Two new developments will probably have some Democrats wishing they’d waited for all the information to come out before jumping the gun on impeachment.
The first comes from an unnamed Ukrainian official who said that Kiev was not aware that the United States had suspended security funds before Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and didn’t know they had been on hold until a month after the call. This, like the actual transcript, undermines the allegation that there was a quid pro quo, or as Adam Schiff described, a mob-like “shakedown.” The whistleblower complaint alleged that officials in Kiev knew military aid was at stake, but the whistleblower admitted not knowing “how or when they learned of it.”
As for the allegations that the communication between Trump and Zelensky was an unusual effort to illicitly conceal the conversation, Politico revealed that the White House had been placing transcripts on the codeword system in 2017 after transcripts started leaking to the media.
After 2017, when verbatim transcripts of his conversations with the leaders of Australian and Mexico were leaked to the press, the White House began to restrict the number of officials who had access to the transcripts. One former Trump administration official confirmed that the White House started placing transcripts into the codeword system after those leaks.
Anti-Trump pundits had surmised that the alleged placing of the transcript on a codeword system was the biggest bombshell of the whistleblower complaint and was evidence of a cover-up. Looks like they could have benefited from waiting for the facts to come out before jumping to conclusions.
It’s becoming increasingly clear to objective people that there was no crime, no quid pro quo, and no cover-up. But Democrats have backed themselves into a corner with impeachment.
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