Source? I find this hard to believe as a justification, since the Senate is Republican-controlled, and Zelensky should know that.
It seems late in the game for this to be a real motivator: he was planning to announce an investigation of the sitting president’s political rival during an election year, he was deep in the US political battle already.
This is possible, but we don’t have anything beyond saying “X might be possible” as evidence for it. Speculation is weak evidence. The certain evidence we do have is that the they have publicly acknowledged that they were planning to make an announcement, and they did not.
There’s a chance of a lot of things. It’s possible that Trump and Giuliani have access to better information than the career civil servants who have much more experience working in the Ukraine. It’s possible that an ousted prosecutor (who has publicly denied any evidence that Hunter Biden had broken any laws) provided Giuliani with evidence that Hunter Biden broke the law. There’s a chance that the Crowdstrike conspiracy theory, which seems to have begun with Trump just mixing things up (c.f. cliff-notes kind of guy, doesn’t read briefings, etc.), is actually a real thing.
But that is speculation, not evidence. Clever people can come up with narratives that paint any set of damning evidence as totally innocent. But that isn’t the test of reality day to day, it’s not a sound methodology for accurately modeling the world. The best established evidence better supports the narrative that Trump is appealing to vacuous conspiracy theories to deflect from and exonerate his abuse of power.
I would say this is an example of how two things that might both fit under the umbrella of ‘obstruction’ are very different. Giuliani was the guy doing the behind the scenes negotiations with Ukrainian officials, he was in touch with both Trump and the Ukrainian administration, and has specific knowledge about what Trump knew and what Trump ordered, and what he passed on to the Ukrainians, and he defied a congressional subpoena. By comparison, the whistleblower was an analyst on a phone call, with only second-hand knowledge of the rest of the affair, and he’s protected by law from having information about him publicly disclosed. The degree of obstruction is different, the scope information that the obstruction kept hidden is different. They are both colorably ‘obstruction’, but they aren’t comparably bad.
I don’t know his name, and I’m pretty plugged in. My understanding is that Trump and several Republicans have tweeted it, but it isn’t a household name.
I don’t think you’re wrong to suggest that being a household name might be safer for him, but I don’t think that’s the question. Whether he’s strategically wrong to exercise the protections of the whistleblower protection laws, he has those laws to protect him and he’d prefer to use them.
It doesn’t matter. First, in the hypo, we’re calling that cashier for the limited purpose of explaining how a cash register works (comparable to calling the whistleblower solely to describe the workings of US foreign relations). And where we have laws to protect the cashier, and we can get testimony about the facts relevant to the embezzlement without the whistleblowing cashier, we should do that. We’re trying to prove embezzlement, not whistleblowing.
As Hamilton predicted, impeachment is a political process. It only works if the jurors (Senators) feel pressure to act against their political interests to hold the president to account for his actions. And so a boring process doesn’t work: the public needs to be engaged enough that senators think they care about the accusations and the outcomes.
Following on my comments above, this is something of an equivocation. Is Pelosi preventing testimony from the whistleblower? Arguably. Is that the same as the obstruction for which Trump has been impeached? No.
So, rather than ‘justified obstruction’, it might be easier to think of it as ‘not obstruction in the relevant sense’.
Sure, and I’m open to this specific law being invalid for Constitutional reasons; I don’t think it’s open-and-shut, but the separation of powers argument is there and a good lawyer could make a decent prima facie case. But arguing that the president broke the law as written but it’s OK because it’s a bad law is a very different thing from arguing that he didn’t break the law.
No do I. But Biden has been vice president, barring any extremely bad press that’s going to be how he’s remembered. The point is that, if for someone who hasn’t been vice president, the kind of accusation is life-ruining, it’s hard to say that it doesn’t matter at all to someone who has been vice president.
Compare to a loss of money: A billionaire cares about losing $100k, even though it doesn’t really touch their bottom line.
This part of the conversation seems weird to me, so I think I am not understanding our disagreement. I don’t see any tension between the claims:
- Russia has good reasons for wanting to affect the outcomes of our elections.
- We have good reasons not to want Russia to affect the outcomes of our elections.
- Russia is entitled to transparently endorse our candidates.
- We can be mad at Russia for transparently endorsing our candidates.
- Russia is not entitled to run disinformation campaigns to affect the outcomes of our elections.
- We can be mad at Russia, sanction them, and penalize any US citizen who assisted, endorsed, celebrated, participated in, or benefited from Russian disinformation campaigns to affect the outcomes of our elections.
- We can be mad and take those actions even if Russia only tried to do those things, and failed, and didn’t actually change anything.
Do you see a tension here? Do you disagree with any of those claims?
This is the kind of thing that makes me pretty sure that you haven’t read the Constitution.
There’s a law that expressly says otherwise: Impoundment Control Act.