Forget About Watergate & Monica Lewinsky, Trump's Evildoing Is Costing Lives

ANN.AZ

The endless comparisons to Watergate and Richard Nixon, as well as the Lewinsky scandal and Bill Clinton, as the impeachment inquiry plays out against Donald Trump misses a larger and literally global point.  Nixon was reckless with his powers and Clinton with his personal behavior, while Trump's determination to advance his personal agenda and tilt the 2020 election in his favor by playing politics in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere is costing human lives. 

We, and the news media in particular, have become so numb in the face of the torrent of news gushing from the impeachment inquiry -- witnesses disobeying Trump and testifying before House committees, congressional Republicans pulling a publicity stunt by derailing a closed-door hearing and the latest round of denials, lies and tweeted insults and profanities from Trump -- that the testimony this week of William Taylor was jarring while completely demolishing what remained of the president's tattered defense. 

Stephanie Grisham, who masquerades at the president's press secretary, unintentionally revealed the desperation oozing from the West Wing, declaring following the Freedom Caucus's disruption of the hearing on Wednesday that the impeachment inquiry is part of "a coordinated smear campaign from far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution." 

Translation: Even Republicans can't defend Trump anymore.  They can only attack the process. 

Taylor, the acting U.S. envoy to Ukraine and a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who has served under Republican and Democratic presidents, recalled standing on a war-damaged bridge staring across at Russian-backed forces on July 26, the day after Trump's now-infamous extortionate call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was told nearly $400 million in military aid and a promised White House meeting with the Chosen One would be held up until he agreed to make a public pledge to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in a blatant effort to try to skew the 2020 election.  

Taylor said he was standing on the bridge in northern Donbas, the front line of the conflict with Russian-backed separatists, with Zelensky and Kurt Volker, the State Department special envoy for Ukraine, as they were briefed by the commander of Ukrainian forces. 

"More Ukrainians would undoubtedly die," Taylor believed, as Trump held up desperately needed aid to fight Russia's relentless aggression, which began with its 2014 annexation of Crimea by brute force and has cost over 13,000 Ukrainian lives (including nine Ukrainians who were slaughtered in the ambush pictured above). 

President Obama responded to that invasion by imposing increasingly tougher rounds of sanctions on Russia.  Trump, of course, promised Vladimir Putin that he would ease or eliminate those sanctions when he became president with Moscow's considerable help. That Trump has been unable to make good on that deal with the devil is only because even congressional Republicans occasionally have spines.   

"If Ukraine succeeds in breaking free of Russian influence, it is possible for Europe to be whole, free, democratic and at peace," Taylor testified.  "In contrast, if Russia dominates Ukraine, Russia will again become an empire, oppressing its people and threatening its neighbors and the rest of the world." 

"Ukraine is special to me,” Taylor told House investigators, and said what has happened in the five months since he was asked to return to Kiev to replace ousted ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who as an anti-corruption advocate was getting in the way of Trump's scheming, is "crazy," "improper" and "folly" with far-reaching implications.    

"We must support Ukraine in its fight against its bullying neighbor," Taylor added.  "Russian aggression cannot stand." 

Trump, to Taylor's shock, was betraying the Ukraine people by establishing two policymaking channels, one regular channel run by EU ambassador Gordon Sondland and one highly irregular channel to put the fix in primarily run by Rudy Giuliani, who not only is Trump's personal lawyer but has longstanding ties to corrupt Ukrainians and Russians with organized crime connections. 

(Then there is Trump's calculated abandonment of Kurds in northern Syria, who promptly were slaughtered by Turkish soldiers.  This was a sop to Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan and played to the larger geopolitical interests of Russia, Iran and a re-emergent ISIS.  All roads seem to lead back to Putin with Trump's so-called foreign policy.)

Taylor's deeply visceral testimony now makes Trump's impeachment inevitable, and the Republican claims that the Ukraine scandal -- on top of all of the president's other crap, corruption and crimes -- may have been inappropriate but not impeachable have been demolished in part, but only in part, because it so closely mirrors what we have long known about Trump and Russia in 2016 and the Mueller report brought into such sharp focus.   

All of that needs to be put in an historic perspective. 

Nixon's pending impeachment in 1974, which prompted his resignation, was a consequence of the Watergate break-in and his abuse of office in covering up that "third-rate burglary," as he called it, was indeed serious, while the 1998 Clinton impeachment was an overblown Republican-orchestrated political circus growing out of a president's improper personal behavior and his lies about it.   

But both pale in comparison to Trump's evildoing and disregard for that most precious of things -- real lives and real people yearning to be free.