In the face of charges he held up military aid to Ukraine to help himself politically in the 2020 elections, the man who sits behind the desk in the Oval Office shouts "no quid pro quo!"
That man is a barefaced liar. The plain fact is now confirmed by Donald Trump's own chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.
After announcing that the 2020 G-7 summit will be at Trump's Doral Resort _ another potentially impeachable offense, if the Constitution's emoluments clause is to be honored _ Mulvaney turned to the charges fueling Democrats' impeachment inquiry.
Said he, of his boss ordering the hold-up of $391 million in assistance authorized by Congress: "Did he also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that," he said. "But that's it, and that's why we held up the money."
That "corruption related to the DNC server" is, to be clear, a nonsense GOP conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton's missing emails that Trump seeks to mainline in time for 2020 in order to bamboozle the public over the Mueller probe and excuse Russia for the conduct of which every credible source says they are guilty.
Challenged on the obscenity of the dirt-for-dollars arrangement, Mulvaney had the gall to claim, "We do that all the time. Get over it."
No. No. No. No. America cannot, will not casually normalize the linkage of political dirty tricks by foreign powers in exchange for millions in taxpayer-provided security funding. This is foreign policy as Mafia protection racket.
Indeed, even as Mulvaney was dissembling, another key figure in the Ukraine scandal, ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland, confessed under oath that he was late in realizing that the ultimate goal of Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was "to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the president's 2020 reelection campaign," i.e. the investigate the Bidens part of the quid pro quo that Mulvaney hopes everyone ignores.
Donald Trump said he was a dealmaker. He said he would get things done. Now America sees clearly how nasty those deals are, and how dastardly those deeds.
