A Second Thought

Photo by George Marks/Retrofile/Getty Images via Vanity Fair.

Re yesterday's post. Not my thought, but that of some Twitter persons, which I can elaborate:

And then Sept 12, after Schiff asked for the whistleblower report, the aid to Ukraine was unfrozen by the White House.https://t.co/1n7tUeGaj0

— KC Murphy 🍑 (@klcmurphy) September 19, 2019

The Trump-Putin mystery call was 31 July. It was almost a month later, 28 August, that Politico reported the White House "seriously thinking" about refusing to renew its military aid program to Ukraine, which expires at the end of September, just after Trump's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend with the G7 in Biarritz:

The Trump administration is slow-walking $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine, annoying lawmakers and advocates who argue the funding is critical to keeping Russia at bay.

President Donald Trump asked his national security team to review the funding program, known as the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, in order to ensure the money is being used in the best interest of the United States, a senior administration official told POLITICO on Wednesday.

But the delays come amid questions over Trump’s approach to Russia, after a weekend in which the president repeatedly seemed to downplay Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine and pushed for Russia to be reinstated into the Group of Seven, an annual gathering of the world’s largest advanced economies.

It was also rumored, of course, that the Ukrainian aid was being used as a bargaining chip in the crazy efforts led by Rudolph Giuliani to get the Ukrainian government to implicate presidential candidate Joe Biden in connection with the unsavory dealings of his son Hunter, but I never took that wholly seriously, because the Russian war on Ukraine is too serious to be openly used that way. It's not just NATO and Democrats other than Tulsi Gabbard who are interested in defending Ukraine but also the overwhelming majority of Republicans, plus the State Department and the Pentagon, and even Giuliani knows the political profit he might get the president out of the deal wouldn't be worth the risk.

But Trump has no sense of that, as he showed in Biarritz. He really doesn't get the concept of taking human beings seriously, as opposed to deal elements, at all. What if the promise Trump made Putin in that phone call was (or included) that he would stop the Ukraine aid program?

And then the context of Beutler's tweets above:

Sept 9: CNN breaks first story about exfiltrated Russian spy in U.S.

Also Sept 9: IC IG transmits the fact of the complaint to Schiff

Sept 10: Bolton resigns

Sept 13: Schiff goes public

— Brian 'Obama Netflix?' Beutler (@brianbeutler) September 19, 2019

Aug 7: https://t.co/tb3Hg45gx7

— Brian 'Obama Netflix?' Beutler (@brianbeutler) September 19, 2019

What if all this Sturm und Drang is about Trump's determination to keep his promise, which he finally gave up on as the White House began to realize how much Schiff knew about it?

Oof. He's even a traitor to Lindsey Graham, not to mention you and me. And a bit treacherous to Vova as well, who is not going to be very pleased with this debacle.

Update: from today's reporting at The New York Times: the

potentially explosive complaint by a whistle-blower in the intelligence community said to involve President Trump was related to a series of actions that goes beyond any single discussion with a foreign leader, according to interviews on Thursday....

but the "promise" is an element:

Separately, a person familiar with the whistle-blower’s complaint said it involves in part a commitment that Mr. Trump made in a communication with another world leader. The Washington Post first reported the nature of that discussion. But no single communication was at the root of the complaint, another person familiar with it said.