President Trump team expected to benefit from his election meddling
A crucial interchange of events Friday reflected a culture of corruption and intimidation
endemic to the circle of a President who vowed to drain the swamp but instead became its incarnation.
First, a US ambassador told how her reputation was shredded and she was hounded out of her job by President Donald Trump's rogue associates after a faultless 30-year career advancing America's interests.
"Ukrainians who prefer to play by the old corrupt rules sought to remove me," former US envoy to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch said at the House impeachment hearings. "What continues to amaze me is that they found Americans willing to partner with them."
Unbelievably, her testimony was interrupted by a Trump attack tweet that visibly exacerbated her suffering over his horrifying tactics, lent credibility to her testimony and could now be folded into articles of impeachment.
As she spoke, and less than a mile away across Washington's mall, Roger Stone became the latest associate who will pay for his loyalty to the President.
The Nixon-era political trickster was found guilty of lying to Congress and witness tampering, apparently motivated by a desire to protect Trump from embarrassment over the Russia scandal.
"Truth matters. Truth still matters, OK?" prosecutor Michael Marando had told the jury on Wednesday. "In our institutions of self-governance, committee hearings, courts of law ... truth still matters."
All this came during a week in which the President made a new last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court to shield his tax returns from public scrutiny.
And on Friday evening, things took another turn for the worse for Trump.
Diplomatic aide David Holmes testified that he had heard Trump on a telephone call ask US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland whether the Ukrainians were going to open investigations he had asked for into former Vice President Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory surrounding the 2016 election.
Sondland told Trump on the call in July that Ukranian President Vlodymyr Zelensky was ready to do "anything you ask him to," according to a transcript of an opening statement delivered by Holmes to a closed-door session of the impeachment investigation.
The revelation significantly raised the stakes for Sondland's testimony in a televised hearing next week and suggests that Trump was intimately involved in his lawyer Rudy Giuliani's scheme to pressure the Ukrainians.
At a time of swirling misinformation, propagandistic pro-Trump news coverage and conspiracy theories, it showed that while facts may be under assault, they can ultimately still emerge in a way that will allow history to render a judgment even if the fractured political climate makes that it impossible in the moment.
Friday piled more testimony on the mountain of evidence suggesting that the US is in the grip of not just the most unorthodox, but the most corrupt presidency of the modern era.
The Stone and Yovanovitch dramas did not take place in isolation. They fit into a pattern of questionable behavior clouding Trump's entire political career. The huge weight of such evidence confounds his supporters' claims that the real problem is that Democrats and the media are caught up in some kind of "Never Trump" mania that amounts to a coup.
This, after all, is a President who demanded misplaced personal loyalty from FBI chief James Comey, then fired him and said he did it because of the Russia investigation. Trump also repeatedly berated his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions for honoring an obligation to recuse himself from the Russia probe.
While special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish cooperation between Trump's campaign and Russia, he said the President's team expected to benefit from his election meddling.
And he pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction.
This is a President who tried to get the US government to cut him a check to host next year's G7 summit before backing off because of the political outrage. As if to underscore conflicts of interests posed by his financial entanglements, Trump filed suit with the Supreme Court Friday to stop prosecutors pulling his tax returns, setting up a landmark separation of powers showdown.
First, a US ambassador told how her reputation was shredded and she was hounded out of her job by President Donald Trump's rogue associates after a faultless 30-year career advancing America's interests.
"Ukrainians who prefer to play by the old corrupt rules sought to remove me," former US envoy to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch said at the House impeachment hearings. "What continues to amaze me is that they found Americans willing to partner with them."
Unbelievably, her testimony was interrupted by a Trump attack tweet that visibly exacerbated her suffering over his horrifying tactics, lent credibility to her testimony and could now be folded into articles of impeachment.
As she spoke, and less than a mile away across Washington's mall, Roger Stone became the latest associate who will pay for his loyalty to the President.
The Nixon-era political trickster was found guilty of lying to Congress and witness tampering, apparently motivated by a desire to protect Trump from embarrassment over the Russia scandal.
"Truth matters. Truth still matters, OK?" prosecutor Michael Marando had told the jury on Wednesday. "In our institutions of self-governance, committee hearings, courts of law ... truth still matters."
All this came during a week in which the President made a new last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court to shield his tax returns from public scrutiny.
And on Friday evening, things took another turn for the worse for Trump.
Diplomatic aide David Holmes testified that he had heard Trump on a telephone call ask US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland whether the Ukrainians were going to open investigations he had asked for into former Vice President Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory surrounding the 2016 election.
Sondland told Trump on the call in July that Ukranian President Vlodymyr Zelensky was ready to do "anything you ask him to," according to a transcript of an opening statement delivered by Holmes to a closed-door session of the impeachment investigation.
The revelation significantly raised the stakes for Sondland's testimony in a televised hearing next week and suggests that Trump was intimately involved in his lawyer Rudy Giuliani's scheme to pressure the Ukrainians.
At a time of swirling misinformation, propagandistic pro-Trump news coverage and conspiracy theories, it showed that while facts may be under assault, they can ultimately still emerge in a way that will allow history to render a judgment even if the fractured political climate makes that it impossible in the moment.
Friday piled more testimony on the mountain of evidence suggesting that the US is in the grip of not just the most unorthodox, but the most corrupt presidency of the modern era.
The Stone and Yovanovitch dramas did not take place in isolation. They fit into a pattern of questionable behavior clouding Trump's entire political career. The huge weight of such evidence confounds his supporters' claims that the real problem is that Democrats and the media are caught up in some kind of "Never Trump" mania that amounts to a coup.
This, after all, is a President who demanded misplaced personal loyalty from FBI chief James Comey, then fired him and said he did it because of the Russia investigation. Trump also repeatedly berated his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions for honoring an obligation to recuse himself from the Russia probe.
While special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish cooperation between Trump's campaign and Russia, he said the President's team expected to benefit from his election meddling.
And he pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction.
This is a President who tried to get the US government to cut him a check to host next year's G7 summit before backing off because of the political outrage. As if to underscore conflicts of interests posed by his financial entanglements, Trump filed suit with the Supreme Court Friday to stop prosecutors pulling his tax returns, setting up a landmark separation of powers showdown.
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