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On Aug. 5, 1974, pre-Internet Washington was slowly accessing and processing the meaning and message of the president’s words as they poured out of the chattering news wire service machines, radios and TV sets.
The words were being spoken by President Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, just days after the Watergate burglary, back in June 1972. Nixon was plotting the phony Watergate cover-up that he had been assuring his fellow Republicans he knew nothing about. Recently a unanimous Supreme Court had forced Nixon’s White House to make public the transcript of the meeting Nixon had secretly taped. He had taped all his meetings to secure his place in history; now it was about to do just that.
Stunned congressional Republicans pondered the words Nixon was saying: He wanted his CIA to tell his FBI to stop investigating all these Watergate things — just claim it would expose a secret national security operation. Maybe something about the Bay of Pigs. Or whatever.
“I guess we have found the smoking gun, haven’t we,” the respected Rep. Barber Conable, a conservative upstate New Yorker, told fellow House Republicans. Ten Nixon loyalists quickly switched and vowed to vote for impeachment. And lo, history had a new label that would endure for the ages. Nixon’s presidency was ended by his own tape recorded “smoking gun.”
Fast-Forward 45 Years: This week, another supposedly quiet Washington summer erupted into explosive politics. Yet another era’s congressional Republicans were reading yet another president’s words as they streamed across their news screens. This time they were reading a reconstructed transcript detailing a July 25 phone conversation between President Donald Trump (who used to be a reality TV star) and Ukraine’s new young president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy (who used to be a TV comedian).
This time, an anonymous whistleblower from somewhere in the national security intelligence community had made it all happen. This week, we read two very revealing and very troubling documents: a five-page re-created official transcript of the Trump- Zelenskiy phone call; and a nine-page memo, written by the anonymous whistleblower, detailing precisely shocking allegations of presidential misconduct.
Trump’s transcript showed that he was yet again welcoming (calling for!) foreign intervention in an American presidential campaign — hoping it would be as helpful as Russia’s cyber-sabotage was in 2016.
This time, Trump was pressuring Ukraine to provide what amounts to opposition research on his leading Democratic opponent, Joe Biden. Prior to their July 25 phone call, Trump froze all congressionally approved military aid for the very desperate Ukraine, which has Russian-sponsored troops fomenting revolution inside its borders. In their phone call, the transcript memo shows Zelenskiy eagerly saying that Ukraine is almost ready to buy more U.S. Javelin anti-tank missiles. Trump is most unsubtle: “I would like you to do us a favor,” he says, clearly implying it’s a “favor” Zelenskiy dare not refuse.
Trump brings up something that has been implanted within his gray cells by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani (who functions as Trump’s new Roy Cohn). He starts talking about the American right-wing conspiracy theory that is his latest fixation (see also: refuted by fact-checkers): They claim that a low-level Democratic functionary hacked the party’s own emails via a Ukraine-linked company to make Trump look guilty. Then Trump switched to his next “favor.”
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son (Hunter)” who worked for a Ukraine gas company. He hopes Ukraine will prove that Joe Biden stopped a Ukraine prosecution of that gas company (but media fact-checking disproved that). Zelenskiy, trapped, says he knows about it and is on the case. Then Trump repeatedly presses Zelenskiy to meet with his private attorney, Giuliani (who shouldn’t have a role in diplomacy) and Attorney General William Barr (ditto). Poor Zelenskiy shifts into turbo-suck up, telling Trump he stayed at a Trump Tower in New York.
Cover-up Alert: The whistleblower’s complaint reveals an apparent effort to conceal the transcript by removing it from the computer system and hiding it where only classified material is stored. “I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call,” the whistleblower wrote.
“The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in this phone call,” the whistleblower wrote. “…they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain.”
And that gets us to the Warning Whistle we all need to sound: It’s a shame those “deeply disturbed” White House officials weren’t sufficiently outraged to patriotically, yet also anonymously, stand up and sign up to demonstrate their solidarity with the gutsy whistleblower who is the real hero of our times.