HUGE HAPPENINGS last night: NEW TEXT MESSAGES show State officials leveraged the promise of a summit between Zelensky & Trump on Ukrainians' willingness to investigate the 2016 U.S. election & Biden
— Rachael Bade (@rachaelmbade) October 4, 2019
"potus really wants the deliverable," 1 wrote. https://t.co/6s7yBaNTVN
Hm. I think "deliverable" is a pretty handy way of saying "quid pro quo", huh? So I take this exchange:
“As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor later texted Sondland on Sept. 9, complaining that the Trump administration’s decision to withhold congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine had already created a “nightmare scenario.”
“The president has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind,” Sondland replied. “The president is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that president zelensky promised during his campaign I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.”
to more or less mean "We're not going to call this transactionalism a 'quid pro quo', and as long as we don't say the words or keep talking about it, we can still pretend it's all very legal and very cool."
But if you don't want to talk about how not cool it is, chances are good it's because you know it isn't. And there's the rub. What am I always saying? It looks bad because it is bad.
UPDATE: And it looks like some House Republicans knew there was a quid pro quo situation in effect regarding Ukraine aid as well.
UPDATE: It also looks like Trump offered silence regarding the Hong Kong protests (so much for love of democracy!) and brought up investigating Biden to China. So Trump's very public offer yesterday wasn't exactly new. Just very public.
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