The first rule of skulduggery is to keep your secrets close.
By that standard, President Donald Trump is lousy at skulduggery, and it’s just a matter of time before Congress, investigative reporters and additional whistleblowers get to the bottom of his efforts to pressure a foreign government to go after a political opponent — and then to cover it up.
The whistleblower complaint released Thursday presents a compelling case that Trump and a handful of others, beginning with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, did in fact put the arm on the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden, of course, is a leading Democratic presidential candidate.
Trump asked for the “favor” in a phone call — of that there is no doubt — and circumstantial evidence says he was prepared to withhold almost $400 million in military aid to Ukraine until he got what he wanted.
In a second stunning accusation, the whistleblower complaint also alleges that top White House staffers and lawyers knew this was wrong and tried to hide the key evidence, a transcript of Trump’s phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Solve the crime
Trump’s most shameless Republican apologists are shrugging off these latest allegations. It’s all just hearsay, they are saying, while expressing no interest in probing further.
If cops thought like that, they’d never solve a crime.
The most promising aspect of the whistleblower’s complaint, fortunately, might be that none of this has to remain hearsay — and probably won’t. Too many people know too much.
The whistleblower states that “multiple” government officials revealed to him (or her) that “the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” The whistleblower claims that “more than half a dozen U.S. officials” told him of “various facts related to this effort.”
The whistleblower reports that “approximately a dozen” White House officials listened in on Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, and that a State Department official — T. Ulrich Brechbuhl — listened in, too. The whistleblower states that “multiple” officials outside the White House were briefed on the contents of the call.
Even talk of the alleged cover-up got around.
The whistleblower reports that he learned from “multiple” officials that “senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced.” The transcript, in a departure from standard practices, reportedly was secreted away in an electronic system intended for the storage of classified national security information.
In the hands of Congress
So here we have it: Congress has a job to do.
The White House will do all it can to block any investigation, and already is doing its best to block the inspector general for the nation’s intelligence services from digging in. But the House Intelligence Committee has been handed an excellent roadmap.
The committee’s first move, no doubt, will be to call the whistleblower as a witness, after which it should let the subpoenas fly. Ascertain the names — as many as possible — of those “multiple” officials and lawyers referenced in the whistleblower’s complaint and order them in to testify. Subpoena their notes.
Many of them, apparently, are career public servants. They are said to be “deeply disturbed” by what they’ve seen. They will tell the truth.
White House vetting made no sense
In his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, Joseph Maguire, acting director of U.S. National Intelligence, struggled to explain why he brought the whistleblower’s complaint to Trump’s White House first for vetting. That didn’t make much sense, said the committee’s chair, Rep. Adam Schiff, given that Trump himself is the subject of the complaint.
Maguire, who appeared frustrated and defensive, said he was following the law. The White House, he said, had a right to review the complaint to see if any parts of it were subject to executive privilege and should be withheld from Congress.
He might have helped his cause had he at least acknowledged the inherent conflict in this — the accused was allowed to vet the accusation.
But Maguire was exactly right on another point: Now it’s up to Congress.
“My responsibility was to get you the whistleblower letter and get the other information released. I have done my duty,” he told the committee, and now it’s “on the shoulders of the legislative branch and this committee.”
Call the next witness.
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.
