans claim that two private remarks by President Donald Trump clear him of wrongdoing in the Ukraine scandal. The first remark, supposedly made on Aug. 31 to Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, was that Trump would “never” require Ukraine to do anything for him in order to get military aid he had suspended. The second remark, made on Sept.
7 or Sept. 9 to Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, was that Trump wanted “nothing” from Ukraine. These two statements, according to Republicans, prove that Trump didn’t withhold the aid or a White House meeting as leverage to extract favors—specifically, investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden and other Democrats—from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

But now it turns out that by the time Trump spoke to Johnson, the president already knew he was under investigation for extorting Zelensky. This discovery, reported on Tuesday night by the New York Times, inverts the meaning of Trump’s statements to Johnson and Sondland. Trump wasn’t telling the truth. He was launching his cover story. 

Trump has been peddling the “no quid pro quo” line in public since late September, when he disclosed a rough transcript of his July 25 call with Zelensky. A week later, on Oct. 3, the House of Representatives released text messages that had been exchanged between Sondland and Bill Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. In a message dated Sept. 9, Taylor had warned Sondland that it was “crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” Five hours later, Sondland had written back: “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind.” 

Trump cited these texts as proof of his innocence. On Oct. 4, the morning after they were released, he boasted to reporters that Sondland “said there was no quid pro quo. That’s the whole ballgame.” 

That evening, the president got more ammunition. In a Wall Street Journal interview, Johnson said that on Aug. 31, he had called Trump to find out whether the aid was being withheld as leverage to get something from Ukraine. According to Johnson, Trump had replied with an expletive and said, “No way. I would never do that. Who told you that?” Johnson had answered that he’d heard it from Sondland. According to Johnson, Trump signaled that the aid would soon be released, telling the senator, “You’ll probably be happy with my decision.” 

Johnson claimed that his story substantiated Trump’s innocence. It showed that on Aug. 31—well before House Democrats were alerted to a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s alleged extortion of Ukraine—Trump had dismissed the idea. “When I asked the president about that, he completely denied it,” Johnson recalled on Meet the Press. “He vehemently, angrily denied it. He said, ‘I’d never do that.’ ” 

On Oct. 17, Sondland further bolstered the president’s defense. In a deposition before the House Intelligence Committee, he testified that before writing his “no quid pro quo” text on Sept. 9, he had called Trump directly to find out why the aid was being withheld. “I asked the president, ‘What do you want from Ukraine?’ ” Sondland told the committee. “The president responded, ‘Nothing. There is no quid pro.’ ” Sondland claimed that Trump had told him, “I want nothing. I don’t want to give them anything, and I don’t want anything from them.” He recalled that Trump “kept repeating ‘no quid pro quo’ over and over again.” 

Last week, at an open hearing of the Intelligence Committee, Republicans seized on Sondland’s story. Nine times, they repeated the two sterling quotes: “No quid pro quo” and “I want nothing.” Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, Trump’s point man on the committee, declared that these words were “the best direct evidence we have” of the president’s intent. 

Democrats pointed out that if Trump’s statement to Sondland took place on Sept. 9, that was the same day the House had learned of the whistleblower complaint and announced an investigation of the Ukraine scandal. They suggested that “No quid pro quo” and “I want nothing” might have been attempts by the president to deny what he had just been caught doing. But Steve Castor, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican counsel, noted that Trump’s remarks to Johnson preceded the House investigation. Castor quoted from a Nov. 18 letter in which Johnson elaborated on his story about the call. “I asked [Trump] whether there was some kind of arrangement where Ukraine would take some action and the hold would be lifted,” said Castor, reading from the letter. “Without hesitation, President Trump immediately denied such an arrangement existed.” 

Castor held up Johnson’s letter as evidence of Trump’s sincerity. “Sen. Johnson’s telephone call with the president wasn’t a public event,” said Castor. “It was capturing a genuine, you know, moment with the president.” According to Castor, the letter demonstrated that “even on Aug. 31—and this is before any congressional investigation started—the president was signaling to Sen. Johnson that he was going to lift the aid.” 

Tuesday night’s Times story guts this narrative. It shows that in late August, days before Trump’s call with Johnson, White House lawyers told the president about the whistleblower complaint. The lawyers did so, according to the article, in order “to determine whether they were legally required to give [the complaint] to Congress.” To reach that determination, they would have had to tell Trump at least the gist of the complaint. And the gist, according to the complaint’s opening paragraph, was that Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election” by “pressuring [Ukraine] to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.” 

This revelation flips the meaning of what Trump told Johnson and Sondland. He knew exactly what he needed to say, and he said it. No quid pro quo. I want nothing. I would never do that. 

At face value, Trump’s statements to Johnson and Sondland never made sense. Why would he say “I want nothing” while simultaneously demanding that Zelensky “go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations” of Biden and the Democrats? Why would he deny wanting anything from Zelensky after asking the Ukrainian president, in the July 25 call, for the investigations as “a favor”? And why would Trump introduce the lawyerly Latin phrase “quid pro quo,” which neither Johnson nor Sondland had used? California Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee, has noted the oddity of Trump’s words. Saying “There’s no quid pro quo” in response to vague queries, Swalwell observed last week, is “like being pulled over for speeding … and saying, ‘I didn’t rob the bank. I didn’t rob the bank.’ ” 

Once you understand that Trump knew about the whistleblower complaint, everything falls into place. The real story was the extortion. The fake story was what Trump told Johnson and Sondland. By then, the cover-up was underway. After telling Trump about the complaint, White House lawyers decided, according to the Times, “that the administration could withhold from Congress the whistle-blower’s accusations because they were protected by executive privilege.” And Trump needed to snuff out any leads. So when Johnson asked Trump whether the aid was being held up to get something from Ukraine, Trump asked what any crook would ask: “Who told you that?” 

Jordan is right: Trump’s words to Johnson and Sondland are clear evidence of his intent. His intent was to cover up his crimes. 

Billionaire-Funded Protest Is Rearing Its Head in America

By Hamilton Nolan, Guardian UK

29 November 19

Recently a crowd of protesters disrupted a speech by Elizabeth Warren. The activists might have seemed grassroots, but they weren’t

ast week, Elizabeth Warren went to Atlanta to give a major speech about issues of concern to black women. Her speech touched on knotty, existential topics such as the legacy of slavery, institutional racism, voter suppression, mass incarceration and reparations. But the next day’s headlines overwhelmingly focused on the fact that the speech was interrupted by a loud group of pro-charter school protesters.

We were supposed to be talking about challenging centuries of institutional racism, but now we’re talking about charter schools. How did that happen? If you suspect that some sort of nefarious action that can be traced back to plutocratic billionaires is involved – well, of course.

The protesters themselves were, by all accounts and appearances, a group of concerned people who passionately oppose Warren’s plan to bolster public education and crack down on the charter school industry. But they did not all materialize in the crowd together in matching shirts by chance. Their existence was orchestrated by pro-charter school groups that are funded by an array of billionaires, including Netflix founder Reed Hastings, art and philanthropy titan Eli Broad and, most prominently, the Walton Foundation, controlled by the staggeringly wealthy family that owns Walmart. Thus we are all forced to deal with the spectacle of classic tactics of grassroots protest being coopted and fueled by a tiny group of the very sort of people that such tactics were developed to target in the first place.

Of course, astroturfing is nothing new – the suburbs of Washington DC are strewn with post office boxes that serve as the headquarters address for zillions of groups that all have names like Working Americans for Freedom and Reduced Taxation on Pass-Through Business Structures. And charter schools, in particular, have long been an issue that seems created in a lab to entice billionaires to pour money into groups that have as their public faces working parents or former union leaders. (A book could be written on why the ultrarich are so drawn to the charter school movement, but the short answer is that it combines the fiction that education rather than capitalism is responsible for our nation’s ills and the ability to privatize a longstanding public good, all in one.)

It would be a mistake, though, to think that this little propaganda incident is about a single issue. The real lesson of this is how well even transparently corrupt tactics like this work. One of the emotional backbones of Warren’s speech was the story of the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen strike – a relatively little known incident in labor history that she was no doubt inspired to cite by the union leader Sara Nelson’s recent speech on the same topic in front of the Democratic Socialists of America convention. Yet what should be a shining example of radical ideas rising to mainstream prominence in a presidential campaign has been pushed to the bottom of most news stories in favor of the charter school ruckus. This points to the fact that astroturf campaigns don’t have to be very sophisticated, or even very secret; they just need to make enough noise to weasel their way into a 30-second TV hit to get the job done.

And so we are all left to gaze in dread at our dystopian very near future, when an increasingly small and savvy pool of billionaires is responsible for not only the majority of businesses, political connections and wealth, but also protests. If you thought that misleading stories on Facebook were bad, imagine a horde of angry activists, staging classic protests around the country, whose existence is entirely facilitated by the richest and most powerful people on earth.

The one thing that rich people forever lust for is authenticity, that elusive quality that tends to disappear the more that your influence is bought rather than organically developed. (A huge portion of the public relations industry exists to sell rich people the illusion of authenticity, with the assumption that the rich are too insulated from reality to realize that they are being ripped off.) Nothing is perceived as more authentic than real live chanting, sign-waving demonstrators. It is a trivial matter to find people who genuinely believe in a cause. Plutocrats can supply them with organizers and resources while still maintaining plausible deniability of actually controlling them. As a side benefit, in the same way that Fox News has undermined the public’s belief in factual journalism, billionaire-funded protests will inevitably make everyone more cynical about the integrity of real protests.

There’s really no downside, from the perspective of billionaires.

The most straightforward way to avoid this creeping problem, of course, is to have everyone personally flog a billionaire before being granted admission to a protest. Until we sort out a few minor logistical problems with that system, we will have to settle for something even simpler: keeping private money out of politics, by law. The Walton family’s net worth is nearly $200bn. If they are so concerned about education, they can pick up the tab for the entire US Department of Education for the next three years and still have a few billion left over.

Perhaps ironically, getting money out of politics is one of the big ideas at the center of Warren’s campaign. But a lot of people may not have heard about it, over the shouting of all of those grassroots protesters.